Henry Shukman’s Archangel, published just under two years ago, was much anticipated; it was his first collection since the publication of his award-winning debut In Doctor No’s Garden, over a decade ago. The central sequence of this work addresses a captivating piece of little-known history: the story of thousands of Jewish immigrants, tailors, to be Read More
Granta 2012 Poet and visual artist Sean Borodale’s debut collection, Bee Journal rightly earned him an Eliot prize shortlisting and a Guardian Book of the Year accolade. What he terms “poem work” involves making verse in situ – smoked at the opened hive, or note-sticky at the honeyed centrifuge. If most poems may be considered Read More
Steven Reese’s latest collection, American Dervish, as the title suggests, is about people on the move. The collection is divided into three sections, “Dervishes”, “Our Ships”, and “If You Lived Here”. The first sequence of ten Dervish poems is an intense and fascinating characterisation of facets of colonial America. “Dervish”, the opening poem, begins: Our Read More
“Landslides of words, empty wells and a wasteland await”. This one line from Yannis Kondos’s Absurd Athlete perhaps best describes the collection as a whole. “Landslides of words” suggests the intense power and emotional force harnessed in these pages while “empty wells” conjures images of starkness and emptiness, a recurrent theme in Absurd Athlete. The Read More
Self-Portraits by David Pollard is a meticulously crafted collection of poems inspired by the work of eighty-nine artists. Each piece is assembled in such a way that the reader can visualise both the artists and the portraits which inspired the writing with clarity. From Caravaggio to Goya, Da Vinci to Warhol, the poet covers a Read More
Terence Winch’s latest collection, Lit from Below, is not for the faint-hearted. In ninety ten-line sonnets, he weaves together elements of what at first read like dreams and whimsy, before going off at a tangent into even more surreal imagery. Just as you think you might be able to make some sense of it, he’ll Read More
The main danger with a collection that only contains 16 relatively short poems is that they all need to be excellent or at the very least good. Even four mediocre or bad poems might ruin the entire pamphlet since they constitute one fourth thereof. This is not to say that one cannot make any mistakes Read More
There is a quiet, yet brutal authority to David Harsent’s latest collection, although to categorise the book as mere poetry might do the collection and the writer a considerable disservice. Fire Songs stands alone as a unique beast, which harks back to the verse masters of the past; it is even reminiscent of Milton’s later works. Stealthily, the poet Read More
Ruth Padel’s latest collection, shortlisted for the Eliot Prize, Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth is a book “of the book” in that it draws on narratives from Christianity, Islam and Judaism to comment on our “crossing this desert of life” (“Extract from the Travels of Ibn Jubayr”). The poems are finely wrought pieces Read More
Jonathan Edwards’ collection of amusing and accessibly candid poems, My Family and Other Superheroes, recognises that costumes, masks and neatly folding personas belong to the everyday. These are artificial means of separation between self and profession, past and present, family and nation. Most successfully perhaps Edwards plunders the modern high street, a place replete with Read More