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
In Hearth, prize-winning poets Sarah James and Angela Topping have co-created an engaging sequence of “poetry duets”; paired poems that echo and spar, diverge and re-convene in that common ground of home, hearth and memory. Only the first and last poems are collaborative; the others retain each poet’s highly individual voice, yet harmonise effortlessly. The Read More
Byssus – strong, tenaciously anchoring; the mussel’s beard, all delicate multiple fibres, with the capacity to be woven into highly desirable cloth. Jen Hadfield’s title for her first collection since the Eliot-winning Nigh-No-Place is a near-perfect metaphor for her attachment to her adopted Shetland, and for that land’s own bedrock hold. Byssus challenges with its Read More
Oh Heart of the Web, Heart of Bracken, give me the strength to persevere. (“Walking the Wood”) For a reader who loves the mystery and fairy-tale quality of wild forest lands, the nature of Anna Robinson’s second collection, Into the Woods, is pure food for the creative soul. Set in imaginary woodlands in Read More
Peter Riley’s 18th poetry publication, Due North, is a poem of twelve chapters that builds a larger story with roots deeply imbued in movement. Whether it be a search for work or finding inner happiness, the poet is concerned with the restless nature of the human mind and the displacement of those who wander without Read More
“My body is a series of bodies: / now & before” writes Matthew Siegel, in “The electric body”, and there is perhaps no better way to introduce Blood Work. His collection addresses themes of the physical self primarily, dealing with illness (hospital visits, and relationships), but also features occasional portraits of a broken family. For Read More
Back cover blurbs may be accurate but they can also be misleading. Loop of Jade is described as an exploration “of a dual heritage” – Chinese and British – a “journeying back… in search of her roots”. My heart sank a little. Without diminishing the importance of such endeavours, the intervening three decades of identity Read More