Poetry

A Career in Accompaniment

What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices? Robert Hayden, “Those winter Sundays”. Northumbrian poet Alex Reed’s debut pamphlet is weighted by his former professional and academic capacities in family therapy, and more gravely by his personal experience of caring for his partner Jan who has multiple sclerosis. The severity Read More

Laurna Robertson

Laurna Robertson’s fourth publication, Praise Song, celebrates Shetland, the place of her birth and childhood, and reflects aspects of her early years there in poetic memoir. The pamphlet opens with “North”, in which Robertson sets out the experience of leaving home and family to live in unfamiliar and unsettling surroundings, only to return: your place Read More

Come to Me

“Ergo bibamus, my prince, we stole an entire country like one empty heart.” Latvian poet, Kārlis Vērdiņš (born in 1979) has already been anthologised in Arc’s Six Latvian Poets (2011, also translated by Ieva Lešinska) but with four full poetry collections, a career encompassing criticism, translation, song lyrics, libretti and more, he is both versatile Read More