1939 was an excellent vintage for Northern Irish poetry as both Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley were born in that year. Indeed, in some sense, their verse is not dissimilar in that it is never pretentious, and there is much to be said in favour of poetry that somehow manages to imbue everyday occurrences with Read More
Moniza Alvi’s latest collection, At the Time of Partition, frames a narrative of what “might have taken place” at the time of the partition of India and Pakistan. The poems, detailing the movement of her father’s family from Ludhiana to Lahore in the newly formed Pakistan, combine to produce an overarching tale of political failure Read More
The cover of Helen Mort’s debut collection consists of a photograph of a miner confronting policemen during the 1984 Strike; Division Street promises a work “marked by distance and division”, “[f]rom the clash between striking miners and police to the delicate conflicts in personal relationships”. The title itself announces this. Outwardly then, the book indicates Read More
Robin Robertson’s newest collection Hill of Doors was a book I wanted to review, such was the praise heaped upon it; nominations for the T.S. Eliot prize and the Costa book award only enhanced its literary reputation. The landscape of Robertson’s poetry is fascinating. Variegated cultural strains – history, legend, myth, past and present, contribute Read More
Canadian poet and classicist, Anne Carson, has followed up The Autobiography of Red with this stunning “sequel”, Red Doc>. G, the central character, a winged being and herdsman like his mythical namesake, Geryon, is on a road trip with artist, Ida (who looks like a “tough experimental baby”), and his former lover, Herakles, now in Read More
John MacKenna writes prolifically, and to acclaim, across the full spectrum – playwriting, novels, short stories, biography, documentary, radio and poetry. He approaches all of these different forms from the tri-fold backdrop of writing, producing and acting. All of this lays the foundation for his third poetry collection, Where Sadness Begins. Collected in four parts, Read More
Norman Jope’s Aphinar is not an easy read. It is a collection which requires full investment from the reader. It is ambitious. The diction is complex and the content rich – dense, even. As far as first impressions are concerned, Aphinar is, without doubt, intimidating. Yet, it is also immediately captivating – cohesive, intricate and Read More
Ovid wrote Heroides over 2000 years ago, and in the succeeding millennia attitudes towards this remarkable text have veered from reverence to disdain. Once his most celebrated work, recent critics have held it in less high regard. This series of letters from the women of Greek and Roman myth to their absent lovers has been Read More
“Every poet is ideally the deaf Beethoven”. This double-billing was both welcome and apt for Michael Hulse, the distinguished poet, editor, translator and educator. Born of a German mother and an English father, he probed an identity and a “complex legacy”, acknowledging that the post-colonial weight of the British Empire was no less difficult than Read More
Estás sola y nadie te mira. Eres la reina, bella como la luna envuelta en la seda de su noche. Estás sola y te vas a morir./ ’You’re alone and nobody looks at you. You’re the queen, beautiful as the moon wrapped up in the silk of her night. You’re alone and you’re going to Read More