Helen Farish(Bloodaxe Books, 2024); pbk, £12.00 The Penny Dropping is a compelling narrative-driven poetry collection telling the story of a relationship from beginning to end. This is Helen Farish’s fourth collection of poetry. Previously, Farish has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and this is the second time her work has been shortlisted Read More
Peter Gizzi(Penguin Books, 2024); pbk, £9.99 In his collection, Fierce Elegy, Peter Gizzi offers us words which recognise all the contradictions in loss and grieving. He gives us ‘elegy’, from Greek elegeia, from elegos, a mourning song. Add ‘fierce’ to that, and we have a flavour of the intensity of the offering. An American poet, Read More
Raymond Antrobus(Picador Poetry, 2024); pbk, £10.99 Much has been written more recently about new mothers, laughed at, or conspiratorially grimaced with, in face-to-face encounters in various post-natal and toddler groups. And because pregnancy and childbirth are necessarily bodily states, I have often wondered about how fathers imagine themselves into a relationship with the unborn or Read More
Gboyega Odubanjo(Faber, London 2024), pbk: £10.59 Gboyega Odubanjo’s posthumously published debut collection, Adam, is ‘inspired’ by the grim discovery in 2001 of a child’s headless and limbless torso in the Thames near to Shakespeare’s Globe and London Bridge—the city’s literary and corporate heartland. Child victim was genetically proven to be of Nigerian origin, of a Read More
Gustav Parker Hibbett(Banshee Press, 2024); pbk, £10.99 Gustav Parker Hibbett’s unusual blend of sports and Greek mythology presents an outstanding debut collection. A black poet, essayist and scholar, Hibbett’s work has previously been published in LitHub, Adroit, London Magazine, Guernica Poetry Ireland Review, to name a few. There’s a real magic to the way Hibbett Read More
Katrina Porteous(Bloodaxe, 2024); pbk, £12.99 A poetry collection, if it is to be successful, should offer the reader a ‘way in’, regardless of its tone, form or subject matter. Sometimes, the latter is the biggest obstacle; poets often write of places and experiences that are personal to them, or share insights relating to often complex Read More
Hannah Copley,(Liverpool University Press, 2024); pbk £10.99 Hannah Copley’s second collection Lapwing intermeshes avian environments and human emotions, overlaying natural and social ecologies into a bleared landscape of unsustainability and grief. Copley interweaves the relationship between the bird, Lapwing, and his neglected daughter, Peet, with a sequence documenting whole flocks of unidentified birds in ‘SIGHTING’, Read More
Carl Phillips(Carcanet Press, 2024); pbk, £11.99 Carl Phillips asks in ‘Foliage’, ‘When did syntax and life become indistinguishable from one another?’ Art and Life: poetry as the transformation (not transcription) of experience in words. In reading Scattered Snows, to the North, I shall take my cue from Phillips’ essay. For these are thoughtful, expansive, if sometimes Read More
Karen McCarthy Woolf(Dialogue Books, 2024); hbk, £20 Infinity is an episode long and troubling to decipher [,] Dolly How might a writer work their way into writing an expansive historical telling of the vastness of United States, uncovering a multitude of people, of oppressions, victories, defeats and ongoing struggles? Recalling the cliché, ‘When Read More
Fri 13 Sept – Sat 5 Oct, Dundee Rep Theatre As theatre sub-editor for DURA, it feels strange to confess that, up until recently, I’d never seen an Ayckbourn production. I’d read his non-fiction book, The Crafty Art of Playmaking, but never watched a single one of his ninety plays. I’m glad my first Ayckbourn Read More