Borders & Crossings
Varieties of Exile Richard Gwyn Presented at the 14th Robert Graves Conference in Palma, Mallorca, on 12 July 2018

Once near a border, it is impossible not to be involved, not to want to exorcise or transgress something. Just by being there, the border is an invitation. Come on, it whispers, step across this line. If you dare. To step across the line, in sunshine or under cover of night, is fear and hope rolled into one […] People die crossing borders, and sometimes just being near them. The lucky ones are reborn on the other side.
                                                                                                               — Kapka Kassabova

BORDERS DEFINE US and deny us; they carve out entire tracts of the planet, reward those born by chance within certain territories, and condemn others to a condition of otherness and anomie. Crossing borders is, for much of the world’s population, an act of transgression and often involves huge risk.

Borders not only shape lives; they serve a political purpose by promoting a sense of insider and outsider, of belonging and of exile. But perhaps exile itself is a kind of belonging, the forging of an outsider identity that involves, as Kassabova notes, being reborn.

Roberto Bolaño said – rather ungraciously, perhaps – on being invited to speak on the theme of Literature and Exile: ‘I don’t believe in exile, especially not when the word sits next to the word ‘literature’.’ And I can see his point: unless you are Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Taslima Nasreen (or even Ovid) few writers are threatening or influential enough to be exiled specifically for what they write, ... read more

Ange Mlinko Cassadega, Florida

Summer. A toad died in a plastic habitat,
sparrow nestlings in the grill fledged,
the Don Juan rose’s ups and downs
were managed with a spritz of sulfur at
intervals, the St Augustine was edged;
and at the crossroads of the town

there was almost nothing to trumpet
the psychic capital of the world, albeit
a unified aesthetic seemed to have bled
... read more

Henry King On Toby Martinez de las Rivas and Dave Coates

BECAUSE ONE OF THE THINGS I admire about the reviews Dave Coates posts on his blog is how scrupulously he acknowledges his personal connections, let me start by explaining that I don’t know him, but I do know Toby Martinez de las Rivas. Not intimately: we’ve never met, only exchanged a few emails; I approached him to write an essay for the centenary celebration of C. H. Sisson in PNR 217, and I chose to place his contribution first in that feature. So when Coates draws on that essay to attack Martinez de las Rivas (‘On the Pale Sun of Toby Martinez de las Rivas’, davepoems.wordpress.com, 13 September 2018), I have a stake in mounting a defence. But if that doesn’t put me beyond the pale, I want to argue two things: firstly, that Coates is wrong about Martinez ... read more