Anne Stevenson’s sixteenth collection, Astonishment, examines the everyday in an extraordinary way. Love, nature, childhood and old age are put through her alembic of lyrical compression and technical inventiveness. The opening poem, “The Loom”, marks the beginning of life itself: “ And once my lungs were gills”. The image of the loom shapes both the Read More
Mortality is, of course, a regular concern of poets. How much more pressing might be the need to explore our relationship with death if the poet were born Jewish in 1942? How much weightier yet might that feeling be were he to have sprung from “a long line of rabbis”, and his father, by his Read More
Street poetry, as an art form, is certainly nothing new. “Auld Reekie’s” Robert Fergusson was the pioneer of pavement verse and, since then, the trend has developed into the wonderful localised material heard and read today. Gary Robertson is Dundee born and bred, granting him the authority and the credentials to comment (often acerbically) on Read More
Douglas Dunn, quoted on the front cover of The Magicians of Edinburgh, describes Ron Butlin, in the inevitable cliché, as “the best, the most productive Scottish poet of his generation”. On the back cover, Sorley Maclean calls Butlin’s poems those “of a man who can think and feel”, adding that “poems come [to Butlin] because Read More
This is Rita Ann Higgins’ ninth collection, a poetic memoir about her working class, Catholic upbringing, a collection about loss, language, poetry and travel. There is a strong thread of repression and fear running through her work, which describes the drudgery of women’s lives, the poverty of poverty, and the sadness of realisation, all softened Read More
This collection is not for those who seek light reading or any form of reassurance. Opening with a poem not listed in the contents, Stephen Murray immediately throws us into a cuttingly real and tumultuous world. Murray cleaves open his world with an honesty that is almost chilling; he invites us into a past littered Read More
Those who considered Simon Jenner’s first collection, About Bloody Time, difficult, might equally have been anticipating this, his second book of poetry. It contains nothing glib or easily accessible, and nothing which will have the reader close the volume after one reading. It is none the worse for that. Jenner’s intellect scintillates in the diversity Read More
One of post-apartheid South Africa’s contributions to global culture is an affirmation of ubuntu* – an indigenous concept which emphasises the folded-togetherness of human being. Karen Press’s new collection, which finds poetry in subjects as diverse as Jacob Zuma and the war in Iraq, is mindful of our collective failure to put this principle into Read More
Although there are two “Suites”, of five and eight sections respectively, and a page-length prose poem (“West-Coast Colloquy”), the keynote of this volume is minimalism: short free-verse lyrics, many with short lines. It’s a common form in post-1960s poetry; one which hopes to imbue language with intensity through terseness, and invite us to focus on Read More
Nominated for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize in 2011, The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions restores complexity, colour and light to a world which had turned fifty shades of grey. Jacqueline Saphra writes with disarming honesty about sex, control, femininity, gender roles and relationships. Above all, these are intensely personal poems. The first section on childhood Read More