Poetry

If your first foray into a multi-award-winning poet’s work is his eleventh published collection, it’s natural that you might approach it with a little bit of trepidation. That, in any case, was my experience. Indeed, a sense of the mysterious and the uncertain never quite left me throughout my reading of Matthew Sweeney’s Inquisition Lane Read More

The Facebook of the Dead

Valerie Laws, in the title pages of this poetry collection, is described as “Poet, crime novelist, performer, playwright, Writer-in Residence at science institutes, sci-art installation specialist, mathematician.” Phew! Like many other writers and artists, Laws clearly has her fingers in many different creative pies; this is very much in evidence in the varied subject matter Read More

Roads to Yair: Some Border Poems

Recipient of the 2014 Scottish Book Trust New Writer Poetry Award, Bridget Khursheed was already known by many on the poetry circuit before the publication of Roads to Yair. Some may argue that her approach to poetry is hardly traditional in that very tradition-aware part of the country, but there is no doubt that her Read More

Pepper Seed

Red peppers and plantain, hibiscus and hummingbirds, saltfish and snapper, kaiso and calypso – all feature in Malika Booker’s debut collection, Pepper Seed, as its narrative slips between Guyana, Grenada, Trinidad and Brixton to tell intertwined personal and political stories. Booker’s writing is at once both searing and beautifully lyrical, the past slipping into the Read More

Listener

Lemn Sissay’s ability to inspire a wide gamut of emotions in his reader makes his last published collection, the 2008 Listener, still a thought-provoking and vivid collection. Comprising of one short essay and 57 free verse poems his is an individual voice which simultaneously evokes pathos, joy, hope and longing. Whatever the topic, and there are Read More

Charms Against Lightning

James Arthur’s collection is elegantly jacketed; an exquisite, somewhat Oriental-looking painting, framed in grey seems to capture the essence of that very lightning. Can we judge this book by its cover? Firstly, that arrestingly beautiful image, La Mer,is by renowned American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell. Perhaps all is not quite what it seems. On the Read More

Model City

Donna Stonecipher’s Model City is an evocative and thought-provoking collection; despite an at times formulaic structure and expression, each poem feels new and progressive. Over the course of seventy-two separate pieces, the collection answers the simple question: “What was it like?”. In spite of being deliberately ambiguous about what the “it” is (perhaps the experience Read More

Rebel Without Applause

Do you ever wonder what was it like for a Black person to live under the iron regime of Margaret Thatcher? Well wonder no more. Grab Lemn Sissay’s Rebel Without Applause and submerge yourself in his free verse, which bears witness to the lives of Black people in Manchester. Born and raised in Britain, Sissay Read More

The Book of Ways

For those, like me, who are unfamiliar with haibun, Colin Will’s The Book of Ways looks initially like dense prose poetry. At the start of the book, however, Will provides an illuminating explanation of the form without prescribing interpretations. The advantages of haibun seem to be its ability to balance conversational, observational and autobiographical prose Read More