DURA homepage
Skip main navigation menu
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact Us
  • A-Z
  • Submissions
Skip main content

Featured image of Top Doll

Top Doll

Karen McCarthy Woolf(Dialogue Books, 2024); hbk, £20      Infinity is an episode long     and troubling to decipher [,]                                          Dolly How might a writer work their way into writing an expansive historical telling of the vastness of United States, uncovering a multitude of people, of oppressions, victories, defeats and ongoing struggles?  Recalling the cliché, ‘When Read More

Featured image of Strike (Shortlisted, Forward Poetry Prize Best Collection)

Strike (Shortlisted, Forward Poetry Prize Best Collection)

Sarah Wimbush(Stairwell Books, 2024); pbk, £15.00      300 million years of compression     dripping through their hands.                                                    (‘Boy Riddlers’) Trade union activists reading Sarah Wimbush’s Strike will recognise those turbulent meetings, the passions, pains, waved placards, and they will know both the lasting comradeship and the perpetual divisions germinated during prolonged strife. They will be Read More

Featured image of Fox Trousers

Fox Trousers

Eithne Hand (Salmon Poetry, 2020); pbk: €12,00 Wherever your political inclinations, in the aftermath of the UK’s most recent election, it’s likely we can agree that we have all endured a certain amount of tired, repetitive debate. In poetry, probably, there are parallels in the regularly trundled out arguments polarising page and stage, discussions which Read More

Featured image of Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire

Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire

MacGillivrayBloodaxe (2023)Pbk:£14.99      my real marks…I hide beneath my overcoat, trace     the seams of its rough-sewn darts: skins shield, sweats salt, but     anatomies of sorrow, only death reveals.                    (Celestial Metre: Wounded Centaur Hexameter) In July 2022, MacGillivray (‘matrilineal Highland pen-name of writer, artist and musician Kirsten Norrie’) interred family ashes in the clan enclave on Read More

Featured image of When The Whooper Swans Came

When The Whooper Swans Came

This is the poet’s first collection, Perthshire-based Picton Smith and it comes with considerable verse credentials, already having been long-listed in the National Poetry Competition, commended in the Hippocrates Prize, and placed second in the Neil Gunn Writing Competition; she also holds a PhD in Contemporary Scottish Poetry.  When The Whooper Swans Came demonstrates what a pamphlet can achieve. This is a taut beauty, flensed of flab, an example of less being more, with the promise of a great deal yet to come.

Featured image of my name is abilene (Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023, Shortlisted)

my name is abilene (Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023, Shortlisted)

Rachael Allen describes a collection which ‘is a haunting’, whilst John Greening terms it ‘almost a verse novel’. I’m uncertain where the parameters lie, but in this Fenland Gothic tale, Elisabeth Sennit Clough (who is from that area) conveys the almost-trippy drift from the subconscious, ingrained with something painfully real. And all of it arrives with a level of formal poetic crafting which lifts this narrative into the extraordinary. 

Featured image of Ghost Passage

Ghost Passage

Most famously, Seamus Heaney remarked on ‘chiming the ancient with the modern’. In Ghost Passage, Josephine Balmer’s task is similarly charged. Her rich publication record includes her own poetry, Classical verse translations, editorship of anthologies and, arguably most closely in the context of this latest collection, Piecing Together the Fragments: translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry (OUP, 2013). This is a poet very ready to write this book.

Featured image of Continuous Creation

Continuous Creation

In spite of the poet’s undeniable fastidiousness in presenting his lines, being Les Murray’s editor must have had mercurial moments. Jamie Grant provides an illuminating ‘Note on the Text’ to open the great Australian’s final collection.

Featured image of All the Men I Never Married (Shortlisted, 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection)

All the Men I Never Married (Shortlisted, 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection)

None of the poems in this, Kim Moore’s more recent collection, have formal titles. Numbers, yes, and the contents’ list identifies them by their opening words. The acknowledgements credit sources as diverse as Hélène Cixous, Thomas Hardy, Adrienne Rich and Rainer Maria Rilke, but in the opening poem, ‘We are coming’, it’s impossible not to see a baton already being passed from Sylvia Plath; soon after it’s hard to avoid shades of Carol Ann Duffy’s Red Riding Hood, or to hear Hilaire Belloc’s ‘waterfall of doom’ building its inevitable force. The tributaries are indeed wide-ranging, which seems entirely in keeping with the complex and very painful issues Moore has the bravery to explore. Rarely has it been more important to read a poetry collection in the sequence the poet has ordered; there are no lines to be skimmed.

Featured image of We Have to Leave the Earth

We Have to Leave the Earth

When a poet opens a collection quoting fellow-poet Ada Limón’s question, ‘Will you tell us the stories that make/ us uncomfortable, but not complicit?’ then already a great deal is being demanded of both the reader and of the writer.

Originally from Belfast, Carolyn Jess-Cooke now is very much part of Glasgow’s vibrant literary scene; she comes to We Have to Leave the Earth with a considerable backdrop of lived, researched and written experience. Pleasingly, her website describes her as being ‘not really bothered about genre’. That’s useful as the evidence of her ability to work beyond boundaries is clear.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 5
  • Next Page »
DURA facebook page

Copyright © 2025 DURA :: Dundee Review of the Arts (DURA)