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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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