Sheri Benning’s first full poetry collection consists of previous publications with several new pieces. Her new title, The Season’s Vagrant Light, is a beautiful and sensuous collection, addressing interpersonal relationships, place and memory and showcases Benning’s growth as a poet. Benning’s ability to conjure vivid and beautiful images from the seemingly ordinary or mundane infuses Read More
Those April Fevers is the perfect fit for anyone looking for a collection of diverse poems that is far from conventional poetry associated with continuous meter and schematic rhymes. Mary O’Donnell produces exquisite, elegant and colourful poems, open to any field or subject. This expansiveness is also represented in her approach to genres: not only Read More
Ron Silliman is an American poet with a distinctive voice and an extensive publishing history in poetry. Taken as a whole, however, his is a relatively meagre canon; he views his work as essentially consisting of several long poems spread over a large number of collections stemming back to the 1970s but which should be Read More
This collection of Cornish poet Jack Clemo’s work consolidates poetry from all his published volumes in the first major poetry publication since his death over twenty years ago. These Selected Poems, edited by Luke Thompson, are designed to reinstate Clemo as a celebrated national poet. With this resurgence of interest in Clemo, it is important Read More
Increasingly, the passive voice in poetry tends to receive bad press. Some particularly ferocious critics are keen to strike out its very existence in verse. Like most polemics, the rhetoric contains truths and interesting pointers to alert the unwary. Also like most polemics, we might not always want to take such an extreme line. What Read More
Homer’s epic has always prompted strong responses ever since its first appearance during Greece’s archaic period. Poets and playwrights ransacked it for stories in the later centuries BCE (Before the Common Era). The process continued through the European Middle Ages and the Renaissance, on through the various literary Augustan, Romantic, Victorian and Modernist periods, and Read More
Having studied Creative writing at Keele University, North Londoner Deborah Alma taught poetry. At the same time, based in a 1970s ambulance, she was also operating as an “Emergency Poet”, which involved working primarily with people reaching the end of their lives and with individuals suffering from dementia. Alma’s 2015 debut pamphlet True Tales of Read More
Everybody deserves recognition for their creative achievements, unshadowed by backstories and illustrious family comparisons. Rightly, this courageous painter-poet has long been outspoken, criticising those choosing to play with her biography to suit their own ends. The press release is wisely oblique on this aspect. I turned away from the room’s elephant. Frieda Hughes is probably Read More
Christopher Reid is a big tease. The titles of all 73 poems in his latest collection, The Curiosities, begin with the letter “C”. There’s a wide range of subjects covered between The Contents and The Credits but you won’t actually find THAT c-word in amongst “The Calabash”, “The Collarbone”, “The Celibate”, “The Canoodling”, “The Cufflinks” Read More
The possessing of multiple selves is a theme regularly explored in both psychology and in literature. For the most part, the issue has been treated formally; however this is not the case in Me, Me and Not Me by Tony Frisby. It is a text that, despite its important subject matter, still manages to retain Read More