Seeing the soft cover of Locust and Marlin, it was difficult not to grab the thin book from the proffered selection. There’s something magical about the marlin disappearing in the waves while the heron stands quietly on the back in an image which stretches across both covers. Certainly, it’s a scene familiar to me, my Read More
Sylvia Plath: Drawings gives an insight into a world of the famed poet perhaps not known to many as a visual artist. Having suffered from depression for most her life,and having eventually committed suicide aged only 30, she is known best for her confessional poetry, her dark, harsh and even macabre themes. For anyone who Read More
Sandeep Parmar is one of the most exciting emerging voices in British poetry. As a scholar, she is known primarily for her work on the modernist poet Hope Mirrlees; as a poet forging her own voice, she is known for the 2012 collection The Stone Orchard, and now (and, one hopes, pre-eminently) she is to Read More
In his review of Pluto for Stride Magazine, Andy Brown is overtly critical of Glyn Maxwell’s “highly repetitious deployment of forms of ‘parallelisms’”, both synonymous and antithetic. That this style recurs throughout the collection cannot be denied. The first stanza of the opening poem, “Byelaws”, epitomises this technique: Never have met me, know me well, Read More
There is a feeling that had Seamus Heaney entered any Dublin pub everyone would have known him, whereas Ted Hughes would have passed unnoticed in a London bar. Paul Durcan sits very near Heaney’s right hand in Irish affections, which may come as some surprise on this side of the water. Certainly, my first reading Read More
I have been reading Debasish Lahiri’s’s poetry over the past few years. He has sent me his poems in a steady stream from Kolkata where he lives and writes, and from his various journeys both East and West and I have been struck by their many-layered intensity. It is therefore a pleasure to see his Read More
“I’ve said on many occasions that if a poem, once written, is exactly the same as its author first imagined it would be, then it is almost certainly a failure, and that artistic success must always involve a process of transformation.” This is Simon Armitage reflecting on the “almost electrically bright” Snow Stone poem’s lettering Read More
Carolyn Forché’s single-authored 2003 collection, Blue Hour, is reviewed here in advance of her appearance at the StAnza 2015 International Poetry Festival. The eleven poems which make up the collection contemplate remembrance, the transition between life and death, and the effects of war. Above all, it seems to me that Forché is concerned to present Read More
Shetland native and Edinburgh Makar (appointed May 2014) Christine de Luca’s most recent collection poses, and obliquely answers, many questions so well. If a pamphlet might be termed a chapbook (originally cheapbook), then only in terms of the price, it might be that. However, from its elegant dull yellow jacket, its buff endpapers and Gerry Read More
Ahren Warner’s first two collections, Confer and Pretty, may have simple titles but inside the covers you’ll find poems teeming with conceptual and linguistic complexities. Both books demand the reader’s full participation – I found myself conferring not only with Warner’s explanatory endnotes but also with Google to find translations of French and Greek words, Read More