The Dark Film, the fourth collection from the multi-award winning Paul Farley, delves yet deeper into the poet’s fascination with the visual, and explores further a wide array of familiar topics – memory, history, technology, national identity, landscapes. While the mood throughout the book clunks uneasily between the trivial and the serious, the verse nevertheless Read More
If love and loss are perhaps the most commonplace of human experiences, they are also amongst the most difficult to write well about. How is one to commemorate the shared intimacy of a relationship unique to lovers, “themselves absolutely, beyond imitation”, to craft fine phrases when so swallowed up in sorrow that “no one can Read More
Clearly, there is something about poets and bees. Observe them in Paradise Lost, hear them in Keats, and love them with Plath. The Poet Laureate Carol Anne Duffy published a whole collection dedicated to them. What is it, then, about bees? Is it their exquisite industry, that sonorous voice, their structured life and space, or Read More
William Wall’s new collection, Ghost Estate, takes its title from lonely places: the large, half-finished ‘ghost estate’ housing schemes of Ireland. First started during the height of the Celtic Tiger Boom, the economic collapse left them as unfinished and largely uninhabited chilling and empty spaces. Wall mirrors these qualities here. His sentences are carefully minimalist; Read More
I first came across Petrucci’s work after meeting his co-founder of Perdika Press, Peter Brennan, who recommended Petrucci’s poetry to me. Petrucci is a notable polymath, having trained in physics and environmental science, though more recently working in literary education and in a large number of poetry residencies. The i tulips sequence, of which this volume Read More
“I ran into an industrial estate and looked around, / the spikes got me.” Having self-published two pamphlets (softly softly catchy monkey and Sleeveless errand), and gained considerable performance experience both live and online, Emma Hammond offers her first full poetry collection, tunth-sk. The satisfyingly well-designed cover does not clarify the perplexing titular word (nor Read More
William Wall’s new collection, Ghost Estate, takes its title from lonely places: the large, half-finished ‘ghost estate’ housing schemes of Ireland. First started during the height of the Celtic Tiger Boom, the economic collapse left them as unfinished and largely uninhabited chilling and empty spaces. Wall mirrors these qualities here. His sentences are carefully minimalist; Read More
Inspired by the Scottish Homecoming celebrations of 2009 which, amongst other things, marked the 250th anniversary of the birth of Rabbie Burns, Thi 20:09 presents the boisterous tale of “A bus fu we past generations that huv shaped oor nation”. It is Dundonian poet Mark Thompson’s second poetry collection, following on from Bardfaethi Building Site Read More
Kofi Anyidoho’s The Place We Call Home and Other Poems is a musical composition in three movements; a lyrical dance to a throbbing drumbeat and a painfully truthful examination of history, ancestry and regret. It provides a patriotic cultural insight into Africa yet does not shirk from, nor seek to glorify, reality and hurt. It Read More
Confucius said that “To love a thing means wanting it to live.” This fearless collection of poetry by Julian Stannard provides a living, breathing body of uncompromising work that grows off the page and flowers into the large and small places of life, touching and resonating as it branches outwards, and then out some more. Read More