Claire McLaughlin (Survivor’s Press, 2014); pbk, £10 In this her first collection, Claire McLaughlin penetrates the “misty blankness” of vision emerging into the vivid, sensory realm of memory. Blinded by a degenerative retina disease, her poems demonstrate the importance of memory when living without vision. McLaughlin’s account is so intense in its imagery, so arousing Read More
You sink in wheat. Slowly. And the more you struggle the worse it gets. So warns the title poem of John Kinsella’s recent selected works. Children “on every farm” across Australia have been issued this warning, alert even “in the midst of play” to the “acrid / chemical smell / of treated wheat”, and the Read More
Eeva Kilpi (translated by Donald Adamson) (Arc Publications, 2014); pbk, £9.99 Eeva Kilpi has herself remarked that her works have three main themes: the evacuation from Karelia where she was born, relationships and nature. These themes are prominent in A Landscape Blossoms Within Me, which consists of 70 poems chronologically arranged and meticulously translated from Read More
Jan Wagner, translated by Iain Galbraith (Arc Publications, 2015); pbk, £10.99 In his introduction to this collection, Iain Galbraith notes that “a poem, we might hazard, is a highly sophisticated instrument for the measurement of, and ingress to, the real in all its dimensions.” This maxim exudes aptness, especially when applied to the wonderful variety Read More
Ron Carey (Revival Press, 2015); pbk:£10 The emotions, imagination and images which characterise Ron Carey’s first collection, Distance – a work brimful of metaphor and personification, deeply rooted in his Irish background – owe as much to Dylan Thomas as to Heaney, Kavanagh and Yeats. All have their place in this long poetic journey back Read More
Choman Hardi (Bloodaxe Books, 2015); pbk, £9.95 This is the second poetry collection by Kurdish poet, Choman Hardi. Born in Sulaimani, Iraq, Hardi moved to the UK with her family as asylum seekers after the genocide of Iraqi Kurds in 1988 when 100,000 civilians were killed. She is the daughter of celebrated Kurdish poet, Ahmed Hardi. Read More
It seems self-evident that there are different kinds of poetry but this truism is well worth restating. For readers of the modern lyric whose appeal might lie in the small imagistic fragment, a well-wrought urn of words and music that speaks to a sudden, vital moment of perception as creative renewal (that sudden slant of Read More
There are few poets active today with the wit, warmth and erudition of Ian Duhig. Since his 2003 debut The Lammas Hireling he has assembled a body of work rivalling that of any other poet for sustained colour, insight and invention. His work mixes comedy and tragedy, and his poems often come with a complex Read More
After the success of Denise Riley’s prizewinning elegiac sequence A Part Song, it was with great anticipation that I opened her new collection Say Something Back. As well as being highly regarded as a poet, Riley has also published various academic works of language and Feminist theory. Say Something Back is her first collection since Read More
There are more than seven words for winter in Greenlandic, and when you have read Nancy Campbell’s Disko Bay you’ll know why. The poet has worked as writer in residence for many ecological institutions and over her career has authored many non-fiction books – including How to Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic: An Arctic Read More