Rainer Maria Rilke, from ‘Book of Hours: Love Poems to God’, tr. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy
Gillian Hanscombe, from Sybil: The Glide of Her Tongue
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It’s like autumn arriving. You expect nothing from its arrival. You expect everything.
Alejandra Pizarnik, Extracting the Stone of Madness; from ‘Extracting the Stone of Madness’, tr. Yvette Siegert
summer is a slow plague.
Alejandra Pizarnik, Alejandra Pizarnik: Selected Poems; from ‘Poems Uncollected in Books (1956–1960)’, tr. Cecilia Rossi
I need you in some way that I can’t explain…
Anne Sexton, from ‘A Self-Portrait in Letters’: Brother Dennis Farrell, 21st June 1962
Dark angel divine.
Sarah Kane, from ‘Crave’
What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.
Theodore Roethke, The Far Field; from ‘The Marrow’
I am conscious of flux, of disorder; of annihilation and despair.
Virginia Woolf, from ‘The Waves’
I, who came back from the depths laughing too loudly,
Theodore Roethke, The Far Field; from ‘The Long Waters’
you saw the flame in the mouth, and heard the rushing of the demon,—the familiar,—and recognized the sound; for you have heard it in your own solitudes.
Herman Melville, from a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne c. 17th November 1851
Jean Racine, from ‘Phaedra’, tr. Richard Wilbur