In Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds re-visits the months, seasons and years following the moment her husband of thirty years tells her he is leaving her for another woman. Avoiding sentimentality and self-pity, she takes her readers to the core of her anguish, hurt and even shame. Intensely personal though they are, these poems nonetheless go beyond Read More
Jorie Graham’s twelfth collection of poetry, PLACE, short listed for the T S Eliot Prize and recent winner of the Forward Prize, offers the reader both meditation and protestation. An early poem, “Cagnes Sur Mer 1950”, set in the year of Graham’s birth, explores moments of consciousness, real or imagined, of her own infancy. From Read More
Renfrewshire-born Kathleen Jamie, Scotland’s sole Eliot prize nominee, has long been resident on the Fife shore of the Tay. The Overhaul bears the watermarks of her adopted home. Jamie’s collection begins with “The Beach”, human rubbish seen as man’s contribution to natural beauty, and comes full circle with the span of “bird-bones, rope-scraps” in the Read More
The National Poet of Wales since 2008, Gillian Clarke is a writer, lecturer, translator and champion of the Welsh language; in 2010 she received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Having published ten collections since 1971, Clarke is a prolific poet and a central figure in Welsh literary life. The snowbound winters of 2009 and Read More
The Havocs is Jacob Polley’s third published collection of poetry. This ensemble of poems displays an eclectic mix of styles and draws inspiration from sources as diverse as Anglo-Saxon poetry and the work of Northern Irish poet Tom Paulin. The collection is unified by the poet’s insightful reflections on universal human concerns such as love, Read More
A peculiar feature of the Alliterative Morte Arthure, is that certain characters, including Emperor Lucius, are killed twice. Simon Armitage professes mystification at this. There needn’t be. The poem (c. 1400) is to a large extent combat porn. Like all species of porn, sexual or otherwise, it craves and provides sensation, narrative plausibility coming a Read More
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