Frodo Soup

The Lammas Hireling by Ian Duhig (2000) After the fair, I’d still a light heart and a heavy purse, he struck so cheap. And cattle doted on him: in his time mine only dropped heifers, fat as cream. Yields doubled. I grew fond of company that knew when to shut up. Then one night,   disturbed from dreams of my dear late wife, I hunted down her torn voice to his pale form. Stock-still in the light from the dark lantern, stark-naked but for one bloody boot of fox-trap, I knew him a warlock, a cow with leather horns. To go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow,   the wisdom runs, muckle care. I levelled and blew the small hour through his heart. The moon came out. By its yellow witness I saw him fur over like a stone mossing. His lovely head thinned. His top lip gathered. His eyes rose like bread. I carried him   in a sack that grew lighter at every step and dropped him from a bridge. There was no splash. Now my herd’s elf-shot. I don’t dream but spend my nights casting ball from half-c

There’s a Certain Slant of Light   Emily Dickinson   1861   Find out more about Emily Dickinson by watching a documentary about her. Context:   Emily Dickinson was a prolific poet who did not want her work to be published. She thought that if her  work was bought and paid for, it was like an auction of the mind. However, Dick inson  produced hand bound  books  for herself in order to draw her work together . This desire to keep her work private is reflected in the poem with its theme of isolation and its exploration of the soul of the individual.  Brought up a Calvinist*, in adult life she decided to stop attending public worship while still retaining a sense of faith. Her struggle with spirituality is evident in the poem as religion is a key theme.   *Following the Christian teachings of John Calvin, e s pecially the belief that God controls what happens on earth. Calvinists have very strict moral standards and consider pleasure to be wrong or not neces

An Easy Passage by Julia Copus Once she is halfway up there, crouched in her bikini on the porch roof of her family's house, trembling, she knows that the one thing she must not do is to think of the narrow windowsill, the sharp drop of the stairwell; she must keep her mind on the friend with whom she is half in love and who is waiting for her on the blond gravel somewhere beneath her, keep her mind on her and on the fact of the open window, the flimsy, hole-punched, aluminium lever t owards which in a moment she will reach with the length of her whole body, leaning in to the warm flank of the house. But first she steadies herself, still crouching, the grains of the asphalt hot beneath her toes and fingertips, a square of petrified beach. Her tiny breasts rest lightly on her thighs. – What can she know of the way the world admits us less and less the more we grow? For now both girls seem lit, as if from within, their hair and the