The epigraph for Eavan Boland’s latest collection is taken from Virginia Woolf’s essay, Three Guineas – “The outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country.’” Boland might herself be, “a woman without a country”, given her peripatetic life, dividing her time between Dublin and California where she is Director of the Read More
Philip Gross’s Later follows his much praised collection Deep Field, and the T.S. Eliot prize-winning The Water Table. Largely inspired by the difficult final years he spent alongside his father, this collection moves through the complex traumas of the failing body, and the creeping uncertainty of the mourning process, towards a tentative interaction with the Read More
Forms of Protest is, at first read, quite a bizarre piece of work. However, amongst Hannah Silva’s strange and unconventional writing there is a wealth of inventive and interesting content. Silva’s background in music, including playing the recorder and her experience in theatre, sees her work with sounds and rhetoric in interesting ways. The collection Read More
The Only Reason for Time, Fiona Moore’s particularly courageous debut, takes the reader through a very honest and insightful depiction of the poet’s agonizing struggle following the death of her beloved husband. Written days after his death, the opening poem “Postcard” marks the early stages of her grief. Thought-provoking comparisons of both colours and textures Read More
Nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature nine times, awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in May 1977 and deemed by French poet Louis Aragon “the greatest poet of our age”, Yiannis Ritsos is rightly considered amongst the greatest Greek poets of the twentieth century. Given this great stature then, it is perhaps surprising – and Read More
Translating poetry is a creative enterprise and, for many, a labour of love. How, then, are we to assess the translated poem? No doubt there is no easy answer to that question, but at least bilingual editions such as this one open up different possibilities. Those with some knowledge of the original language can enjoy Read More
John Berger is a poet, Art critic, playwright and general European polymath. Collected Poems brings together nearly 60 years of work in one English language volume. Enhancing the start of each discrete section are beautiful, understated monotypes by his son, Yves Berger. The volume examines history, emigration, place and love; collectively it contemplates the impact Read More
George Mpanga, aka George The poet, is a street savvy Cambridge-educated 23 year old from North West London. His debut collection, Search Party, espouses a blend of spoken word and rap which explores life in the capital’s inner city housing estates, of which he also has much experience. Arguably, not since Gil Scot Heron has Read More
“We didn’t stand a chance, my siblings and I, when it came to loving tea.” Having dazzled the poetry world with her 2009 debut collection, Furniture (shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize), Lorraine Mariner has returned with an array of diverse and insightful poems Read More
While the idea of a post-humanist age is a recent concept, the relationship between the human and the natural world that emphasises the enormity, endurance and the significance of the latter isn’t. In Continental Drift, Nancy Gaffield explores the finite and the infinite, with humans beings in the former category and land belonging to the Read More