Willis Barnstone is an American poet, who is also known as a translator. His work draws on multiple languages and references, both to the works of other poets and also to philosophical theories, all undertaken in a rigorously intellectual manner. Barnstone believes that much of our western modern culture is rooted in Greek philosophy. Yet, Read More
The StAnza lecture is one the mainstays of Scotland’s International Poetry Festival with past luminaries such as Glyn Maxwell, Michael Schmidt, Gillian Clarke and Neil Astley holding forth. It is a tricky juggling act to get right because the lecture is heard by aspiring poets, established poets, academics and poetry readers, as well as folk Read More
Ageing is something we all experience and, as a society, to some degree fear. This fear is manifested in the selling of “anti-ageing products” – a market worth extortionate amounts of money that claims to reverse the outward signs of this process and, at its most extreme, even to outsmart life itself. The candid collection Read More
A creative project such as VERSschmuggel, of which this book is the offspring, is a remarkable thing. Funded by Literaturwerkstatt Berlin for the 2014 Berlin Poetry Festival, four Scottish and two Scotland-based poets spent time in Berlin with six German counterparts. With considerable assistance from translators, they paired to transform each other’s work into an Read More
Fresh from his win in the Edinburgh Fringe Slam Poetry final in 2015, Scott Tyrell’s momentum shows little signs of halting any time soon. The poet’s recent collection of poems, Grown Up, can only be described as a comedic satire on domestic life, follows the poet’s personal progression from cynical lost soul to grounded family Read More
Deeply embedded in its time, Lift, Harry Man’s first poetry collection, offers insight into how growing up in the late 20th Century, amidst rapid technological advancement and ground-breaking scientific research (especially in the domain of space exploration), might have oriented and shaped one’s personal experience of the world. His poems, imbued with a communicative and Read More
Russell Jones’s collection, The Green Dress Whose Girl is Sleeping is much about the serendipitous little moments in life as it is about the huge losses. His constantly changing style enables this; he moves from haiku to couplets in the same way his poems move from quiet moments outside chip shops to moments of contemplation Read More
A Hatfield Mass is, in the main, a sequence of ekphrastic poems written after Martyn Crucefix’s visit to a Henry Moore sculpture exhibition in Hatfield House, Hertfordshire (Crucefix has assured many interviewers that this is, in fact, his real name). Crucefix’s sixth published poetry collection is thus structured: six poems inspired by six Moore sculptures, Read More
“For all flesh is as grass”. With this biblical epigraph from Brahm’s Ein deutsches Requiem, Sarah Holland-Batt declares what is at the heart of her most recent poetry collection: nature. Holland-Batt is an Australian poet whose first book of poetry Aria, published in 2008, won multiple awards, among them being the Judith Wright Prize. The Read More
As a North Walian, I picked this slim volume of poems, drawn to the name “Llanberis” on page eight. I hoped there would be more poems about North Wales. There aren’t any poems about North Wales but that doesn’t matter. Selina Nwulu well deserves to be the young poet laureate for London, where she now Read More