This is a really wonderful piece by @helenmort.bsky.social

Colm Tóibín · Seagulls as Playmates: Where the Islanders Went In 1954, the islanders left the Great Blasket. It has been empty since then. What does ‘empty’ mean? What happens...

Joyce identified the men as Paddy Kenny (left), Máirtín Maingí (middle), and Seán Joyce (right), his first cousin. Colm Tóibín revisits the image, along with Joyce’s book in his LRB review Seagulls as Playmates.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Ah thank you, I was just about to hunt out the book again!!

‘Remembering Peasants’ by Patrick Joyce review

What a wonderful film @paulduane.bsky.social🙏🏼 First saw that extraordinary picture in Patrick Joyce's book Remembering Peasants,reviewed here by @petermandler.bsky.social. Joyce draws some of the deep continuities East to West of a life lived off land and sea.

www.historytoday.com/archive/revi...

Richard Ovenden standing at a lectern talking to a large group of people in a modern lecture theatre.

We’re proud to be part of the formal launch of the Libraries Alliance today at the British Academy in London.

Libraries of all kinds are coming together as a unified voice, showing how libraries support people through every stage of life.

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Literary text in William Shakespeare’s own handwriting

A powerful plea for compassion, written over 400 years ago.

This manuscript in our collection is believed to contain the only surviving literary text in William Shakespeare’s handwriting. Its message still resonates today.

Discover more here: link.bl.uk/tkr

Collaborative Doctoral Awards Learn more about our Collaborative Doctoral Partnership programme, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

We're currently recruiting for five (yes five!) Collaborative Doctoral Partnership awards at IWM See the full list of projects and partners here, with further details of how to apply: www.iwm.org.uk/research/doc...

While We Wait for Sunrise, 23rd May 1912 - Modern Poetry in Translation Faltering dawn, the Avenue: a stammer of light. Yesterday’s waiters hover tired, yet a fresh brew steams the air and a single cloud splits from yellow to blue above the park, above the boulevard of pe...

Surely this is the day all the winter gardens will shatter, release
their crystal treasure, the pent-up breath of our ambition, so tomorrow,
life will be measured in a value greater than the body’s weight in blood

#Hungary @mptmagazine.bsky.social

modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/while-w...

Patchwork quilt made of diamond-shaped fabric pieces arranged in a repeating geometric pattern. The quilt features a mix of worn and patterned textiles in muted tones, including florals, stripes, and solids, with visible stitching and signs of age.

As more #research happens in digital environments, discovery shapes how materials are encountered.

@rschon.bsky.social reflects on what this means for libraries & archives, & how platform decisions contribute to the visibility and use of collections over time.

Read more: https://bit.ly/3Qs3NsG

@carcanet.bsky.social - Remembering Ed Dorn today on the Allen Ginsberg Project - allenginsberg.org/2026/04/t-a-...

O'ERWEENING Statesmen have full long relied
On fleets and armies, and external wealth:
But from within proceeds a Nation’s health...

Wordsworth

Portrait by William Henry Pickersgill, 1831 Courtesy of St John’s College Cambridge

“Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give,
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
Ode: Intimations of Immortality, 1807, by William Wordsworth, born #OTD 1770.
St John’s College, Cambridge

The policy system needs more social science Rita Gardner stresses the benefits of deeper embedding of robust social science evidence and methodologies in the world of government policy Rita Gardner stresses the benefits of deeper embedding of r...

And also more Humanity/Humanities.

Our friends in The Confluence Collective have made a short film of our Kalimpong exhibition.

बाउ को धुरी छैन “Father Has No Roof over his head” Kalimpong, India 21-27 February 2026

shorturl.at/6IbjP

#Himalaya #OtherEverests #Archives #IndigenousWork

Funded by @ukri.org @christophersmith.bsky.social

Black ink drawing of overlapping squares, some colored grey with a felt-tip pen

March's End 2026

Here’s a lovely thread celebrating today’s anniversary of the birth of #RSThomas

Passing Flyingly Over On the trail of the hyphenated line-break

I wrote about one of the most important questions of our time: what's going on when poets use a hyphen across a line break?

I review ‘The art of the book’, the new history of @thamesandhudson.bsky.social in today’s @theobserveruk.bsky.social. It is a superbly illustrated volume - celebrating high quality-book making that brought ideas, art & culture to a wide audience at affordable prices. A gorgeous book!

