Kona Macphee (Bloodaxe Books, 2013); pbk, £8.95. Kona Macphee’s What Long Miles forms a genuinely intriguing collection. Her approach to poetry is most accurately described as experimental. Macphee fluctuates between strict poetic forms and free verse, and aptly too, for her poems’ themes also range widely. This diversity initially appears to demonstrate her skilful shaping Read More
Pauline Stainer (Bloodaxe Books, 2013); pbk, £8.95. And when the sun lifts over bus lane and urban foxes a kind of giddiness overcomes me… These lines, from Pauline Stainer’s poem “Primrose Hill Druids”, evoke the dizzying sense of spiritual connection explored in her latest collection, Tiger Facing the Mist. Stainer is a gifted and prolific Read More
Sophia Wellbeloved (Waterloo Press, 2011); pbk, £10. No writer is well served by effusive or uncritical praise. If we are to believe the introduction to Sophia Wellbeloved’s four-part poem Praying for Flow, her handling of words is “[l]ike Neruda’s”. Her poetic voice “may not even be hers”, but her dead twin’s, or that of her Read More
There are some startling and beautiful images from the much-exhibited photographer Hermann Rodrigues in Rags and Reels. Visual and Poetic Stories of Migration and Diaspora, his collaboration with poet Bashabi Fraser. There’s an elderly Sikh, bearded and turbaned in a bright blue tartan jacket, holding his ceremonial scabbard. A sitar player poses in her sari on an Read More
Moss Rich was a new name to me when I picked up his book, A Psalm of Consequences for Those Who Can’t Keep Up Monthly Payments, but the title promised originality and quirkiness, and the collection subsequently did not disappoint. With both serious and comic insights into the everyday, Rich seeks to turn the humdrum into poetry. Read More
Clare Best’s first collection, Excisions, opens with a sequence entitled ‘Matryoshka’ (“nested Russian dolls”) about the death of her parents, and feelings of grief and memory. Best’s poems, which have an intensity and physicality about them, include arresting descriptions of the body, as for example in “Stitch”, My grandmother knew about seams- her abdomen ruched Read More
Jamie McKendrick (Faber and Faber, 2012); pbk, 9.99. Out There is the sixth collection from poet and translator Jamie McKendrick. It opens with an epigraph sourced from Dante’s Paradiso: “This little patch of earth that makes us all so fierce.” That juxtaposition of earth and fierce humanity resonates thematically throughout McKendrick’s poems, which articulate the Read More
Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot (Cape, 2013); hdbk, £14.99. This graphic memoir and biography is the first collaborative project from Bryan and Mary Talbot. Bryan Talbot is an established comics creator whose previous works include Alice in Sunderland and the Grandville series. Mary Talbot is an academic writer whose research into language, gender and Read More
Emily Berry (Faber and Faber, 2013); pbk, £9.99. As a debut collection, Emily Berry’s Dear Boy intrigues, capturing the imagination with a sense of poetic experimentation. Yet Berry rarely forges any profound or emotional link with her readers, and seems strangely distant as a narrator. This is odd, as there is significant intimacy in her Read More
Helen Buckingham (Waterloo Press, 2011); pbk: £10. Armadillo Basket is a tender and often brutally honest assessment of a poet’s life and career. Its author, Helen Buckingham, has been published internationally in many small print publications and has been nominated for several awards, including an honourable mention at the 2011 Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Read More