Assinaros & other poems
Students who heard that tragedy
Beside what may have been the river,
Conjectured what the author meant:
Guessed empire condignly punished,
Guessed no rebuke (all rule who can),
Or shelved grand themes and marked
A warning, so, should bad day come,
They’d stand clear while others drowned.
By Aaron Evan Baker.
Beyond Stonebridge Park
Keiller is often lumped into the psychogeography camp but here he reminds us that “the d érive is not an end in itself”, something often overlooked as urban walking has become synonymous with psychogeography as if it would merely be enough to go for a wander round the East End to shatter the Spectacle. He points out, “In London now, psychogeography leads not so much to avant-garde architecture as to gentrification”, and relates the way the Surrealists appropriated buildings and areas to the mechanics of modern property development as estate agents dream up new names and narratives for run-down districts to boost prices and draw in house-hunters looking for the new up-and-coming investment opportunity.
John Rogers reviews Patrick Keiller‘s The View from the Train.