K Patrick (Granta Poetry, 2024); pbk: £12.99 Scottish writer K Patrick is having a moment. Their debut novel, Mrs S (4th Estate, 2023) earned them a place on the Observer Best Debut Novelists list as well as the Granta best Young British Novelists in 2023. 2024 sees their debut poetry collection come hot on its heels Read More
Clare Best (Waterloo Press, 2019); pbk: £12 In her own life, Clare Best has packed in more challenging experiences than she might have chosen to invite. Welcomed or not, she has faced her trials with extraordinary courage and an important creative verve. Most famously, her approach to her ‘experience of family breast cancer and risk-reducing surgery’ Read More
Liam Guilar(Shearsman Books, 2023); pbk £14.95 History is a record of brutalitytempered by outbursts of idealism (‘Maxim 1’) Liam Guilar’s A Man of Heart transforms historical record into contemporary poetry, unearthing narratives of 5th-century Britain by blending reimagination with realism. His compelling sequel to A Presentment of Englishry continues his poetic retelling of the Read More
Sarah James(Verve Poetry Press, 2022); pbk, £10.99 Thoughtful and haunted, Sarah James’s recent poetry collection, Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic was shortlisted for the International Rubery Book Award 2023. It is a playful, biting, and introspective look at life with type one diabetes. James’ skilfully employs both conventional and experimental styles, with page layout and lineation Read More
MacGillivrayBloodaxe (2023)Pbk:£14.99 my real marks…I hide beneath my overcoat, trace the seams of its rough-sewn darts: skins shield, sweats salt, but anatomies of sorrow, only death reveals. (Celestial Metre: Wounded Centaur Hexameter) In July 2022, MacGillivray (‘matrilineal Highland pen-name of writer, artist and musician Kirsten Norrie’) interred family ashes in the clan enclave on Read More
Marjorie Lotfi(Bloodaxe Books, 2023); pbk, £10.99 Majorie Lotfi was born in the United States and moved to Tehran as a child, and then back to her American mother’s hometown of Ohio on the cusp of the Iran Revolution. Currently living in Edinburgh, she seems to have moved around a fair bit. This debut title comes Read More
William Letford(Carcanet, 2023); pbk, £14.99 ‘Now the world’s broken I feel safer being surrounded by people who can put things together’ (‘Starlings’) From Our Own Fire is William Letford’s third poetry collection, following Bevel (2012) and Dirt (2016). He was the winner of the New Writer’s Award from the Scottish Book Trust in 2008. It Read More
Hannah Lavery(Polygon, Birlinn, 2022); pbk. £10.99 As the title suggests, Hannah Lavery’s collection is a triptych possessing multiplicities. The reader is brought along through scenes and sights that could be from the author themselves, or could be anyone, yet which all share in the difficulties, tragedies, and memories that are embroiled in race, class, sexuality Read More
SEKXPHRASTICSJane Goldman(Dostoyevsky Wannabe Originals; 2021). £12.00 With SEKXPHRASTIKS, Jane Goldman delivers a poetry collection that is at once a delight and a difficult undertaking. It is a dizzying whirlwind of feminism, of queer solidarity, of love and grief and fury and tongue twisters. This is a profoundly intertextual collection. To try and cross reference every Read More
Leontia Flynn(Cape Poetry, 2023); pbk, £12. Is an image always a representation of something material that we see on the outside of us, or can it be something that we inhabit internally, providing us with a shape to express something otherwise that isn’t quite so easily realised? In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard suggests Read More