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

Improptus: Selected Poems

I have often asked myself and never found an answer Whence kindness and gentleness come, I don’t know it to this day, and now must go myself. (“People Met”) Before the carnage of Benn’s early poetry, Michael Hofmann offers an insightful, engaging, funny and enjoyable introduction into Gottfried Benn’s life and extraordinary career. He describes Read More

Fools & Mad

A midnight court during which only men are invited to speak is where the reader of John O’Donoghue’s Fools & Mad finds herself at this epic poem’s finale. Yet these are no ordinary men, but a jury of twelve poets hand-picked by Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift from Ireland’s literary history. They have been gathered here Read More

Happiness

If the reader seeks hearts and flowers in the sunnily-named Happiness, they are to be found, albeit pumping viscerally or severed in vases. Jack Underwood questions how we experience, understand, appreciate and attempt to capture that sometimes elusive state. In something of a Ying/Yang complement he explores whether happiness is possible without its shadow boxer. Read More