Rob Currie’s play, Undertaking, explores the dimensions of grief and loss by blurring the lines between reality, fantasy and memory, examining death as it were from a personal and professional point of view. Undertaking ushers the audience into the backrooms of a funeral parlour and the home of a grieving family, as both prepare for Read More
A luridly pink cover and a suggestive title first drew me to The Art of Scratching. Shazea Quraishi is a Pakistani-Canadian writer,and the second and middle sections of her new collection were published in her first pamphlet The Courtesans Reply (2012). Having lived in Pakistan, Canada, Spain, and London, her influences are myriad. Of Skyros, Read More
Poetry Centre Stage played host to exciting performances from two of the UK’s leading poets on the Friday of the StAnza festival. Lemn Sissay’s presence filled the auditorium as soon as he appeared on stage; his larger-than-life exuberance creates its own buzz. Effortlessly facing down some caustic remarks from a member of the audience, Sissay Read More
“This book begins and is made of gifts” writes Alan Riach in the introduction to Ian Brown’s new collection of poetry – a sentence that in it own curious syntactical imbalance strikes exactly the note of spontaneity and uncertainty that dances through every page of “Collyshangles in the canopy”. For is it that the book Read More
Should you wish to be transported into a fairytale world of Nordic myth then Transparencies by Meg Bateman may be just your thing. There are moments when one receives an antidote, often in an art form, which clears your mental fog. In this case it comes in the guise of poetry. Meg Bateman has a Read More
Laced with the sexuality and the associated violence we have come to expect from Angela Carter, her somewhat forgotten poetry does not disappoint. Editor Rosemary Hill highlights that very frisson in her new collection of Carter’s published verse Unicorn. Much like Carter’s earlier novels Several Perceptions and Heroes and Villains, her poetry has been neglected Read More
In his latest collection, seasoned poet and scrupulous “life critic” Alan Brownjohn writes candidly of modern life and the human experience. His penchant for the trivialities of la vie quotidienne manifests through an acutely realist and, at times, satirical lens. These thirty nine poems might be said to emulate the values of European cinema’s Neorealist Read More
In a snug, lamp-lit, yellow-stoned vault underneath St. John’s House, StAnza hosts a series of poetry readings under the title, “Border Crossings”. These events, in which two poets read consecutively, stage not only the boundaries between poetic practices, but the national and cultural boundaries that many of the poets have crossed in order to be Read More
Les Animots: A Human Bestiary is Gordon Meade’s eighth poetry collection. Taking animals – a perennially popular topic in poetry – as his theme, it quickly becomes apparent that Meade is playing with our preconceptions. The book initially appears to be a field guide with “68 species described with black & white drawings”, a hardback Read More
Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning American poet, born in 1953 in New York. Since graduating from Princeton University in 1973, she has lived in California, where she has lectured at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her previously published poetry collections, five of which were awarded prizes, she is an essayist and editor Read More