Remembering Adam Johnson

Sir:
In her article 'Remembering Adam Johnson' (PNR 211), Leah Fritz writes: 'The first poem in this book [Collected Poems], "After Hours", is dated by Powell between 1984 and 1985, when Adam would have been 19 or 20...' She suggests that the poem's reference to 'one of seventeen' might imply that it was written earlier. But Adam, as I say at the start of my brief Editorial Note, 'sent or gave me a signed and dated copy of almost every poem he wrote': 'After Hours' is inscribed '1984, Stalybridge, revised May 1985, London'. These are the dates I provide in the book; and they are his, not mine. In any case the poem, written in the third person, is surely about Adam's observation of another boy who reminds him, a bit wistfully, of his own younger self.

NEIL POWELL
Orford, Suffolk



Christian Resistance

Sir:
I am enjoying an excellent issue of PNR (211), including Mr Raphael's essay on three of the modern Greek poets and Wittgenstein. Elytis is not referred to. However, despite being dazzled and delighted I take exception to two sentences at the end of the fourth paragraph: 'The Homosexual and the Jew were in somewhat similar case; only good when shriven. The Nazi aversion to both, though in uneven measure, proved only how Christian Hitler's Germany was.' As a sententious remark this seems insulting to the memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who unlike Adolf Hitler ('I am a good Catholic') was, like the majority of Germans, a Protestant, and an active member of the resistance from the mid-1930s to his execution in 1945. Nothing in what I have read leads me to believe that he wasn't an exemplar of German and Christian culture.

SILAS GUNN
By email