Tripping Over Clouds

Ezra Pound suggested that poets ‘go in fear of abstractions’, and his advice continues to hold much weight. Like any principle of course, not only will excellent exceptions keep occurring, but it deserves to be held to account. Pound would have expected no less. In her second full collection Tripping Over Clouds, Lucy Burnett does exactly that, and ‘underpinning this is a re-imagining of abstraction as a prior state of possibility and potential from which the world and ourselves are constantly re-emerging – as abstraction to, not from.’

The Marks on the Map

Brian Johnstone is far too well-known a figure in the Scottish poetry scene to require any potted biography here. That said, which Brian Johnstone will you meet in The Marks on the Map, his most recent collection?

Lamping for Pickled Fish

If there could ever be the right – the only – title for this poetry collection, then Lamping for Pickled Fish might be it, setting the reader up as it so neatly does for the illicit, for the hidden and obscure and for journeys into unexpected spaces. … McDonough is a forager, avid in pursuit of the wild jewels of shoreline and hedgerow in her native north-east Scotland and a maker. A maker of jam, from Ronnie’s stolen rhubarb; of soused herring in the title poem; of a young adult from a toddler; and, effortlessly, of words from other words.

The M Pages

The M Pages opens with ‘Death of an Actress’, a poem layered with literary references, and heavy with a clever litany of clichés, both witty and poignant. That wit is intrinsic to these poems. Throughout tragic, shocking and sombre passages, Bryce’s fun with wordplay, and her tumbling rhyme never diminish, akin to the irreverent gallows humour which needfully so often accompanies mourning.

THE LONG TAKE (or A Way to Lose More Slowly)

cos cheum nach gabh tilleadh For some, Robin Robertson’s book-length narrative poem is “unclassifiable”. Shortlisted for awards invariably dominated by prose, it is epic in both scale and ambition. Resisting the strict fit of epic form, its protagonist (the aptly-named Walker) is overly human for deification; its netherworld trips, earthly hells. Remembered paradises are also Read More

Killellen lime kiln by Beth McDonough

Find as far inland as Kintyre can allow, map back to an almost-anywhere dot. Out of seasight. Still, on clouded nights, watch Rathlin’s lit pattern censer past. A little industrial structure. One bog-footed cave built for burning. All rabbit shit, trotting-in lost sheep, broken curves open to host brackening rain. A dripped-on Alice, shrunk on Read More

On Balance (Shortlisted, 2017 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection)

     Time, which is itself encased     in stunning script: Baikal     poured into a single     shell or glass receptacle. Belfast folk aver there was nothing wrong with the Titanic when she left their slipway. As that city’s inaugural laureate Sinéad Morrissey arrives in Newcastle, her most recent collection On Balance opens by contemplating the fated liner’s Read More

Selected Poetry & Prose

[S]ongs made dearer when gone than ever they were, sung by heroes, animal spirits[.] There has been a need for this volume for some time, a need perhaps fully established at Riley’s Light, the 2015 Helen Mort-organised Leeds University conference. Indeed many luminaries, Vahni Capildeo, Andrew McMillan, Ian Duhig and more have shared that journey. Read More