I know you must be surprised, it says, but I will die soon and want to make contact. “Arrival of the Electric Eel” With these lines – the closing couplet of the collection’s first poem – Petit makes an immediate emotional impact, eliciting a sympathetic connection with her reader. Already a winner of the Manchester Read More
“Slit open, unfolded, written across, and handed over to chance, they reject the asylum offered by the lyric to probe the last privacies of our existence.” The so-called myth of Amherst continues to intrigue and perplex us, nearly 150 years after her death. Emily Dickinson’s reclusive life spanned 55 years, 1,800 distinct poems, 2,357 known Read More
The latest collection of poems from Stevie Ronne is a challenge in its opening sections, but particular rewarding, when it reaches its final, ambitious prose poems. The collection is divided into three sections, “Manifestations”, where some of the more classically styled poems mingle with bold experimental pieces, followed by the epic prose poem “A Night Read More
It’s hard to get past the foreword to this intriguing book of poetry. The foreword – penned by JG Ballard, no less – claims that “Jeremy Reed’s talent is almost extra-terrestrial in its brilliance” and that “No other poet (and very few novelists) has so accurately conveyed the essence of what it is to be Read More
Jim Carruth’s collection, Rider at the Crossing, provides a fairly different style of writing from the Renfrewshire farmer’s usual pastoral concerns. Although not his most recent work, the poems compiled here represent the ever-changing, yet compelling style of Glasgow’s 2014 Laureate. In Rider at the Crossing, the poet examines a darker, more unsettling set of Read More
The Privilege of Rain tracks the year David Swann spent as Writer in Residence at HMP Nottingham in three parts: “Seed”, “Sap” and “Stump”. The irony of the prison’s setting, on land that once bore part of the wilds of Sherwood Forest, is utilised throughout as myriad themes associated with the prison system are addressed. Read More
Boogeyman Dawn is hard reading; hard in the tradition of Alice Munro, of some of Toni Morrison, of what is often politely called “unflinching social realism”: about racism, sexual abuse, poverty, identity struggle. Raina Leon’s collection is about people whom poetry, more than prose, often disregards; it is concerned with suffering, which often also sits uncomfortably Read More
The mainstreaming of Out There, an anthology of prose and poetry by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender writers from Scotland, is a sign of the times, receiving, as it did, a contribution from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. There’s a stellar cast of writers, including Ali Smith, Jackie Kay, Val McDermid, Louise Welsh, Jo Clifford, Read More
Water is the element in Jenny Lewis’s latest collection, Taking Mesopotamia. From the locus of Mesopotamia (meaning the land “between two rivers”), the poems encompass the waters of childbirth (“Mine”), the flooded irrigation ditches in Iraq (“April 1916”), the grey rain of the Rhondda (“Blaenclydach”) and the flood myths of Gilgamesh and Noah. The opening Read More
Popular culture clings. It aspires to immortality, presenting itself as an essential part of social existence. And we readily acknowledge it as such. This is precisely what is explored in Double Bill, an anthology of poems about popular culture as a thing that survives history and becomes ageless. But it is not just agelessness that Read More