Up Late

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Still, whatever Mendelson thought then, he has now given us everything, or almost everything. (A final volume, Personal Writings: Selected Letters, Journals, and Poems Written for Friends, is forthcoming.) It’s been an astonishing act of literary scholarship and personal dedication on Mendelson’s part, and readers the world over should be thankful for it.

Auden discovered Freud at thirteen, according to Mendelson’s biography, “when his father began using the new psychology in his school medical practice.” All his life the poet argued with and borrowed from Freud, becoming, perhaps, the first major poet to use modern ideas about psychology in his work. According to the Cambridge Companion, “From adolescence he would startle or bully his friends with Freudian diagnoses.” ↩ Lisa Owens’s novel Not Working was published by Picador in 2016. She also writes short stories and screenplays, and lives in London.Her story ‘Chemistry Read’ was published here in September.Publisher Ithys Press is unrepentant, saying, “The book was conceived not as a commercial venture but as a carefully crafted tribute to a rather different Joyce, the family man and grandfather.” On 18 November, I watched a performance on the Irish tour of MÁM by Teaċ Daṁsa, Cormac Begley and the orchestral collective, s t a r g a z e, in a school hall in Boyle, County Roscommon. There was no stage, no lighting rig, no tabs. What was in front of the audience was a raised steel platform, a kitchen table with a drawer and some wooden chairs. The music came first, then the movement. Maria Johnston is a poetry critic and academic. She is the co-editor, with Conor Linnie, of Irish Women Poets Rediscovered (Cork University Press, 2021).

I have always been, in one way or another, obsessed with sisters, the dead and the living both. The dead sister died before I was born. Her death was not my experience, but her absence was. Her death let me be born. I saw myself as her substitute, which produced in me a profound obligation toward my mother, and a frantic desire to remedy her every distress. I took it all personally: every shadow that crossed her face proved my insufficiency; the birth of my younger sister proved this yet more concretely. At the same time, I took on the guilty responsibility of the survivor.Up Late was written by Laird as an elegy to his father, who died of Covid in March 2021. The judges felt Up Late “sincerely engaged with death, grief and the private and shared lived experience of the pandemic in ways which readers will find profoundly moving and cathartic”. He also teaches, most recently at Princeton and Barnard in the US, where their daughter is in school and where their next child will be born, after which they intend to spend more time in London. asked me why I didn’t include his essay on Romeo and Juliet, and I simply shook my head no, as a slightly nervous way of saying I didn’t think it equaled the rest. At this, he beamed at me, and I realized he was delighted that I didn’t think everything he wrote was worthy to be engraved in gold.