The name of our press is inspired by the opening lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s extraordinary sonnet, ‘The Caged Skylark’: As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells – That bird beyond the remembering his free fells; This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life’s age. In Victorian …
In 1916 a young British officer turned up at Mary Borden’s hospital on the Somme, a make-shift collection of huts and tents close to the front line. The officer was accompanied by his alsation dog Rex, and was looking for a lost company of soldiers. Mary described their first meeting: ‘My apron is stained with …
Paul O’Prey, editor of Laurence Binyon, Poems of Two Wars, reads and discusses ‘The Burning of the Leaves’, Binyon’s extraordinary poem set in London during the Blitz When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Laurence Binyon was 70 – but that didn’t stop him feeling that same sense of wanting to be made …
Paul O’Prey reads and discusses ‘Unidentified’ by Mary Borden, written during the Battle of the Somme Mary Borden’s war poems, written from field hospitals in Flanders and on the Somme, are unlike any other poems written during the First World War. Her model for these poems is not Rupert Brooke or Thomas Hardy, both of …
