Deeply embedded in its time, Lift, Harry Man’s first poetry collection, offers insight into how growing up in the late 20th Century, amidst rapid technological advancement and ground-breaking scientific research (especially in the domain of space exploration), might have oriented and shaped one’s personal experience of the world. His poems, imbued with a communicative and Read More
Russell Jones’s collection, The Green Dress Whose Girl is Sleeping is much about the serendipitous little moments in life as it is about the huge losses. His constantly changing style enables this; he moves from haiku to couplets in the same way his poems move from quiet moments outside chip shops to moments of contemplation Read More
Thomas Lynch is an American award winning poet and writer. He won the American Book Award for his publication, Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, which was also short-listed for the National Book Award, and his essays and poems have appeared in a host of distinguished magazines and newspapers including Harper’s, The New Yorker, Read More
A Hatfield Mass is, in the main, a sequence of ekphrastic poems written after Martyn Crucefix’s visit to a Henry Moore sculpture exhibition in Hatfield House, Hertfordshire (Crucefix has assured many interviewers that this is, in fact, his real name). Crucefix’s sixth published poetry collection is thus structured: six poems inspired by six Moore sculptures, Read More
Jane Austen’s renowned 19th century novel received a rather unique twist in this adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s book of the same name. Though the idea has great potential, its attempt to both please lovers of Austen and to create a chilling and scary atmosphere for lovers of horror will end up leaving most viewers unsatisfied Read More
“Are you or have you ever been Trumbo?” ask the promotional posters for Jay Roach’s Trumbo, a delicate piece that explores the real events of the McCarthy Era at the height of the paranoia surrounding The Cold War and Russian/Communist influence upon American citizens. Bryan Cranston masterfully takes on the role of Dalton Trumbo, a Read More
“For all flesh is as grass”. With this biblical epigraph from Brahm’s Ein deutsches Requiem, Sarah Holland-Batt declares what is at the heart of her most recent poetry collection: nature. Holland-Batt is an Australian poet whose first book of poetry Aria, published in 2008, won multiple awards, among them being the Judith Wright Prize. The Read More
As a North Walian, I picked this slim volume of poems, drawn to the name “Llanberis” on page eight. I hoped there would be more poems about North Wales. There aren’t any poems about North Wales but that doesn’t matter. Selina Nwulu well deserves to be the young poet laureate for London, where she now Read More
If your first foray into a multi-award-winning poet’s work is his eleventh published collection, it’s natural that you might approach it with a little bit of trepidation. That, in any case, was my experience. Indeed, a sense of the mysterious and the uncertain never quite left me throughout my reading of Matthew Sweeney’s Inquisition Lane Read More