Poets @ Stanza 2022 - a selection of reviews

StAnza is Scotland’s annual international poetry festival, bringing poetry in all its forms and many languages to Scottish audiences and worldwide. Since the festival was founded by three local poets in 1998, StAnza has gained a truly international reputation. What distinguishes StAnza is a commitment to being both cutting-edge and inclusive, both in their festival programme and their outreach and development work. Poetry is dynamic, drawing upon and challenging past traditions in order to ask ‘where to’ next; it is deeply involved with the world, participating in questioning its structures and direction and able to imagine words, worlds and feelings that are new to us, as well as ones we share. Reviews of work from a selection of poets appearing at StAnza will be published on these pages in the run up to the festival.

Poetry as Acts of Resistance: An Interview with André Naffis-Sahely

Our conversation has covered a variety of topics and his interest in life is both present and contagious. It is quite clear André is a man with a thirst for knowledge, which brings me to ask him why use poetry as your main vehicle to navigate such terrain? He answers succinctly, ‘I have an axe to grind.’ That is followed by his infectious laughter. He elaborates by referring to the Chilean poet, Nicanor Parra whom André tells me once said, ‘a poet should be a thorn in society’s side’. This resonated with him in his teens.

The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life

It is quite often said a good book can take the reader on a journey; in this collection the journey is quite literal as we are invited to flit around the globe from Abu Dhabi to Venice, from Tamil Nadu to the Catskills. Don’t be mistaken – this is not a book simply about travelling but about perspective… the type of perspective that is born out of an itinerant life….

Cut Flowers

As Professor of Ecopoetry and Poetics in Sheffield Hallum University, Harriet Tarlo’s poetry centres on linguistic, natural and political landscapes.  Divided into four seasons, with twelve poems per section, Cut Flowers blends into and builds upon itself organically. The collection consists of poems of hybrid structures, which can be read horizontally or vertically, allowing for different interpretations and conceptual understandings, often indicating the juxtaposition between beautiful living things and the severed, separated, dying and the dead. 

Wain

Scotland is known for ancient icons such as the Loch Ness Monster, its national animal being mythical in itself (the unicorn), and its seemingly endless array of folk tales, passed down through generations. What Rachel Plummer captures in their collection Wain is a reimagining of Scottish folklore through an LGBTQ lens. This book greets you with a watercolour explosion of a cover in which a faerie creature beckons you to turn the page and enter this enchanting collection.

Forty Names

In her first collection, Forty Names, Fayyaz names these women over and over again and often women from her family, whose stories she grew up being told even if, at the time, she didn’t fully understand them. Names are echoed, written first in Persian and then translated into English – an act which revels in the ‘emotional and imaginative’ aspects of translation, as Fayyaz discusses in a Youtube video for Carcanet. The effect is such that the names become almost internalised mini-poems in and of themselves…

Solar Cruise

Claire Crowther’s fourth collection Solar Cruise, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2020, is a deeply moving and introspective memoir, which documents the relationship between herself, a poet, and her husband physicist. Her linguistic choices––pneumonic rhetoric, metaphors and similes––demonstrate the value of researching and making strides to combat the adverse effects of climate change. In Solar Cruise, Crowther examines the language of science closely and discovers the poetry hidden underneath.

Bioluminescent Baby

The poems in Fiona Benson’s Bioluminescent Baby detail the short, intense lives of insects. They were originally commissioned by University of Exeter’s ‘Project Urgency’ as a commentary on the looming biodiversity disaster, yet these various crawly creatures compel us even further through Benson’s careful and evocative words. 

The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette

Angela Gardner delivers a theatrical experience with this remarkable verse novel. This powerful true story lays bare one of the most important trials in Seafaring history. Told in five parts, Gardner takes us on an emotional voyage from elation to fear, horror to sorrow, injustice to fate.

At Least This I Know

Andrés N. Ordorica (404Ink, 2022);  pbk, £9.99 What does it mean to belong somewhere? In a body, in a family, in a writing group, in a country? These are the questions that inhabit this debut collection from Andrés N. Ordorica, a queer Latinx poet now based in Edinburgh, having lived in Mexico and the USA. Read More