Karen McCarthy Woolf(Dialogue Books, 2024); hbk, £20 Infinity is an episode long and troubling to decipher [,] Dolly How might a writer work their way into writing an expansive historical telling of the vastness of United States, uncovering a multitude of people, of oppressions, victories, defeats and ongoing struggles? Recalling the cliché, ‘When Read More
Katie Farris(Pavilion Poetry, 2023); pbk £10.99. American writer, poet, academic and translator, Katie Farris delivers her memoir in poems with generosity of spirit and stunning lyrical dexterity, especially following a devastating cancer diagnosis. She is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the 2021 Chad Walsh Poetry Award, 2018 Anne Halley Poetry Prize from The Massachusetts Read More
Joe Carrick-Varty(Carcanet, 2023); pbk, £11.99 ‘O rain falling on the stillest lake that was all of our futures’ (‘Ode to a Shotgun’) More Sky is Joe Carrick-Varty’s debut poetry collection and the winner of The Irish Times Book of the Year. Carrick-Varty won the New Poets Prize in 2018 and the Eric Gregory Award in Read More
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin(The Gallery Press, 2023); pbk: €11.95 ‘Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.’ (Eavan Boland, A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming A Woman Poet) This is true of the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, poet, academic, translator and former Poetry Professor of Ireland now elected to the Read More
Ishion Hutchinson(Faber and Faber, 2023); pbk, £12.99 In a recent interview, Ishion Hutchinson remarked on the invitation to respond to the Imperial War Museum archive that resulted in the discovery of material relating to Caribbean soldiers who fought in the British Army in the First World War which is all but lost to history. Each Read More
Fran Lock(The Poetry Bus, 2023); pbk, £8.50 ‘This human form where I was born, I now repent’. This quote from Pixies ‘Caribou’ sets the tone for Fran Lock’s Hyena!, an intoxicating blend of the melancholic and the apocryphal, a charged, crudely honest, experimental, and intricate exercise in reflection. The collection is dedicated to Scottish poet Read More
Sharon Olds(Cape Poetry, 2022); pbk, £12 I’ve long been an admirer of the work of Sharon Olds, and I’d venture to say that she has taught me more about women and their relationships with the world than any other poet. This book was published in her 80th year and serves as proof that she is Read More
A title like ‘The brain of the rat in stereotaxic space’ makes a bold opening gambit. The reviewer is aware the poet has had a past career in toymaking and is soon alert to the intricate care inherent in the constructing of these poems; a planning, an almost archaeologically labelled or museum-catalogued craft. These impressively, formally varied poems is precision-assembled, and there is something in each—be they sonnets, sets of sestets, runes, guitar chords, or even a tightly metrical poem where only one of its 33 lines and title does not end on the name ‘Rosemarie’— which tells of meticulous planning, exacting execution and a mesmerising, unrelentingly creative mind….
This is Jane Clarke’s third poetry collection. Her previous work has been nominated for several poetry prizes, including being shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, awarded for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry evoking the spirit of a place. The latest collection certainly does that….
Kit Fan’s new collection is one that delves into the power of writing, on both the individual and collective level. Its conversation between suffering and healing is made ever more brilliant by Fan’s eloquence and linguistic dexterity. Drawing from life and lived history, the poems shift and change, touch upon love and suffering, running like the ink he so eloquently describes…
