‘The words […] a line of curses, promises, demands, wishes, intoxicants and offerings […] sets all the prayers in the house to glint.’ (From ‘Vespers’, All The Prayers In The House, Miriam Nash). Having grown up in the Catholic faith, courted by pictures and other icons of the tradition (usually from a shrine shop in Read More
Patron Saint of Disappointing Children Praise to this book, now heavy with scurf, pages moist with the persistence of must, your words still breathing, though only just on the bowed shelves of the house of your birth. Praise to the dynasty of something and nothing, the house of which you one day will be head, Read More
Roger Francis Langley was a Warwickshire-born poet, as well as a close friend and contemporary of avant-gardist J.H.Prynne. Complete Poems is a summation of his writing spanning a relatively short career – from 1994’s Twelve Poems to his final collection The Face of It, published four years before his death in 2011. His poem, 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
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
Not for Andy Jackson the esoteric or the pastoral lark ascending, it is realism that is essential to his work. Jackson has been published in a wide range of magazines and periodicals and had his first collection, The Assassination Museum, published in 2010, also by Red Squirrel Press. In this his second collection, Jackson takes Read More
Before the stiff Monsignor bends To butter me with chrism, do these things for me; air the suit from Gieves & Hawkes, cut to a shape I haven’t been since eighty-three; black and shine my wedding shoes with Cherry Blossom from the tin below the stairs; choose a shirt (collar fifteen and a half), Pringle Read More
Stuart Paterson is an Ayrshire-born poet writing in both English and Scots. Border Lines is his third collection, its twenty-four poems focusing on Dumfries & Galloway’s landscape and people. Beginning with a manifesto of sorts; “High Tide at Sandyhills” sees the world open up beyond the Galloway coastline, but ultimately the poet is unable or Read More
You can tell much about a city by its attitudes to the arts. Or perhaps it’s the art that alerts us to the victories and vicissitudes of a city. Even a brief list of Dundee’s leet of literati would include a high number of leading poets, such as W. N. Herbert (one of the editors Read More