The Guardian Art Critic, Adrian Searle, wrote that there are many artists, “who, furrowing their brows and trying to convince us of their seriousness, aren’t half as profound or compelling.” He was referring to Turner Prize 2013 Nominee David Shrigley, but he might equally have been speaking about Selima Hill, whose latest work, Jutland includes Read More
If you keep up with magazines such as 3:AM, Under the Radar, Hearing Voices or Tears in the Fence, you may be familiar with many of Melissa Lee-Houghton’s poems in Beautiful Girls. Previously recognised in the Lupus UK Competition as well as by The New Writer Collection, Beautiful Girls is now listed as a Poetry Read More
A Bird is Not a Stone is thought provoking, honest and often deeply uncomfortable. This collection was written by twenty-five of the foremost Palestinian literary voices, four of them women, perhaps a reflection of gender-based disparity existing within the country. Since the Israeli occupation, which began in 1967, Palestine is a nation besieged. The erratic construction of barriers Read More
The human body is constantly changing. Capable of being strong, developing healthily through adolescence, for example, it can also weaken through illness or injury. In One Still Thing, Nell Regan’s latest poetry collection, the fluctuating fortunes of the human body is presented through the weather and different elements. These changes (from solid to water to Read More
Stuart Paterson is an Ayrshire-born poet writing in both English and Scots. Border Lines is his third collection, its twenty-four poems focusing on Dumfries & Galloway’s landscape and people. Beginning with a manifesto of sorts; “High Tide at Sandyhills” sees the world open up beyond the Galloway coastline, but ultimately the poet is unable or Read More
Small Consolations, is Gary Glauber’s first collection. Divided into four sections “Occupations”, “Explorations”, “Situations” and “Infatuations”, this meaty volume appears not only dense in format on the page, but also uniformly dense in thought, image and rhythm. The titles of the sections themselves reflect the degree to which Glauber uses alliteration, assonance and rhyme to Read More
Lucy Newlyn’s latest poetry collection is, as she puts it in “Not Ours”, “scholar quiet, cerebral”. Earth’s Almanac is a journey both through the seasons and through grief, attempting to find “a grammar of loss – a way of grasping / the shape and structure of desolation” (“Wreck”). The poems cohere around the death of Read More
Where am I? – Oh I just stepped out, No need to make a fuss, or shout. No need to comb the nearest wood Or roam about the neighbourhood. Felix Dennis lived a remarkable life, making his fortune from magazines covering advances in the technology sector, before devoting his final fifteen years to poetry. I Read More
Be you a globetrotter or a home-bird, Pia Tafdrup’s words, aptly translated by David McDuff, will grab and carry you across the world and pack you into her own personal recollections. The two collections in Salamander Sun & Other Poems deal with the tension between the poet’s desire for freedom and her deep-rooted familial ties Read More
Jackie Kay’s new collection of poetry The Empathetic Store could only be described as ‘very Kay-ish’ in that her body of work has brought about its own adjective. As a novice to reviewing poetry I felt quite daunted by the plain blue paperback, turning over its front page over to encounter what I assumed would Read More