War and its losses are never far from the surface in Brian Johnstone and Chrys Salt’s mixed media performance The Fields of War. Breaking through in powerful human expressions of anguish and outrage, the poets assume voices from across a century of fighting – the soldier returning in peacetime, the bomber pilot surveying his target, Read More
Tasha Kavanagh has previously published a number of children’s books, and judging by the tone and point of view of her first novel, Things We Have In Common, she is still drawn to that genre. Indeed, the subject matter here places this debut adult work into that crossover space shared by adult and ‘young adult’ Read More
Neil Rollinson has published three collections of poetry before Talking Dead, and is a past recipient of a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. He has also garnered a reputation for being polemical. His case is arguably quite similar to that of Henry Miller, who is often misinterpreted as a misogynist purveyor of smut. Read More
My first response to And She Was (that’s a Talking Heads’ track) is vindicated by the inclusion of a quote from that very song in the frontispiece – “The world was moving, she was right there with it” – very fitting for this collection’s tone and pace. Sarah Corbett has written a remarkable book, which Read More
In all honesty, when choosing which Eliot Prize shortlisted collection to review, I decided upon Not in This World simply because Tracey Herd lives in Dundee; I felt a real curiousity about the work of this local poet. Soon, I discovered that Herd’s connections with not only the city but with the University run deep: Read More
at the time of writing the boundless joy of a pre-walk dog is suggesting itself in the writer’s chest (“immortelle”) Beauty/Beauty is Rebecca Perry’s first book-length poetry collection. The London-based poet sculpts a world from snapshots of memories and eulogies, written sensitively from the female perspective. As the title suggests, Beauty/Beauty is a mirror, offering Read More
It’s nobody’s fault that shifting tectonic plates once split this kingdom, blessed one half at birth with coal and a black economy. And who is to blame if fortunes also shift, slide, luck gets all mined out; only shadows are left now and dust trapped in the fault-lines. @Eleanor Livingstone
As a poet who often courts the epithet, “a poet for the people”, one would think this phrase would perhaps daunt an artist as far into his career as the 77-year-old Les Murray. This is not the case, as can be seen clearly in Waiting for the Past, the prolific poet’s fourth full-length collection in Read More
Is that love on the tip of the tongue of the river, never too wounded to care for the wounded, singing the single-flowered clubrush to sleep like a prodigal daughter returned from the deep, raising the black-hearted ravens as though they were kith, having a fling, now and then, with an agate or freshwater fish Read More
The Observances of Kate Miller’s debut collection are more than observations, more than watchfulness; they are imbued with an appreciation of ritual, whether human or, in nature, a ritual-like patterning. Such is her acute scrutiny that for much of the time the poet erases herself, willingly passive in a world intensely experienced. The first two Read More