Jane King’s collection Performance Anxiety draws together poetry from two previous books which were first published in 1993/4, in combination with more recent work. Performance Anxiety is a holistic, well-chosen collection that works around central themes of identity, theatricality and female experience. King’s work has a considerable autobiographical focus. In her 1994 poem “Wash Day”, Read More
Peter Bennet’s Border is one of the most idiosyncratic contemporary poetry collections I have ever read. Uniting poems from his past collections – Goblin Lawn, (T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted in 2007), The Glass Swarm, and The Game of Bear – with new pieces, Border is a substantial work. It is titled most appropriately; borders – between Read More
Bill Manhire is the pre-eminent voice of New Zealand poetry; that country’s first Laureate, and author of over a dozen collections, stretching back to the earliest part of the 1970s. He found some notoriety in his early career when a short poem, “Wingatui”, whose meaning was partially rooted in the vernacular of the New Zealand Read More
Simon Jarvis’ Night Office is a timely reminder of poetry’s capacity for extraordinary reach and intensity. Night Office is a 7000 word, rhymed poem which seems to formally arrange the thoughts and feelings encountered over one night of wakefulness. These referenced prayers, spoken through the night, offer waking consciousness as a form of devotion that Read More
In The Book of Bells and Candles, Norman Jope adapts the Golem myth and places it in a modern setting. The poet expects a great deal from his readers; not only are they to follow the over-arching story, but he inserts references from several different European cultures into that ancient Jewish folklore. So, this is Read More
Karen Solie, who won the Canadian Griffin Prize with her third collection Pigeon, is very much a poet of unrest. Many of her poems refer to locations associated with travel, such as roadside motels. The Living Option: Selected Poems, conveys said restlessness much like a best-of album of a musical artist. One might say that Read More
Following the enormous and in many ways unexpected success of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf in 1999, it may come as little surprise that Faber have begun to ask a selection of Britain’s other leading poets to produce modern versions of some of the equally important mainstays of the early period canon. Ten years on Read More
This, Tamara Kamenszain’s eighth poetry volume, was first published in 2010 as part of the “Sur Translation Program”. The Echo of My Mother responds to the loss of her mother, first to Alzheimer’s disease and then ultimately to death coming to terms with the silences and dislocation caused by that loss, and finally reassembling her Read More
Christopher Reid is part of an exclusive club of English poets in as much as he is genuinely funny. Though by no means a ‘comic’ poet – that tag hardly does justice to his extraordinary depth and range, nor to the poignancy of his subject matter — Reid is very adept at staring into the Read More
The poem, “Kindness, you can’t accuse me of”, proffered early in Michelene Wandor’s new collection Natural Chemistry, completely fulfils its title. Essentially written about the poet as performer, Wandor certainly cannot stand so accused, but she might be charged with many less desirable qualities. Written retrospectively and with acidic disdain, Wandor describes a fellow poet’s Read More