It seems self-evident that there are different kinds of poetry but this truism is well worth restating. For readers of the modern lyric whose appeal might lie in the small imagistic fragment, a well-wrought urn of words and music that speaks to a sudden, vital moment of perception as creative renewal (that sudden slant of Read More
Magician, performer, mystic, and writer; there are many strings to Alan Moore’s bow. Touting a belief in the miraculous powers of art and language, the grizzled Northampton giant equates the role of the artist with that of the shaman: manipulating the consciousness of his audience with a knowledge of symbols, a grimoire of grammar. In Read More
There are few poets active today with the wit, warmth and erudition of Ian Duhig. Since his 2003 debut The Lammas Hireling he has assembled a body of work rivalling that of any other poet for sustained colour, insight and invention. His work mixes comedy and tragedy, and his poems often come with a complex Read More
After the success of Denise Riley’s prizewinning elegiac sequence A Part Song, it was with great anticipation that I opened her new collection Say Something Back. As well as being highly regarded as a poet, Riley has also published various academic works of language and Feminist theory. Say Something Back is her first collection since Read More
There are more than seven words for winter in Greenlandic, and when you have read Nancy Campbell’s Disko Bay you’ll know why. The poet has worked as writer in residence for many ecological institutions and over her career has authored many non-fiction books – including How to Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic: An Arctic Read More
Every Little Sound is Ruby Robinson’s debut collection. The title embodies the inspiration behind the poems – “internal gain”: the “internal volume control which helps us amplify and focus on quiet sounds in times of threat, danger or intense concentration”. This concentrated mastery of attention is reflected in the poet’s lines, both in those which Read More
Harry Giles, brought up tri-lingually with Orcadian, Scots and “English”, sets out his stall in “Brave”, the opening poem of his first full collection, Tonguit, which was short-listed for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award in 2015: Acause incomer will aywis be a clarty wird, acause this tongue A gabber wi will nivver be the real Read More
After reading this collection by Alice Oswald, it came as no surprise to learn that following her studies of Classics at Oxford, Oswald trained as a gardener. Plants, flowers, myths and legends are constant threads that run through her poems. She draws much of her inspiration from the River Dart and the folklore of the Read More
True, we will never be beyond our histories. And so I am the island. And so this is a warning. Wife opens with “Dangerous Things” ; a few pages later, the full-page prose poem “Dictionary” sets out a clear stall as to how that titular word might be explored, initially from a European perspective, then Read More
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZeVSdKtQVY Eye in the Sky, directed by Gavin Hood, was released in early May this year, featuring both relatively unheard of actors and revered veterans of the acting world, such as Helen Mirren and the late Alan Rickman. Both are very versatile actors having starred in a number of genres ranging from serious roles to downright eccentric Read More