Indisputably, Emily Dickinson’s “Tell it Slant” works, but does her entreatment apply solely to poets? In Rego Retold Owen Lowery has rightly termed his collection “Poems in Response” (my italics). Ekphrastic poetry has many detractors; done badly there is reason for critical disquiet. If we are all in some way telling it slant then any Read More
Do you remember when you were learning to read and it was both difficult and exciting to mouth the next word? Then there’s the thrill of recognition. The simple rhyming title of Vahni Capildeo’s chapbook seas and trees – presented in lowercase sans serif typeface – may take the reader back to those days. One Read More
Sara Hirsch’s debut is a photo album of memories described by a woman not trying to be anyone other than herself. Still Falling is a collection of both rare and everyday encounters which are often shocking, and always personal. The title itself suggests a continuation of mistake making and learning, rather than a Wonder Woman Read More
Imagine the poet as a sandwich-board man, with his daily routine of spreading the word. Dennis O’Driscoll was such a poet – plain-speaking, astute, wary of ornament – his poetry pronounces ‘every day’ on the board at the front, and ‘death’ at the back, as he walks away. Born in Tipperary, on New Year’s Day Read More
The children will play with the Sea they will learn addition from the corpses piled on the sidewalks subtraction from decapitated trees[.] Such wounds, remembered even after the page turns and the book ends up on the shelf, are so common in Khoury-Ghata’s work that they shape their own reality, giving the readers a new Read More
Has David Morley really “cast off the worlds of myth and magical fable” as the back blurb of this collection suggests? His shape-shifting, shift-shaping Romani folk tales are what has made his work so wonderfully distinctive so far. He won the 2015 Ted Hughes Award for The Invisible Gift, his Selected Poems. Is this collection Read More
Good poetry, as Robert Crawford said about John Ashbery’s word craft, “levitates language” from the page. As I read and re-read Miriam Nash’s first book-length collection of poetry, All the Prayers in the House, I am struck with a similar leavening in the composition of the poems as prayers and reading them aloud as “PRAY-ers”. Read More
When he was eighteen years of age, John Greening queued at the British Museum to see the 1972 exhibition of relics from the tomb of Tutankhamun. He describes seeing his own youthful, “golden” face reflected in the museum glass cases as his “coming of age exhibition” (“The Treasures of Tutankhamun”). Part of his entrance fee Read More
This new collection of poetry, from Suffolk-based writer Semmens, takes as its title a quote from Joseph Stalin, dated 1938. The Soviet leader’s reflection, and the volume itself, look backwards over the “purges” – the waves of political assassinations and executions that were implemented twenty years after the Russian Revolution. This historical resonances of the Read More
[…] Dear wall, dear gate, dear stile, dear Dutch door, not a cat-flap nor a swinging door but a one-time piñata. […] Entering any body of work via an “Ode to the Hymen” announces, with undeniable chutzpah, that things are about to change; really, there’s no going back. Sharon Olds’ most recent collection Odes Read More