Current Issue: March - April 2025
PN Review 282

In this issue:

Sergey Zavyalov - Horatian Paraphrases
Translated from the Russian by J. Kates
Anthony Vahni Capildeo - Skeletons in the Closet
Sasha Dugdale - On learning that Russian mothers buy their soldier sons lucky belts inscribed with Psalm 90 to wear into battle
James Womack - on Damion Searls’s The Philosophy of Translation
Andrew Hadfield - Readings of Milton

Current Issue: March - April 2025
PN Review 282

The Lightbox Sinéad Morrissey ‘If you had to describe yourself in a single word, what would it be?’ We’re sitting around our dinner table under the halogen strip light in the early evening dark. It’s October 1983. I’m eleven. My mother has recently decided the family should be vegetarian, so dinner is Hungarian goulash with mushrooms, sour cream and cheese. The melted cheese has turned stringy and is stuck to my teeth. Flattening his ears back like an owl, our cat mews outside the kitchen window – a pure-black boy cat called Morris. Morris Morrissey. We tend to name or acquire things that sound just like us. At one point we even had a Morris Minor. Whenever we got a lift to school instead of having to walk, my brother and I ducked our heads while my mother parked,......
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Current Issue: March - April 2025
PN Review 282

Cold War Hot Air Rod Mengham In the Humboldt Forum in Berlin there is now an exhibition commemorating the vanished Palace of the Republic. This was the Soviet-style building in the heart of Communist East Berlin that housed the Volkskammer – the Parliament of the German Democratic Republic – between the years 1976 and 1990. The building itself was demolished – slowly – between the years 2006 and 2008: primarily because it was constructed with over 5,000 tons of asbestos; secondarily because it was a towering reminder of a way of life resented by perhaps the majority of citizens who endured it. There were the securities of housing and employment built into the East German social structure, but also the insecurities generated by relentless surveillance, official and unofficial, in both workplaces and neighbourhoods. The exhibition organisers assume that a majority of its......
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Current Issue: March - April 2025
PN Review 282

Coding Gregory Woods David Grundy, Never by Itself Alone: Queer Poetry, Queer Communities in Boston and the Bay Area, 1944–Present (OUP) $120 Reviewing Stephen Coote’s The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (TLS, 22-28 April 1983), Alan Hollinghurst, of all people, roundly declared that ‘the increasing self-segregation of gays has had an enfeebling effect on their art’. This was a commonplace critical stance at the time, though less so coming from a gay critic. Hollinghurst’s main objection was to the new directness, where oblique coding had once been the norm. There was also the implication, inherited via the strictures of the New Criticism, that each poem should be able to stand on its own (actually a fair requirement for anthology pieces), but that many of these could not. The poem Hollinghurst especially objected to, all the more so because of......
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