“Suburban noir” is a growing sub-genre in American crime fiction, fuelled by the success of TV series such as Desperate Housewives and Breaking Bad. And When She Was Good makes a welcome contribution to this trend, though an uneven one. In the afterword to the novel, Laura Lippman claims that she wanted Heloise Lewis, the Read More
Critically acclaimed poet, and former Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee (2003-5), Colette Bryce was born in Derry, and grew up during the Troubles. The Whole and Rain-domed Universe is a retrospective impression of that time, a keenly-felt and often poignant memoir of childhood and family life, set against the backdrop of Read More
How many people can say they have penetrated the inner space of their being and come out on the other side? Awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry (2004), Hugo Williams won the Eliot Prize in 1999 for West End Final, a collection that earned him an earlier Forward listing. I Knew the Bride appears Read More
Winner of an Eric Gregory Award in 2006 and a Faber New Poets Award in 2009, Fiona Benson’s first full collection, Bright Travellers, explores various aspects of nature and the human experience, including those that are difficult and sometimes heart-wrenching. She addresses her subject matter directly and fearlessly. Consider “Sheep”, which opens as follows: She’s Read More
The Invention of Fireworks is Beatrice Garland’s first full collection, although she already has an impressive publishing history. As well as new verses, this volume contains poems previously published in the London Magazine, Rialto, The Spectator and P.N.Review and other pieces included in anthologies of new poetry by Faber (1998), Carcanet (2007) and The Shuffle (2009). Read More
With Niall Campbell’s Moontide I’ve been to the Hebrides and back, I’ve explored dry grain stores in half-light and felt fleece brush my cheek, touched farm implements and coils of rope and imagined daylight. I’ve heard waves and kelpies in the distance and felt the bitterness of cold and the wretchedness of drowning. Then I’ve Read More
John Burnside has a tough job with this collection, his thirteenth; how does one follow up the Forward Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize-winning 2011 collection Black Cat Bone? Any truly great book, poetry or otherwise, casts a long shadow over its successors, but All One Breath manages to step out of the cover of its Read More
In anticipation of reading Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, I examined a number of other reviews of the collection. Now, having read the work, one of these reviews strikes me as particularly interesting. David Clarke perceives Letter Composed as largely self-obsessed. With regard to the poem “Improvised Explosive Device”, written from the perspective Read More
In her new collection, Louise Gluck writes of originary griefs and joys mediated by memory, in a recovery of aboriginal feeling prior to any intellectualising process. The poetry is open ended and inconclusive; its modes are parabolic, or narrativised, or staged as a prose poem, and the poetic persona she adopts throughout is male, possibly Read More
Vidyan Ravinthiran is a research fellow at Selwyn College, born to Sri Lankan parents , and Grun-tu-molani is his first collection of poetry. This is a large first collection: large in its desire to encompass everything from the poet’s history to the complexities of prose-style. Ravinthiran’s enthusiasm spills off the page but never outstrips the Read More