Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips Jane Hirshfield the Homeric past and Northern

the Homeric past and Northern Ireland’s troubled present cohabit in these pages – as do depth

Poems and Ballads (1866)

Lucasta Miller takes Keats's best-known poems - the ones you are most likely to have read - and excavates their backstories

easily snapped

they sit next to us on the bus

Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips Jane Hirshfield the Homeric past and NorthernCarl Phillips's Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowledge that's rooted in (always unstable) human memory. If the poet's recent books have been engaged with the theme of power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the value of embracing it and thus of releasing ourselves from the compulsion to understand our past. If we remember a thing, did it really happen? If we