There are poems in this collection that knocked me clean to the ground… The subject is crucial, but it’s the beauty of the poems which hold it all together….so what makes Lyall’s title special? There is her ability to bring such a dazzling array of raw emotion to the page without a hint of over-sentimentality. But there is also her profound ear for lyric and language.
As a much admired poet, writer and dancer, Tishani Doshi leaves little of the arts world untouched. Countries of the Body was awarded the Forward Prize for Best First Collection while Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. From politics, womanhood to the roots that ground us, this is a journey that the reader is rewarded with…
Love Minus Love is the second collection from Wayne Holloway-Smith. It reads as a continuous, fractured train of thought exploring the poet’s childhood trauma, his relationship with his dad, his mum and mental illness. Sitting on the cover with its hands on its knees is a skeletal robot, the box of its chest burst open. Read More
Tiger Girl is Pascale Petit’s eighth collection. Her previous works include Mama Amazonica which has won, among others, the Ondaatje Prize. This is a rare win for a woman, and for a poet too since the prize is usually awarded to travel writers. But when it comes to Petit’s work, this honour makes sense. Reading Read More
How came separation to chisel, to cherish, to chafe? (‘Some Questions’) There’s always that danger in knowing a writer’s backstory, being aware of historical contexts, or as here, when we live through extreme times and cannot help but use that lens as we read. Over-reading and filtering poems through the reader’s experiences are rightly Read More
In The Lateness of the World is the fourth collection from Carolyn Forché, coiner of the phrase ‘poetry of witness’. Seventeen years on from her last collection, Blue Hour, Forché continues to bear witness with her poems, which here serve as war correspondence, warnings and eulogies, to both individuals and the world around us. Intertextuality Read More
This collection, Maitreyabandhu’s third with Bloodaxe, has an unusual format. It is illustrated with 25 paintings by the post-Impressionist painter, Paul Cezanne, and together the poems in the collection form a meditation on aspects of the artist and his work. Maitreyabandhu, who studied fine art at Goldsmiths, trained as a Buddhist monk and now lives Read More
There is a cyclone fence between ourselves and the slaughter behind it we hover in a calm protected world like netted fish, exactly like netted fish. It is either the beginning or the end of the world, and the choice is ourselves or nothing. (‘Ourselves or Nothing’) Journalist, academic, memoir-writer, editor, poet and human rights’ Read More
By its nature, as the waters of the Ocean, the extent of heaven’s bliss cannot be defined. But the sphere of human happiness is like a dew-drop clinging to a blade of grass. Vidagama Maitreya, Budugunalamkaraya (‘Beauteous Virtues of the Buddha’, 15th century). Epigraph taken from The True Paradise, Gamini Salgado. Reading and re-reading The Read More
Certain kinds of children’s stories have long promised that anything is possible at night when the rest of the world is asleep. So there is a certain magic in just the conceit behind the title of Niall Campbell’s Forward Prize shortlisted second collection. A ‘noctuary’, we are told, is ‘a diary for the late hours’ Read More
