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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

Sam Buchan-Watts’s Path Through Wood, published in October 2021, begins where you would think: in a coppice, where branches tick and greenery fidgets My own debut collection, Rotten Days in Late Summer was published the same year This is an ‘in-conversation’ between the two of us, about our poems, their overlaps and intersections Both are books about adolescent hallucinations, about love, loss and desire, about getting lost in woods and trolleyed in fields They are about seeing lawlessness in the landscape, and a subsequent indoctrination into the ‘laws’ of manhood   The phrase ‘warped pastoral’, coined by Sam, describes the poems’ often shared mise-en-scène It becomes a funhouse mirror reflecting and distorting the state of boyishness in both collections As a half-wild, half-built environment, the warped pastoral also gives cover for – even cultivates – ‘boyishness’ And boyishness is figured in the poems as an interstitial state, not of innocence, but of flux, fluidity, play and possibility, briefly glimpsed in a glade through smoke-haze and thick foliage, just before the trees are all cut down   This conversation took place last winter, in that period of the pandemic when time was becoming unstuck yet remained globulous and sludge-like Appropriately, it unfolded at a slow pace, via email, over a period of months Exchanges of this kind are less like conversations and more like experiments in collaborative criticism It’s an odd genre Each interlocutor has the privilege (or curse) of being able to self-edit as they go The questions and answers are therefore more articulated than they would be in real-time conversation At least, one has more time to formulate and consider a question and response    The slowness of such an exchange also underscores the possibility of attending to your interlocutor to the fullest, if staggered, extent, and to actually listen to your own responses and reflections as they occur and shift It’s not reactionary or quick-fire As such, it reflects something that we discuss about the poet-reader relationship: principles of consideration, care and carefulness within the context of lyric poetry    For me, central to our exchange was the joint admission of poetry’s ‘not-knowing’: the essential difficulty of determining what poetry is and how it can happen: a

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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Prize Entry

April 2017

Terre Haute

Lauren Van Schaik

Prize Entry

April 2017

We’ve been quarantined in the school gym for three weeks when we realise just how much we’ve forgotten. Not...

fiction

April 2015

Heavy

Chris Newlove Horton

fiction

April 2015

It is a two lane road somewhere in North America. The car is pulled onto the shoulder with the...

fiction

December 2011

Travel

Paul Kavanagh

fiction

December 2011

Taxi The taxi stopped and Henry climbed into the taxi. The taxi driver went around the block three times...

 

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