William Letford(Carcanet, 2023); pbk, £14.99 ‘Now the world’s broken I feel safer being surrounded by people who can put things together’ (‘Starlings’) From Our Own Fire is William Letford’s third poetry collection, following Bevel (2012) and Dirt (2016). He was the winner of the New Writer’s Award from the Scottish Book Trust in 2008. It Read More
Hannah Lavery(Polygon, Birlinn, 2022); pbk. £10.99 As the title suggests, Hannah Lavery’s collection is a triptych possessing multiplicities. The reader is brought along through scenes and sights that could be from the author themselves, or could be anyone, yet which all share in the difficulties, tragedies, and memories that are embroiled in race, class, sexuality Read More
SEKXPHRASTICSJane Goldman(Dostoyevsky Wannabe Originals; 2021). £12.00 With SEKXPHRASTIKS, Jane Goldman delivers a poetry collection that is at once a delight and a difficult undertaking. It is a dizzying whirlwind of feminism, of queer solidarity, of love and grief and fury and tongue twisters. This is a profoundly intertextual collection. To try and cross reference every Read More
Leontia Flynn(Cape Poetry, 2023); pbk, £12. Is an image always a representation of something material that we see on the outside of us, or can it be something that we inhabit internally, providing us with a shape to express something otherwise that isn’t quite so easily realised? In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard suggests Read More
Rachel Mann(Carcanet 2024); £11.99 Rachel Mann’s second poetry collection, Eleanor Among the Saints, begins in the seamstress’s workshop with the poem ‘Embroidering a Priest’. He I we shall be complete, he will forget (we all do) The mysteries of his making, a birth. He will be All flounce, a skin, layers of bride mesh, He shall Read More
George Paterson (Into Books, 2023); pbk; £10.99 Westerwick is the second novel from George Paterson, whose sensational 2022 debut The Girl, The Crow, The Writer, The Fighter was always going to be a tough act to follow. Like Paterson’s first novel, Westerwick is a crime thriller, but it diverges sharply from its predecessor with a local Read More
Yorgos Lanthimos (dir)USA / UK / Ireland, 2023 Poor Things, a continuation of Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone’s creative collaboration (The Favourite (2018) and Bleat (2022)), is a strange yet intoxicating wonderland, full of soul, humour and sex. An adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, the film is set in a 19th 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