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Featured image of Noctuary (Forward Prize Shortlisted, Best Collection)

Noctuary (Forward Prize Shortlisted, Best Collection)

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

Featured image of Insistence (Shortlisted, T S Eliot Poetry Prize)

Insistence (Shortlisted, T S Eliot Poetry Prize)

Ailbhe Darcy’s second collection is a literary force of nature fearlessly exploring themes of love and grief. Much like her debut collection, Imaginary Menagerie, which begins in Dublin and then stretches further afield, Darcy offers a dark telling of the world seen through her eyes. Similarly, in Insistence, an unsettling feeling of hopelessness and anxiety Read More

Featured image of Luck is the Hook

Luck is the Hook

There’s an unexplained comfort in reading Luck is the Hook despite many of the poems dealing with pain and, often, discomfort. Each one contains a space devoid of explanation, a sacred place of intimacy for both the poet and the reader. Awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014, Luck is the Hook is Read More

Featured image of  Jinx (SHORTLISTED FOR 2018 FORWARD PRIZES FOR POETRY: THE FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION)

 Jinx (SHORTLISTED FOR 2018 FORWARD PRIZES FOR POETRY: THE FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION)

Abigail Parry’s debut collection Jinx is an exercise in sleight of hand, it’s a trick. Parry weaves the familiar elements of nursery rhymes and folktales with darker themes of sex, death and guilt into an uncomfortable combination that plays with readers’ expectations. She borrows characters and stories from those sharp-edged fairy tales with undercurrents of Read More

Featured image of This Changes Things

This Changes Things

Claire Askew’s debut collection, This Changes Things, opens with “Dukkha”, a starkly beautiful and shocking poem, at once lyrical and political.  It moves from a list of basic human needs – simple shelter, water and food – before escalating to include guns, banks and barbed wire to protect property and resources. It ends chillingly: [….]                Read More

Featured image of Tongulish

Tongulish

Rita Ann Higgins’s eleventh poetry collection, Tongulish, pulses with conversation. It is a stroll down the street; the ambience of the spoken word splayed across the page. Conversation is volatile and ever-changing from subject to subject; in much the same way, the poems within the collection cover a plethora of subject matter. It is a Read More

Featured image of All the Prayers in the House

All the Prayers in the House

Good poetry, as Robert Crawford said about John Ashbery’s word craft, “levitates language” from the page. As I read and re-read Miriam Nash’s first book-length collection of poetry, All the Prayers in the House, I am struck with a similar leavening in the composition of the poems as prayers and reading them aloud as “PRAY-ers”. Read More

Featured image of So Glad I’m Me (SHORTLISTED, 2017 T S ELIOT POETRY PRIZE)

So Glad I’m Me (SHORTLISTED, 2017 T S ELIOT POETRY PRIZE)

Ten minutes ago, I wrote these words. Ten minutes; now I think I think them. They knew me first, I fear, another me went first and thought them. Roddy Lumsden’s tenth collection, So Glad I’m Me, has a misleading title; in fact, one of the major themes of the collection questions the very nature of Read More

Featured image of The Months

The Months

            Already from the south             I heard them weeks ago             creaking above me through the air at dusk –             and then the cold. Eighteen below,             each pond a cataract of ice. Where did they go?   Read More

Featured image of Bear

Bear

They say if you don’t like the Scottish weather just wait a bit and it will change. Arguably, the same might be said of Bear. This collection is so varied that if the style of one poem is not to the reader’s taste, moving on is hardly problematic and very shortly a more agreeable offering Read More

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