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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 >