‘All I’ve ever done with my life is follow the average course’ (The Starling) How bold of Paul Farley to open his recent poetry collection, The Mizzy, with such a provocative admission to have followed the ordinary or ‘average course’? Yet, Farley is anything but average or conventional, and throughout this latest collection, the profound Read More
Arias is American poet Sharon Olds’ twelfth poetry collection. Her 2012 collection, Stag’s Leap, which focuses on the break-up of her thirty-year marriage, won the Pulitzer Prize and the TS Eliot Prize. To say that Olds’ poetry is personal would be an understatement. It is intimately personal, corporeal, visceral, but also somehow transcendent. Her work Read More
This is Canadian-born Karen Solie’s fifth full collection and it is a strange and wonderful read, taking two outwardly unappealing themes of loneliness and indecision and exploring them fully through the eyes of the seventh-century Scottish saint St Ethernan. The titular ‘Caiplie Caves’ were the dwelling place of said saint on the sleepy Fife coast, Read More
The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes was written in the three months following Lieke Marsman’s diagnosis of a rare form of bone cancer at the age of twenty-seven. But there is nothing hasty or superficial about this slim volume which comprises poetry, letters from Marsman’s friend and translator, the poet Sophie Collin, and an Read More
‘When l look back now at that time, six months after my husband died, I barely inhabited myself. I was as ghostly as the ghosts I never encountered. I had left, as he died, something of my own body behind.’ (‘Fires’) In this, her fifth collection, Deryn Rees-Jones has much to ask of the muse Read More
It would be easiest to describe Anthony Anaxagorou’s debut collection, After the Formalities, as one that deals with Big Issues. Racism, immigration, and trauma all feature large here. Add to this, as per the publisher’s blurb, ‘tracking the male body’, ‘the threat of violence’, and ‘global histories’. These are all appropriate things to write about, Read More
Manuel Rivas’ latest collection of poetry The Mouth of The Earth touches on themes familiar to his previous fiction, poetry and journalism: nature, historical memory, invisibility and necessary attention. In The Mouth of The Earth, it is the economic use of language that initially impresses. Witness the expanse of the three lines that open ‘The Read More
Blue Pearl is a gift to readers who, like me, are fascinated by wild places. These poems do not, however, offer easy representations of frozen wastes as unexplored purity. They are populated with life and stories waiting patiently for those who are prepared to dig for them. Lesley Harrison is a Scottish poet whose work Read More
City of Departures represents departures from home, touching down in a number of European cities, but it also represents a departure from reality, diving deep into an uncanny, dream landscape. That landscape is urban, but it is not to be found in the busy carriageways and shopping centres, nor the packed pubs and restaurants and travel Read More
Isabel Galleymore’s first full collection begins with an epigraph from Donna Haraway drawing attention to a planetary ecology where different species share developmental trajectories and living spaces; these are ‘companion species’ that are nevertheless distinct and irreducible one to another. The challenge in Significant Other is to avow species strangeness without estrangement. Not to exoticize Read More