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Wednesday 04 March 2009

Thinking about Malcolm Lowry

Nicholas Murray has been thinking about Malcolm Lowry:


This year is the centenary of the birth of the writer Malcolm Lowry, one of a host of Liverpool (well, New Brighton if you are a pedantic Scouser) writers who featured in my book about the city last year So Spirited A Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool. In the book I relate the well-known story of Lowry's going away to sea at the age of 17 and being delivered to the Liverpool dock in his father's Rolls Royce. Lowry senior was a wealthy Liverpool cotton-broker who paid his reprobate son an allowance all his life so that he never had to put up with that tiresome inconvenience that hampers the rest of us scribblers, a proper job. According to Lowry's brothers this Roller was one of his tall tales – he liked nothing better to play the role of an old sea dog even though this was his sole professional voyage – and in fact it was a more humble vehicle that pulled up at the dock gates (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
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Serendipoetry

Appointment

He fingers the ends with the care of a vet
handling a new-fledged baby bird.
'How would you like it cut?' he asks.
'Well.' I reply. 'I have a wedding to stop.'

I know I won't go. Just impediments
are for the movies. But I let him snip
through the blade of afternoon light,
layering out the splits, the kinks, the fluff
as thoughtfully as though I had the guts
to shout your name and race you to the bus.

-- Ros Barber

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meretricious

1. Appealing in a cheap or showy manner: tawdry. 2. Based on pretense or insincerity. more …

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