Barbara Cooke, "Evelyn Waugh's Oxford"

 

Dr Barbara Cooke is a senior lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She worked in publishing before completing a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. She is Co-executive Editor of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh and the author of Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford.

About Evelyn Waugh's Oxford, by Barbara Cooke, with illustrations by Amy Dodd

Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford is a site-specific, creative-critical biography focusing on Waugh’s emotional and creative connection to the city. It begins by looking at Waugh’s Oxford through the lenses of invention, memory and imagination before exploring locations in the city that are particularly significant to his life and work. Waugh was a visual thinker, and the book includes reproductions of archival objects alongside specially commissioned images by Amy Dodd to create a dialogue between words and pictures, the imagined and the real.

You can read more about Evelyn Waugh's Oxford on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the book's location vignettes. 

From Evelyn Waugh's Oxford

Hall Brothers

When Waugh was at Oxford, all dapper undergraduates bought their suits from Hall Bros. The tailors were a city institution, and in the 1920s traded from a mock-Tudor building, replete with Elizabeth I’s coat of arms, at 94 Magpie Lane. 

…

In the 1920s they became the city’s foremost purveyor of ‘Oxford bags,’ very wide trousers first popularized by Waugh’s friend Harold Acton. Oxford bags really took off after Waugh had left, but they belonged firmly to a period when he still thought, talked and dressed like an undergraduate and became one of those – as he put it – ‘who cannot at once sever the cord uniting them to the university and haunt it for years to come.’ Like his student friends, Waugh teamed his bags with a high- or ‘turtle’-neck jumper which, he observed in November 1924, was ‘rather becoming and most convenient for lechery because it dispenses with all unromantic gadgets like studs and ties. It also hides the boils with which most of the young men seem to have encrusted their necks.’  

…

Waugh’s appreciation of the turtleneck jumper was typical of his pragmatic approach to fashion at the time .… As his financial situation eased, however, Waugh raised his sartorial ambitions. His brother Alec introduced him to Anderson Sheppard of London’s Savile Row,  whose suits made him feel, for the first time, not ‘the worst dressed person in every room.’  Being well turned out satisfied more than just Waugh’s vanity. For a man of his relatively humble origins, the cut of a seam could be the difference between social acceptance and rejection.

Illustration by Amy Dodd

Sarah James, "Ten Lines or More Than Just Love Notes"

Sarah James is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer, also published as Sarah Leavesley. Her poetry has featured in the Guardian, Financial Times and Poems of the Decade 2011-2020: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry 2011-2020, as well as in a café mural, on the BBC, on buses and in the Blackpool Illuminations. She is the author of eight poetry titles, an Arts Council England-funded multimedia hypertext poetry narrative > Room, two novellas and a touring poetry-play. Her pamphlet Ten Lines or More Than Just Love Notes (Loughborough University, 2022) won the 2020 Overton Poetry Prize. Winner of the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine 2020, the manuscript for Sarah’s latest collection Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic (Verve Poetry Press 2022) won the CP Aware Award Prize for Poetry 2021. In her spare time, Sarah is a keen walker, cyclist and swimmer, especially enjoying nature outdoors. Meanwhile, her spare room is home to V. Press, publishing award-winning poetry and flash fiction. Her website is here.

About Ten Lines or More Than Just Love Notes, by Sarah James

Ten Lines or More Than Just Love Notes (Loughborough University, 2022) looks at love and loss – of a romantic kind, between parents and children, and in nature. It is also an exploration of the poetic range possible within a constraint of ten lines of free verse, and won the 2020 Overton Poetry Prize.

You can see more information about the pamphlet here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Ten Lines or More Than Just Love Notes

"On the eyelid of the North"

          A response to Dylan Thomas’s "A Dream of Winter"

The dusk lake is full of flitting shadows and next winter’s riddles.
For now, a couple idle, breathing in the last drip of summer light.
Their hand-in-hand stroll slips under the water’s dark meniscus.
Untarred, they linger in silence, not yet knowing their time has split
like an overripe peach dropped from beyond tree-height.

Time does split. Through love, fruit, ice. No mouths gulping
at softly rippled surfaces. The silver flicker of fishtails,
disappearing. And polar landscapes melting. Old seasons
dream a past that will heal the future. The lake’s lens
fills with night; pipistrelles empty out their song.

An earlier version of this poem was previously published in Northern Poetry Library’s Poem of the North.

Post-Dive

At depth, I finally open my eyes
and realise how much light
floats below the broken surface.

Encased in the water’s glass,
I glow like a strong filament
in a liquid lamp-bulb.

Here, resistance doesn’t jolt.
Anything could pass through me
and sparkle, even the sharp shock

of existing without him.