[…] 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
As its title suggests, Jacqueline Saphra’s latest collection, All My Mad Mothers, is about women and family. Saphra’s poems examine the multifaceted nature of femininity, individual and universal, moving within, between and beyond the roles designated to women. This applies particularly to familial roles she inhabits – mother, daughter, stepdaughter – but also examined is Read More
Ten minutes ago, I wrote these words. Ten minutes; now I think I think them. They knew me first, I fear, another me went first and thought them. Roddy Lumsden’s tenth collection, So Glad I’m Me, has a misleading title; in fact, one of the major themes of the collection questions the very nature of Read More
This poetry collection is Douglas Dunn’s first since 2001. Since then he has focused on editing poetry anthologies; The Noise of a Fly is an innovative return to form. Here we find work by a mature poet, sometimes painfully self-aware. As ever, Dunn casts new light on diverse subjects, whether environmental or cultural. Douglas Dunn Read More
Lancashire-born Michael Symmons Roberts is a poet whose time has clearly come, confirmed by a string of recent awards, most notably for his 2013 collection Drysalter which garnered both the Forward and Costa awards. As an ex-pat Mancunian, I was especially looking forward to reading his latest collection, a thrillingly dark tour of my home Read More
According to the cover in this, Leontia Flynn’s fourth collection, the poet explores and “resolves the concerns and forms” raised in earlier work, suggesting that the central sequence considers “the constructed (my italics) nature of childhood”. This it does, but elsewhere too there is a pervasive and chafing sense of the constrictions associated with childhood Read More
The poems in this, Bird’s fifth collection, explode on the page, bristling with a vision of sanity within madness, order within chaos. She has the ability to describe a tortured soul in a twenty-first century manner, bringing humour, contemporary idiom and irony into the work. The poems often sound like the poet is coming down Read More
The very act of opening The Abandoned Settlements is pleasurable. With its tactile, foldback cover and ink-blue end papers, as an object, this book is beautiful. The cover photograph – an aged light switch on a wall of peeling turquoise paint – foreshadows the textures and layers within the poems themselves. The first poem, “Line Read More
This is John Latham’s sixth collection of poems; it is bold, bracing and comforting. Latham is an award-winning poet, an eminent physicist and a research scientist who has studied meteorology and cloud formation for over forty years. The title poem won second prize in the UK’s 2006 National Poetry competition and it offers the first Read More
The Paths of Survival, Josephine Balmer’s third collection of poetry, is a captivating read. Balmer has used her background in translation and ancient history to create a series of addictive poetic narratives exploring Aeschylus’ infamous Greek tragedy, Myrmidons. I must admit, prior to reading this collection, I had never heard of the playwright Aeschylus or Read More