If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursèd lot. (‘If We Must Die’ by Claude Mackay) Shane McCrae’s latest TS Eliot shortlisted collection, Sometimes I Never Suffered, isn’t a sound-mirror for Read More
Love Minus Love is the second collection from Wayne Holloway-Smith. It reads as a continuous, fractured train of thought exploring the poet’s childhood trauma, his relationship with his dad, his mum and mental illness. Sitting on the cover with its hands on its knees is a skeletal robot, the box of its chest burst open. Read More
Daisy Lafarge’s debut collection Life Without Air shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, is the ferment of a busy mind drawing from Louis Pasteur’s process of fermentation. Like the intersecting cells on the jacket, suggestive of their proximity, seven sections explore the complexity of human and ecological co-dependence, The inaugural poem, ‘Meridian Dream’, sits title-less Read More
Written against but within the context of an emerging fortress Europe, the philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote in Of Hospitality that ‘absolute hospitality’ seeks no conditions but ‘requires that I open up my home’ to ‘the foreigner’ and let them arrive and ‘take place in the place I offer them, without asking… either reciprocity (entering into Read More
This collection of 44 Science Fiction poems is a departure from Scots poet J O Morgan’s usual style. His 6 previous poetry publications have been single, book-length poems. Assurances, published in 2018, won the Costa Poetry Award and his previous collections have been nominated for major awards. His poetry tends towards physics and metaphysics; its Read More
© Scott Anderson © Keren Macpherson Image and poem first appeared in the exhibition, Shoulder to Shoulder, Higgins Art Gallery, Cape Cod Community College. You can hear both Anderson and Macpherson talking about their work HERE. Scott Anderson received his MFA from the Edinburgh College of Art in 1999 and has been a professor of Read More
Did I say I was never a victim? […] I helped him with good grace and inside I knew every complication I learned to lie and it was barefaced on my lies they built a civilisation (‘Odysseus welcomed from the sea by Nausicaa’) Poet, and significantly translator, Sasha Dugdale’s fourth collection, Deformations, takes two important, Read More
My sharp little knife Black blooms oxidised on the blade Iron tang singing on my tongue Slitting through skin to spilled insides (‘Anaemia’) That uncompromising, but ambiguous, title primes the reader perfectly for Natalie Shaw’s debut collection. Here, I have to make a disclosure that I have met some of these poems already, sometimes at Read More
From Wiktionary: “Ekphrasis”, from Ancient Greek ἔκφρασις (ékphrasis, “description”), from ἐκφράζω (ekphrázō, “I describe”), from ἐκ (ek, “out, ex-”) + φράζω (phrázō, “I explain, point out”). Here are five pieces from a call to respond creatively to a sculpture (circa 1995) affixed very securely to a plinth in the creative writing room at Read More
I loved to watch my mother smoke. She looked like Lauren Bacall as she lifted the lighter to the cigarette that perched on her parted lips, then she’d flick the gas spark, a perfect flame igniting the crisp white tobacco paper. As she drew a long deep inhale her cheeks became concave with the power Read More