Poetry

Night Sky with Exit Wounds (SHORTLISTED, 2017 TS ELIOT POETRY PRIZE; WINNER, 2017 FORWARD POETRY PRIZE FOR BEST DEBUT COLLECTION)

There is a tradition of photography that focuses on urban poverty, decay, disintegration, and entropy; in “urbex”, crumbling, abandoned buildings are transformed into hauntingly and fashionably beautiful images. I couldn’t help but bristle at the title of Ocean Vuong’s newly Forward Prize crowned and now TS Eliot Prize shorlister, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Is Read More

Raking Light (SHORTLISTED, 2017 FORWARD POETRY PRIZE FOR BEST DEBUT COLLECTION)

Sure, there is a kernel of some mattered thing in here and understood if only you can eat it and make it matter much. ({{du|he|tao}}) Eric Langley works as a lecturer at UCL, specialising in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature. Although he has had previous publications Read More

Make Us All Islands (SHORTLISTED, 2017 FORWARD POETRY PRIZE FOR BEST DEBUT COLLECTION)

Trinidadian poet Richard Georges dispels the myth of the Caribbean as a modern-day paradise in his debut collection by invoking the ghosts and shipwrecks of his native islands in a sequence of darkly foreboding poems. The opening poem “Griot” sets the tone with its description of the voyage of the enslaved Abednego across the Atlantic Read More

Angel Hill

Michael Longley has been the recipient of some of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world, including the Whitbread, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and most recently the 2017 PEN Pinter Prize. Longley calls his home in Carrigskeewaun, Co Mayo his ‘soul-landscape’; the environment that feeds and inspires his soul. In Angel Read More

Psalmody (Shortlisted, 2017 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Debut Collection)

I cannot help but question: Does he know the Lord? … So what’s his life about? I want to know. “8” It seems misrepresentative to call this prize-winning début a “collection”. The word implies that each item within has distinctive merit to be effective in its own right. In the case of Apichella’s work, it Read More

FOURTH PERSON SINGULAR (SHORTLISTED, 2017 FORWARD POETRY PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION)

At the intersection of poetry, philosophy, and psychoanalysis lies Nuar Alsadir’s Fourth Person Singular. The title is a play on words. If to speak in the third person is to speak removed from the situation, the proposed fourth expands on this separation This manifests in the dreamy detachment and self-reflective awareness that underlines the collection. Teetering in Read More

The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (Shortlisted, 2017 TS Eliot Poetry Prize for Best Collection)

This is Tara Bergin’s second poetry collection; her first, published in 2013, This is Yarrow, won the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Shine/Strong Award so it comes as no surprise that The Tragic Death of Eleonore Marx should excite much interest. Deservedly so, this is a collection from a unique poetic voice. Playful, dreamlike, with Read More

Stranger, Baby (Shortlisted, 2017 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection)

“The loss of a mother must be something very strange…”. This epigraph from Sigmund Freud sets the scene for Emily Berry’s superb second collection, Stranger, Baby, which concerns the sense of dislocation, “dismantlement” and alterity brought about by intense grief. The suicide of her mother left the narrator/Berry all at sea from the age of Read More

Kingdom of Gravity (Shortlisted, 2017 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Debut Collection)

Such men rise in the ranks and can only be removed by death or revolt … (“Candidate A”) In the 1970s, before the advent of our daily intake of internet reporting, the name Idi Amin Dada evoked a vague sense of horror too distant for the details of his reign of terror to be clear. Read More

On Balance (Shortlisted, 2017 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection)

Time, which is itself encased in stunning script: Baikal poured into a single shell or glass receptacle. Belfast folk aver there was nothing wrong with the Titanic when she left their slipway. As that city’s inaugural laureate Sinéad Morrissey arrives in Newcastle, her most recent collection On Balance opens by contemplating the fated liner’s Read More