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Featured image of A Career in Accompaniment

A Career in Accompaniment

What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices? Robert Hayden, “Those winter Sundays”. Northumbrian poet Alex Reed’s debut pamphlet is weighted by his former professional and academic capacities in family therapy, and more gravely by his personal experience of caring for his partner Jan who has multiple sclerosis. The severity Read More

Featured image of Come to Me

Come to Me

“Ergo bibamus, my prince, we stole an entire country like one empty heart.” Latvian poet, Kārlis Vērdiņš (born in 1979) has already been anthologised in Arc’s Six Latvian Poets (2011, also translated by Ieva Lešinska) but with four full poetry collections, a career encompassing criticism, translation, song lyrics, libretti and more, he is both versatile Read More

Featured image of Happiness

Happiness

If the reader seeks hearts and flowers in the sunnily-named Happiness, they are to be found, albeit pumping viscerally or severed in vases. Jack Underwood questions how we experience, understand, appreciate and attempt to capture that sometimes elusive state. In something of a Ying/Yang complement he explores whether happiness is possible without its shadow boxer. Read More

Featured image of Alternative Values: Poems and Paintings

Alternative Values: Poems and Paintings

Everybody deserves recognition for their creative achievements, unshadowed by backstories and illustrious family comparisons. Rightly, this courageous painter-poet has long been outspoken, criticising those choosing to play with her biography to suit their own ends. The press release is wisely oblique on this aspect. I turned away from the room’s elephant. Frieda Hughes is probably Read More

Featured image of Glasgow: Mapping the City

Glasgow: Mapping the City

Likely every former Glasgow schoolchild – even those of us secretly from adjacent places like Renfrewshire – will have a notion of how Scotland’s largest city grew from its more easterly beginnings at one side of the Clyde. We all have a shadowy sense of how our city became something much bigger: more encompassing, and Read More

Featured image of Geis

Geis

Book jackets are interesting indeed, ideally giving generously before even a word inside is seen.  Madeline von Foerster’s arresting tempera panel Invasive Species II makes an apt introduction to the complex nature of Caitríona O’Reilly’s third collection, Geis.  On the back cover, Patrick Crotty, in The Irish Times, praises The Nowhere Birds (Bloodaxe 2001), shortlisted Read More

Featured image of Charms Against Lightning

Charms Against Lightning

James Arthur’s collection is elegantly jacketed; an exquisite, somewhat Oriental-looking painting, framed in grey seems to capture the essence of that very lightning. Can we judge this book by its cover? Firstly, that arrestingly beautiful image,  La Mer,is  by renowned American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell.   Perhaps all is not quite what it seems. On the Read More

Featured image of Cell

Cell

Pamphlets are a marvellous way into poetry publishing for many emergent poets; currently some very challenging, innovative work is appearing in that form. Scotland’s own HappenStance (which has also published Clare Best) has rightly won awards for its beautiful work in this area, and Frogmore Press also create some excellent examples. Generally, it’s a slightly Read More

Featured image of Portrait of the Quince as an Older Woman

Portrait of the Quince as an Older Woman

An arresting title offers a strong launching place for any book but the reader who tries to find the source of this particularly wonderful one will have to wait. The titular poem, unusually, is the very last in this, Ellen Phethean’s most recent, collection. By the time the reader finds it however, she will have Read More

Featured image of Late August Fox

Late August Fox

Alert, morning sharpened by pre-breakfast sun you turn under orange descents   foretelling in rowans. Pathed   ginger, bright past   crocosmia flames, thrown   at this garden’s end.   Monitoring summer’s last breath, you   skinny in – amber, aware.   © Beth McDonough</blockquote >

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