Jackie Copleton’s first novel is ambitious in its themes and in the spread of history it encompasses: A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding is set mainly in Nagasaki across the years before, during and after the dropping of the atomic bomb. The plot revolves around Amaterasu, a mother and grandmother, whose desperate search to find her Read More
Those April Fevers is the perfect fit for anyone looking for a collection of diverse poems that is far from conventional poetry associated with continuous meter and schematic rhymes. Mary O’Donnell produces exquisite, elegant and colourful poems, open to any field or subject. This expansiveness is also represented in her approach to genres: not only Read More
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight: Time is on the wing but he doesn’t seem to like it as he paces up and down the aisle worried about flying perhaps or deep thrombosis until a stewardess makes him take his seat again. My Read More
Ron Silliman is an American poet with a distinctive voice and an extensive publishing history in poetry. Taken as a whole, however, his is a relatively meagre canon; he views his work as essentially consisting of several long poems spread over a large number of collections stemming back to the 1970s but which should be Read More
Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory is a startlingly vivid and rich narrative recounting the story of Zimbabwean death row inmate Memory, or Mnemosyne. Through meticulously interweaving and patching a gamut of memories together to form a story, Gappah’s debut novel simultaneously evokes feelings of intrigue, pathos, wonder and hope. The early isolation of Memory informs Read More
This collection of Cornish poet Jack Clemo’s work consolidates poetry from all his published volumes in the first major poetry publication since his death over twenty years ago. These Selected Poems, edited by Luke Thompson, are designed to reinstate Clemo as a celebrated national poet. With this resurgence of interest in Clemo, it is important Read More
Sometimes there is irony in a book’s appearance and format. This ‘Little Red Book’ is not a collection of quotes by Chairman Mao, but a novel that echoes the great American jazz-age classic, The Great Gatsby. The (anti?) hero in this case is Roman Gorsky, a billionaire Russian oligarch who has settled in London, during Read More
A journalist and published poet, Ukrainian writer Liubov Holota became a Shevchenko Laureate after receiving the Shevchenko Premier for her debut novel Episodic Memory. Framed by the forty day vigil for her dead mother, the novel sets up vignettes of one woman’s childhood in the Ukrainian Steppe in the 1950s. Holota’s novel is fully transportive Read More
Having been declared a ‘prodigy’ following her first publication in the New Yorker (1992), Heiny has finally delivered her long-awaited debut collection ‘Single, Carefree, Mellow.’ This collection is populated by middle class New York women, most of whom are striving for success in their lovers’ beds rather than in their work. The majority have embarked Read More
Increasingly, the passive voice in poetry tends to receive bad press. Some particularly ferocious critics are keen to strike out its very existence in verse. Like most polemics, the rhetoric contains truths and interesting pointers to alert the unwary. Also like most polemics, we might not always want to take such an extreme line. What Read More