Love Minus Love is the second collection from Wayne Holloway-Smith. It reads as a continuous, fractured train of thought exploring the poet’s childhood trauma, his relationship with his dad, his mum and mental illness. Sitting on the cover with its hands on its knees is a skeletal robot, the box of its chest burst open. Read More
Daisy Lafarge’s debut collection Life Without Air shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, is the ferment of a busy mind drawing from Louis Pasteur’s process of fermentation. Like the intersecting cells on the jacket, suggestive of their proximity, seven sections explore the complexity of human and ecological co-dependence, The inaugural poem, ‘Meridian Dream’, sits title-less Read More
Written against but within the context of an emerging fortress Europe, the philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote in Of Hospitality that ‘absolute hospitality’ seeks no conditions but ‘requires that I open up my home’ to ‘the foreigner’ and let them arrive and ‘take place in the place I offer them, without asking… either reciprocity (entering into Read More
This collection of 44 Science Fiction poems is a departure from Scots poet J O Morgan’s usual style. His 6 previous poetry publications have been single, book-length poems. Assurances, published in 2018, won the Costa Poetry Award and his previous collections have been nominated for major awards. His poetry tends towards physics and metaphysics; its Read More
Did I say I was never a victim? […] I helped him with good grace and inside I knew every complication I learned to lie and it was barefaced on my lies they built a civilisation (‘Odysseus welcomed from the sea by Nausicaa’) Poet, and significantly translator, Sasha Dugdale’s fourth collection, Deformations, takes two important, Read More
My sharp little knife Black blooms oxidised on the blade Iron tang singing on my tongue Slitting through skin to spilled insides (‘Anaemia’) That uncompromising, but ambiguous, title primes the reader perfectly for Natalie Shaw’s debut collection. Here, I have to make a disclosure that I have met some of these poems already, sometimes at Read More
It is not the question of How the Hell are You, but rather the question of who the hell were we (‘How The Hell Are You.’) that encapsulates Glyn Maxwell’s most recent poetry collection of the same title. Maxwell has won many awards for his poetry and has been previously shortlisted twice for the TS Read More
Casket Andy Brown Shearsman (2019); pbk: £6.50 Below This Level Kevin Corcoran Shearsman (2019); pbk: £6.50 Lake Effect Tim Craven Tapsalteerie (2019); pbk: £5 Three excellent pamphlets, produced by courageous independent publishers, and it’s fair to say there are crossing references, though I will treat them alphabetically. Nonetheless, the booklets are very different creatures. However, Read More
‘The words […] a line of curses, promises, demands, wishes, intoxicants and offerings […] sets all the prayers in the house to glint.’ (From ‘Vespers’, All The Prayers In The House, Miriam Nash). Having grown up in the Catholic faith, courted by pictures and other icons of the tradition (usually from a shrine shop in Read More
Tiger Girl is Pascale Petit’s eighth collection. Her previous works include Mama Amazonica which has won, among others, the Ondaatje Prize. This is a rare win for a woman, and for a poet too since the prize is usually awarded to travel writers. But when it comes to Petit’s work, this honour makes sense. Reading Read More