Narrating from the Margins
Chrissy Williams Flying Into The Bear HappenStance £4.00 Fiona Moore The Only Reason for Time HappenStance £4.00 Tim Liardet Madame Sasoo Goes Bathing Shoestring £7.00 Shazea Quraishi The Courtesans...
View ArticleReturning an Echo
Peter Robinson on the aspirations of Derek Mahon’s ‘adaptations’ Derek Mahon Echo’s Grove Gallery, €22.50/€13.90 Derek Mahon’s ‘Echo’, subtitled ‘from the Latin of Ovid, Metamorphoses III, 356-402’,...
View ArticleChuang-Tzu and Prospero
Caleb Klaces on the improbable range of Christopher Middleton’s work Christopher Middleton Collected Later Poems Carcanet, £25.00 Christopher Middleton’s Collected Later Poems begins with something...
View ArticleChaucer: Movie Stills or Slam Remix
Lavinia Greenlaw A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde Faber £16.99 Patience Agbabi Telling Tales Canongate £14.99 Both A Double Sorrow and Telling Tales borrow their basic frame from works by Chaucer....
View ArticleRealities and Dreams
Sue Rose Heart Archives Hercules Editions, £10 Richard O’Brien The Emmores The Emma Press, £5 Harry Man Lift tall-lighthouse, £5 Holly Hopkins Soon Every House Will Have One Smith/Doorstop, £5 Ben...
View ArticleThe World or the Self
Michael Hulse divides the Mariannes from the Sylvias David Harsent Fire Songs Faber £12.99 Ruth Padel Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth Chatto £10.00 Roddy Lumsden Not All Honey Bloodaxe £8.95 One...
View ArticleThe Gaelic Objectivists
David Wheatley on a new anthology of Early Irish poetry Maurice Riordan (Editor) The Finest Music: An Anthology of Early Irish Lyrics Faber £14.99 Seamus Heaney was not the first Ulster poet to travel...
View ArticleA Neo-Modernist Chameleon
Drew Milne on the revived reputation of Nicholas Moore Nicholas Moore Selected Poems (edited by John Lucas and Matthew Welton with an introduction by Mark Ford) Shoestring £14.99 Amid the scrambled...
View ArticleWe’ll Photograph Everything | John Clegg brings light to the ‘obscure small...
JH Prynne Poems Bloodaxe £25.00 For dent inflict yet amuse enamel will livid exceed tactic nursing humid loss, nolore even alert at numb unwind entry. Level ground pacific inversion has wasted...
View ArticleThe Less Consoled | Helen Mort on poetry and landscape
Peter Riley Due North Shearsman £9.95 Blake Morrison Shingle Street Chatto £10.00 In a recent New Statesman article, naturalist and environmental activist Mark Cocker described a subtle shift in...
View ArticleThe Journey to Words: Chris Beckett & Isao Miura on the life’s work of a...
Shuntar Tanikawa New Selected Poems (translated by William I Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura) Carcanet £12.99 ‘Giving people poems / is like giving people air’ writes Tanikawa in 1991. And this wonderful...
View ArticleRacism’s Metre and Rhyme: Kayombo Chingonyi on Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine Citizen Penguin £9.99 Citizen, Claudia Rankine’s most recent collection, opens in understated fashion: ‘When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let...
View ArticlePushing Through to Redemption: Dai George finds poets exceeding the...
Luke Kennard Cain Penned in the Margins £12.99 Helen Mort No Map Could Show Them Chatto £10.00 In 2006 Luke Kennard held a funeral for irony. Commemorated in ‘A Sure-Fire Sign’, a poem from The...
View ArticleThe Hatred of Lerner: Caleb Klaces on his struggle with Ben Lerner’s poetics
Ben Lerner The Hatred of Poetry Fitzcarraldo, £9.99 My two-year-old daughter has a frustrating habit of asking for orange juice, then objecting to every way she might drink it. The juice is right, the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Poetry as Artifact and Historical Testimony: Malika Booker on an emancipating...
Olio Tyehimba Jess Wave $25 Tyehimba Jess’s second collection Olio is a beautiful rendering of minstrel performers post-slavery. Jess and Wave Books have deliberately cultivated a coffee-table art book...
View ArticleMania of Aggregation: Sam Riviere on Ed Atkins’s malignant poetics
Ed Atkins A Primer for Cadavers Fitzcarraldo £12.99 Ed Atkins is known as an artist, not at all as a poet, so he’s not an obvious candidate for the review pages of a poetry magazine – but then I...
View ArticleMetaphors of the Spirit: Shara McCallum on two Poet Laureates of Jamaica
Mervyn Morris Peelin Orange: Collected Poems Carcanet £14.99 Lorna Goodison Collected Poems Carcanet £14.99 I first encountered poems by Mervyn Morris and Lorna Goodison over twenty years ago, at a...
View ArticleSalve to Exile: Momtaza Mehri on Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf’s memory work
Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf The Sea-Migrations/Tahriib (Translated by Clare Pollard, with Said Jama Hussein and Maxamed Xasan ‘Alto’) Bloodaxe £12.00 Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf is a contemporary Somali poet who...
View ArticleAn ‘I’ For An ‘I’: the vanishing self in lyric poetry by Chrissy Williams
Sophie Collins Who is Mary Sue? Faber £10.99 Oli Hazzard Blotter Carcanet £9.99 Sophie Collins’s début collection Who is Mary Sue? assembles many different types of text – poetry (both lineated and...
View ArticleAn Epidemic of the Heart by A K Blakemore
Three seductive, political first collections Richard Scott Soho Faber £10.99 Abigail Parry Jinx Bloodaxe £9.95 Leah Umansky The Barbarous Century Eyewear £10.99 Sometimes when I feel like punishing...
View Article