Poets need not Liz Lochhead Poets need not be garlanded; the poet’s head should be innocent of the leaves of the sweet bay tree, twisted. All honour goes to poetry. And poets need no laurels. Why be lauded for the love of trying to nail the disembodied image with that one plain word to make it palpable; for listening in to silence for the rhythm capable of carrying the thought that’s not thought yet? The pursuit’s its own reward. So you have to let the poem come to voice by footering late in the dark at home, by muttering syllables of scribbled lines – or what might be lines, eventually, if you can get it right. And this, perhaps, in public? The daytime train, the biro, the back of an envelope, and again the fun of the wildgoose chase that goes beyond all this fuss. Inspiration? Bell rings, penny drops, the light-bulb goes on and tops the not-good-enough idea that went before? No, that’s not how it goes. You write, you score it out, you write it in again the same but somehow with a different stress. This is a game you very seldom win and most of your efforts end up in the bin.

There’s one hunched and gloomy heron haunts that nearby stretch of River Kelvin and it wouldn’t if there were no fish. If it never in all that greyness passing caught a flash, a gleam of something, made that quick stab. That’s how a poem is after a long nothingness, you grab at that anything and this is food to you. It comes through, as leaves do. All praise to poetry, the way it has of attaching itself to a familiar phrase in a new way, insisting it be heard and seen. Poets need no laurels, surely? their poems, when they can make them happen – even rarely – crown them with green.

Poets need not be garlanded;
the poet’s head
should be innocent of the leaves of the sweet bay tree,
twisted. All honour goes to poetry…

—Liz Lochhead, “Poets Need Not”
published in A HANDSEL: New & Collected Poems (Birlinn, 2023)
#WorldPoetryDay #poem #poetry
birlinn.co.uk/product/a-ha...

R S Thomas, The Other There are nights that are so still that I can hear the small owl calling far off and a fox barking miles away. It is then that I lie in the lean hours awake listening to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic rising and falling, rising and falling wave on wave on the long shore by the village that is without light and companionless. And the thought comes of that other being who is awake, too, letting our prayers break on him, not like this for a few hours, but for days, years, for eternity.

@pamelaclemit.bsky.social and @rsthomaspoet.bsky.social making it a good #WorldPoetryDay....

allpoetry.com/poem/8519921...

Hello, if you like #RSThomas then you might be interested in following this Bluesky account @RSThomaspoet, also facebook.com/groups/RSThomas/
- share his poems, quotes, events, info, Q+A, etc.
- and there’s a Society you can join… rsthomaspoetry.co.uk/rs-thomas-me-eldridge-society/
please re-post?

'The Bright Field', by R. S. Thomas, first published in his Laboratories of the Spirit (1975). #WorldPoetryDay

#WorldPoetryDay

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. Look at it talking to you. You look out a window Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it. You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other. The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot. What’s a plain level? It is that and other things, Bringing a system of them into play. Play? Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern, As in the division of grace these long August days Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters. It has been played once more. I think you exist only To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

The poem is you.

#WorldPoetryDay

John Ashbery

Balancing the books A report on the value of the State Library of NSW and NSW public libraries.

A new study reveals what we’ve long known… #libraries are good for you, and the community benefits of libraries consistently outweigh the costs. Research from NSW
www.sl.nsw.gov.au/about/about-...

If you’re wondering what the big deal is about Jürgen Habermas (who died yesterday), or if you’ve never heard of him until now, you’re not going to learn much from the short newspaper obituaries, which are focusing on more on what he said about current events than his philosophy. 1/

Yours Truly Flopping onto Your Doormat Some poetry and opinions from other people

Some poetry bits and pieces from my recent reading, featuring Vidyan Ravinthiran, John Forbes, @victoriamoul.bsky.social, Henry Wotton and Philip Larkin

1) This is an excellent book, and one that deserves more readers. 2) Longbarrow Press needs to raise some money. Therefore 3) we have made 'Cazique' half-price this weekend. 4) A beautifully produced hardback for the price of a pamphlet. 5) Order here:
longbarrowpress.com/current-publ...

"Jürgen #Habermas ’s message is challenging. We must have the courage to subject ourselves to each other, to not practice disgust, fear, contempt or dismissal, if we are to be able to agree on power, understand each other’s interests and live with our differences"
Citation: @skytteprize.bsky.social

Future Leaders Fellowships: round 11 Funding to support ambitious research and innovation across UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)’s remit. You must be a researcher or innovator who is looking to establish or transition to independence.

Interested in the Future Leaders Fellowship Scheme?

Join our upcoming webinars to learn more about the scheme, application process and what support is available.

24 March: webinar for host organisations
26 March: webinar for applicants

Register via the ‘additional information’ section ⬇️