Philip Gross dealt with death and ageing in his 2013 collection, Later, and with elemental forces in the T.S. Eliot Prize winning The Water Table, published in 2009. Love Songs of Carbon unites these interests in an extended contemplation of the molecule as the building block of life. In Love Songs, the ageing process is Read More
Choman Hardi (Bloodaxe Books, 2015); pbk, £9.95 This is the second poetry collection by Kurdish poet, Choman Hardi. Born in Sulaimani, Iraq, Hardi moved to the UK with her family as asylum seekers after the genocide of Iraqi Kurds in 1988 when 100,000 civilians were killed. She is the daughter of celebrated Kurdish poet, Ahmed Hardi. Read More
A luridly pink cover and a suggestive title first drew me to The Art of Scratching. Shazea Quraishi is a Pakistani-Canadian writer,and the second and middle sections of her new collection were published in her first pamphlet The Courtesans Reply (2012). Having lived in Pakistan, Canada, Spain, and London, her influences are myriad. Of Skyros, Read More
If your first foray into a multi-award-winning poet’s work is his eleventh published collection, it’s natural that you might approach it with a little bit of trepidation. That, in any case, was my experience. Indeed, a sense of the mysterious and the uncertain never quite left me throughout my reading of Matthew Sweeney’s Inquisition Lane Read More
This intriguing collection by A B Jackson journeys through the fantastical and the mundane with a somewhat counter-intuitive outlook upon both. Jackson approaches his topics whole-heartedly, allowing his reader to wrestle with his ideas. In some (most notably in “Inexpressible Island” and “The Find”) there might be an apparently graphic and crude feel to his Read More
at the time of writing the boundless joy of a pre-walk dog is suggesting itself in the writer’s chest (“immortelle”) Beauty/Beauty is Rebecca Perry’s first book-length poetry collection. The London-based poet sculpts a world from snapshots of memories and eulogies, written sensitively from the female perspective. As the title suggests, Beauty/Beauty is a mirror, offering Read More
The Guardian Art Critic, Adrian Searle, wrote that there are many artists, “who, furrowing their brows and trying to convince us of their seriousness, aren’t half as profound or compelling.” He was referring to Turner Prize 2013 Nominee David Shrigley, but he might equally have been speaking about Selima Hill, whose latest work, Jutland includes Read More
Philip Gross’s Later follows his much praised collection Deep Field, and the T.S. Eliot prize-winning The Water Table. Largely inspired by the difficult final years he spent alongside his father, this collection moves through the complex traumas of the failing body, and the creeping uncertainty of the mourning process, towards a tentative interaction with the Read More
Ahren Warner’s first two collections, Confer and Pretty, may have simple titles but inside the covers you’ll find poems teeming with conceptual and linguistic complexities. Both books demand the reader’s full participation – I found myself conferring not only with Warner’s explanatory endnotes but also with Google to find translations of French and Greek words, Read More