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Poets @ Stanza 2021 - a selection of reviews

StAnza is one of the leading poetry festivals in the UK and Europe. Its mission is to bring to audiences the best of poets, and practitioners in related art forms worldwide. StAnza 2021 will take place 6 - 14 March. This will be a hybrid festival, with mostly online events. The festival themes are 'Make It New' and 'No Rhyme Nor Reason'. All of StAnza's pre-recorded events (those marked 'Free Online' in the online listings) will be captioned and will be available to watch until 31 March 2021. For the programme of events and for more information, please visit: https://stanzapoetry.org/ Reviews of work from a selection of poets appearing at StAnza will be published on these pages in the run up to the festival.
Featured image of Mother, Nature

Mother, Nature

There are poems in this collection that knocked me clean to the ground… The subject is crucial, but it’s the beauty of the poems which hold it all together….so what makes Lyall’s title special? There is her ability to bring such a dazzling array of raw emotion to the page without a hint of over-sentimentality. But there is also her profound ear for lyric and language.

Featured image of Gen

Gen

… single everyday moments are the focal point in Gen, and it can be argued that they are also the focal point of life. Life is, after all, nothing but a series of moments – a kiss, a bike ride, a proposal, and Gen is, at its core, a heart-warming and tongue-twisting attempt to capture these moments.

Featured image of The Conversation of Sheep

The Conversation of Sheep

Hugh McMillan(Luath Press, 2018); pbk £8.99 I’ve never read a poetry book that has made me laugh out loud the way Hugh McMillan’s 2018 collection did (it is possible I’m reading the wrong poetry). But The Conversation of Sheep is more than just sheep jokes, and therein lies its brilliance. The artistry and rhythm of Read More

Featured image of A God at the Door

A God at the Door

As a much admired poet, writer and dancer, Tishani Doshi leaves little of the arts world untouched. Countries of the Body was awarded the Forward Prize for Best First Collection while Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. From politics, womanhood to the roots that ground us, this is a journey that the reader is rewarded with…

Featured image of Lamping for Pickled Fish

Lamping for Pickled Fish

If there could ever be the right – the only – title for this poetry collection, then Lamping for Pickled Fish might be it, setting the reader up as it so neatly does for the illicit, for the hidden and obscure and for journeys into unexpected spaces. … McDonough is a forager, avid in pursuit of the wild jewels of shoreline and hedgerow in her native north-east Scotland and a maker. A maker of jam, from Ronnie’s stolen rhubarb; of soused herring in the title poem; of a young adult from a toddler; and, effortlessly, of words from other words.

Featured image of Pretty in Pink

Pretty in Pink

Ruth Aylett’s first solo pamphlet exemplifies just what thematic poetry collections make possible. Pretty in Pink examines facets of girl and womanhood, and the pressures to conform to, internalise and perform ideals of femininity, through different lenses of time, geography, class and culture.

Featured image of The M Pages

The M Pages

The M Pages opens with ‘Death of an Actress’, a poem layered with literary references, and heavy with a clever litany of clichés, both witty and poignant. That wit is intrinsic to these poems. Throughout tragic, shocking and sombre passages, Bryce’s fun with wordplay, and her tumbling rhyme never diminish, akin to the irreverent gallows humour which needfully so often accompanies mourning.

Featured image of Deformations (Shortlisted, 2020 T S Eliot Prize)

Deformations (Shortlisted, 2020 T S Eliot Prize)

Did I say I was never a victim? […] I helped him with good grace and inside I knew every complication I learned to lie and it was barefaced on my lies they built a civilisation (‘Odysseus welcomed from the sea by Nausicaa’) Poet, and significantly translator, Sasha Dugdale’s fourth collection, Deformations, takes two important, Read More

Featured image of The Saints Are Coming

The Saints Are Coming

‘The words […] a line of curses, promises, demands, wishes, intoxicants and offerings […] sets all the prayers in the house to glint.’ (From ‘Vespers’, All The Prayers In The House, Miriam Nash). Having grown up in the Catholic faith, courted by pictures and other icons of the tradition (usually from a shrine shop in Read More

Featured image of The Air Year (WINNER, 2020 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION)

The Air Year (WINNER, 2020 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION)

The Air Year is Caroline Bird’s sixth collection with Carcanet. Her most recent and highly successful, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. Bird, who published her first collection at the age of 15, displays an astonishing talent and a unique ‘voice’, and is Read More

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