Caleb Femi (Penguin Poetry, 2020); pbk £9.99 The North Peckham Estate, where Caleb Femi’s Forward shortlisted debut collection is set, is infamous for containing the stairwell in which Damilola Taylor died. And yes, death stalks these pages, those streets, as do rage and despair… but so too do love, imagination, defiance. Here is a voice Read More
How does one cope with the enormity of losing all four siblings to cancer? In the preface to Carol A Caffrey’s poignant debut collection, The Untethered Space, she writes, ‘I turned to poetry […] to exhale the heavy burden of grief that weighed on me’. She goes on to extend an invitation, ‘pull up a chair and join me at the table.’ We accept, tentatively, in an expectation that is sure to tether reader and poet as we explore the meaning of grief in all of its guises.
Holly Pester’s first collection Comic Timing proves to be a very thought-provoking volume and highly deserving of its shortlisting for the Forward Prize’s Best First Collection (2021). Pester creates a deeply personal yet political collection as she weaves between the two to gain a sense of self.
Alice Hiller’s potent debut collection, bird of winter, commands respect and reverence. Composure is required to absorb this essential and courageously intimate exploration of sexual abuse.
Ezra Pound suggested that poets ‘go in fear of abstractions’, and his advice continues to hold much weight. Like any principle of course, not only will excellent exceptions keep occurring, but it deserves to be held to account. Pound would have expected no less. In her second full collection Tripping Over Clouds, Lucy Burnett does exactly that, and ‘underpinning this is a re-imagining of abstraction as a prior state of possibility and potential from which the world and ourselves are constantly re-emerging – as abstraction to, not from.’
Face to face conversation has been a rarity this past year, and sadly my time spent getting to know author and poet Oliver K. Langmead was no exception. He agrees, ‘I feel as if I’m spending half my life in Zoom meetings, or typing away in a Word document – staring at the same screen Read More
A poet dazzling enough to be commemorated with a minor planet and a ship in her honour, Marina Tsvetaeva is a crown jewel in Russian literature. Christopher Whyte’s translation of her early poems from 1913 to 1915 does an admirable job of bringing her legacy into the twenty-first century.
Shining through the darkness of our contemporary moment comes Living Weapon, a compositional tour de force that sings to our anxieties of the present. Covering everything from the pandemic to technology and black lives matter, this slim collection belongs to the increasingly popular form of civic poetry.
The Wreck of the Fathership is the seventh poetry collection from W.N. Herbert. Herbert was Dundee’s inaugural Makar from 2013-2018. This collection has its roots firmly in Dundee, but calls upon themes, techniques and artists the world over, and overflows with hidden meanings and metaphysics. Herbert’s Fathership is an outpouring of emotion, especially of grief that threatens to drown the reader but steered by such poetic genius that no such disaster occurs. The turbulent contents are handled tightly, deftly.
Brian Johnstone is far too well-known a figure in the Scottish poetry scene to require any potted biography here. That said, which Brian Johnstone will you meet in The Marks on the Map, his most recent collection?