Bøker av John Watson

It might be that Madame de Lafayette's novel of passion is one of the greatest in the genre. It is closer to the declamatory theatre of Racine than to anything else in the robust tradition of the English novels of Fielding or Smollett or Dickens. It has generated in John Watson a response in iambics, which seem in English the only way this expressive grandeur can be attempted. Watson has in the past been drawn similarly to the ancient texts of Daphnis and Chloe and Tristan, where passion is also the currency. Princess de Clèves may well be his most sustained success.

Many of Schubert's six hundred songs were composed quickly, and often in the midst of of a gathering of friends loudly revelling or performing other music. Sometimes that remarkable facility would be exercised while walking in company through the woods round Vienna. John Watson has composed a sequence of scenes from this prodigious working life - sometimes in Schubert's own voice, sometimes in the voices of critics or friends. Here are glimpses - forming a song cycle, as it were - depicting Schubert at work or between songs, until the final fortnight's struggle when he leaves them behind.

The story of Tristan is well known in the Western tradition of Romance. Few have not heard of Wagner's opera and the love elixir which Tristan and Iseut drink by accident. The story is already well established in the early medieval period, where there are several competing manuscripts, most of them incomplete for various reasons. John Watson has revisited these medieval origins and achieved a synthesis, a complete Tristan. Here are the sea voyages, the ill-fated love potion, the black or white sail hoisted as a signal. And here, re-imagining the whole, Watson has made a fitting companion piece to his earlier The Tale of Gawain (GinninderraPress).

The rewriting of prose texts in iambics is perhaps primarily a way of reading them with deliberation; the texts here - favourites of course - have much in common. Those from Lampedusa posit the possibility of extraordinary events. Similarly, 'Sylvie' depends on extremities of tenderness exemplified by the scene in the Othys section when the narrator and Sylvie, descending the stairs, stage a re-enactment. And in the scene from Dali's novel Hidden Faces there is something in common with the luminous return to life near the end of The Count of Monte Cristo (which itself has echoes of the rapt statue scene in The Winter's Tale). To render these theatrical interludes in verse is of course an indulgence but also, it is hoped, a tribute and an invitation.

This guide introduces the climber to the bouldering around and within Glasgow, Scotland's biggest city.

The lives celebrated in Three Obituaries are of three diverse twentieth century figures: Jeanne Claude (1935-2009), Sophie Moss (1917-2009) and Benoit B. Mandelbrot (1924-2010). Jeanne Claude, the partner of the field artist Christo, was a prime mover in all their projects. Sophie Moss, born in Poland, embodied the wide-ranging turbulence of Europe during the war years. Mandelbrot famously discovered and named fractals, thereby altering the public perception of Geometry. For each of these figures, Watson devises epyllions, making of each life a lyrical epic.The Afternoon Tea is a Chekhovian affair shared with the poet Joseph Brodsky.

In Four Refrains, John Watson has invented a kaleidoscope of glittering facets. A curious incident from the life of the Surrealist Magritte; a sequence in four parts which won the Blake Prize for Poetry; an extended tribute to the poet Wislawa Szymborska, the cigarette-smoking Nobel Prizewinner, who left a remarkably small body of work; and, finally, a second amusing incident involving a work by the modernist artist, Cy Twombly. Each of these Refrains demonstrates Watson's verve and readiness to explore untrodden ways.

Gawain and the Green Knight is the celebrated poem from the time of Chaucer, written in the dialect then current in the north of England. Chaucer's language outlasted this dialect. The poem draws on rich Arthurian and folk traditions involving the Green Man and knightly virtue. It has been frequently translated but John Watson has chosen to devise a version running parallel to the original while avoiding direct translation. Here Gawain struggles afresh with the Green Knight's gruesome challenge and overcomes mysterious temptations in order to preserve the precept of Virtue as required at the Round Table.