Roger Francis Langley was a Warwickshire-born poet, as well as a close friend and contemporary of avant-gardist J.H.Prynne. Complete Poems is a summation of his writing spanning a relatively short career – from 1994’s Twelve Poems to his final collection The Face of It, published four years before his death in 2011. His poem, Read More
“The poetic moans of this century have been, for the most part, a banal patina of snobbery, vanity and sophistry: we’re in need of a new prosody[…]” (“Letter on Riots and Doubt”) If, like me, you spend too much of your free time skulking around the darker, meme-ier corners of YouTube, you may have encountered Read More
Born in Cambridgeshire to American parents in 1933, Anne Stevenson has over sixteen published collections to date of predominantly lyrical works. Although her early adult years were spent in the United States where she graduated from the University of Michigan and published her first collection, Stevenson later returned to the U.K. to live permanently. She Read More
Ardent angler and Yorkshireman Chris McCully has followed a long and fruitful career in academia both at the University of Manchester and in the Netherlands. Born in Bradford in 1958, he now resides in Colchester where he researches English poetic form and metrics at the University of Essex and publishes in a range of genres Read More
Shadows dart throughout What The Wolf Heard; “skeletons” confirming the collection’s theme: their heads turn slightly in a synchronized intensification and lock on something just out of our vision. Daragh Breen’s poems are crowded with spirits and ghosts, their very ethereal nature characterizing his focus on the almost indefinable. Published in 2016, What The Wolf Read More
Roy Fisher’s latest collection, Slakki: New & Neglected Poems, epitomizes the poet’s struggle to stabilize his “everyday self — a quite presentable, penurious, and apparently unambitious young man” in his poetry. The process of putting together the collection addresses the creation of a poetic identity, the representation of Fisher the writer. Fisher’s collection is a Read More
The subtitle for Robert Macfarlane’s Orphans is, intriguingly, “Poems borrowed by Martin Johnson.” The collection started life as a public challenge to writer Robert Macfarlane to “release the poetry that lay undiscovered in his prose.” When Macfarlane declined the task, Johnson took it on. The back cover offers a precedent for Johnson’s proposal: “Edward Thomas, Read More
her black door like an omen […] As the title implies, Buried Music resonates with losses, being filled with many kinds of grief. The collection addresses bereavement (especially that of his father) principally, but also it considers the poet’s own challenged and diminishing health. For all that, Buried Music mines the quirkiness of Read More
What strikes you immediately with Greetings from Grandpa is Jack Mapanje’s voice. The poems have a directness, as if the poet is speaking straight to the reader, plainly and conversationally. Poet and reader in the same room. Mapanje is a Malawian poet, linguist and human rights activist who was imprisoned from 1987 to 1991 by Read More
Philip Ruthen’s latest collection, Familial, is published by the Waterloo press. This is his third collection after Jetty View Holding and Apple Eye Feat. Familial explores a multitude of landscapes, both psychological and physical. The poems articulate strange realities, whether it is the voices of inmates of psychiatric hospitals (“Prelude (Cluster)”), the “curiously satisfied distress” Read More