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Featured image of The Martian’s Regress (SHORTLISTED, 2020 T S ELIOT PRIZE)

The Martian’s Regress (SHORTLISTED, 2020 T S ELIOT PRIZE)

This collection of 44 Science Fiction poems is a departure from Scots poet J O Morgan’s usual style. His 6 previous poetry publications have been single, book-length poems. Assurances, published in 2018, won the Costa Poetry Award and his previous collections have been nominated for major awards. His poetry tends towards physics and metaphysics;  its Read More

Featured image of Odes

Odes

      […] Dear wall, dear gate, dear stile, dear Dutch door, not a cat-flap nor a swinging door but a one-time piñata. […] Entering any body of work via an “Ode to the Hymen” announces, with undeniable chutzpah, that things are about to change; really, there’s no going back. Sharon Olds’ most recent collection Odes Read More

Featured image of Mancunia (SHORTLISTED, 2017 T S ELIOT POETRY PRIZE)

Mancunia (SHORTLISTED, 2017 T S ELIOT POETRY PRIZE)

Lancashire-born Michael Symmons Roberts is a poet whose time has clearly come, confirmed by a string of recent awards, most notably for his 2013 collection Drysalter which garnered both the Forward and Costa awards. As an ex-pat Mancunian, I was especially looking forward to reading his latest collection, a thrillingly dark tour of my home Read More

Featured image of The Radio (SHORTLISTED, 2017 T S ELIOT POETRY PRIZE)

The Radio (SHORTLISTED, 2017 T S ELIOT POETRY PRIZE)

According to the cover in this, Leontia Flynn’s fourth collection, the poet explores and “resolves the concerns and forms” raised in earlier work, suggesting that the central sequence considers “the constructed (my italics) nature of childhood”. This it does, but elsewhere too there is a pervasive and chafing sense of the constrictions associated with childhood Read More

Featured image of The Abandoned Settlements (SHORTLISTED, 2017 T S ELIOT POETRY PRIZE)

The Abandoned Settlements (SHORTLISTED, 2017 T S ELIOT POETRY PRIZE)

The very act of opening The Abandoned Settlements is pleasurable. With its tactile, foldback cover and ink-blue end papers, as an object, this book is beautiful. The cover photograph – an aged light switch on a wall of peeling turquoise paint – foreshadows the textures and layers within the poems themselves. The first poem, “Line Read More

Featured image of Night Sky with Exit Wounds (SHORTLISTED, 2017 TS ELIOT POETRY PRIZE; WINNER, 2017 FORWARD POETRY PRIZE FOR BEST DEBUT COLLECTION)

Night Sky with Exit Wounds (SHORTLISTED, 2017 TS ELIOT POETRY PRIZE; WINNER, 2017 FORWARD POETRY PRIZE FOR BEST DEBUT COLLECTION)

There is a tradition of photography that focuses on urban poverty, decay, disintegration, and entropy; in “urbex”, crumbling, abandoned buildings are transformed into hauntingly and fashionably beautiful images. I couldn’t help but bristle at the title of Ocean Vuong’s newly Forward Prize crowned and now TS Eliot Prize shorlister, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Is Read More

Featured image of Angel Hill

Angel Hill

Michael Longley has been the recipient of some of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world, including the Whitbread, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and most recently the 2017 PEN Pinter Prize. Longley calls his home in Carrigskeewaun, Co Mayo his ‘soul-landscape’; the environment that feeds and inspires his soul. In Angel Read More

Featured image of Testament

Testament

All I want now is my dignity back, To stand on my own unsteady feet […]. Testament is Robert Crawford’s seventh full length collection of poems, and here he writes about a myriad of themes in many different styles. Made up of forty-two poems, Testament is divided into five distinct sections; “Hard-Wearing Flowers”, “A Little Read More

Featured image of Interference Pattern (Shortlisted, 2016 T S Eliot Prize)

Interference Pattern (Shortlisted, 2016 T S Eliot Prize)

Early in the 1980s, I visited an extraordinary installation in the Centre Georges Pompidou. Viewers wore special slippers to enter a room, a carpet to ceiling, wall to wall kinetic/op art environment which seemingly undulated, changing entirely when studied from different positions. The artist’s use of lenticular printing on folded surfaces, in precise mathematical terms, Read More

Featured image of Falling Awake  (Shortlisted, 2016  TS Eliot Poetry Prize; Winner, 2016 Costa Poetry Award)

Falling Awake (Shortlisted, 2016 TS Eliot Poetry Prize; Winner, 2016 Costa Poetry Award)

After reading this collection by Alice Oswald, it came as no surprise to learn that following her studies of Classics at Oxford, Oswald trained as a gardener. Plants, flowers, myths and legends are constant threads that run through her poems. She draws much of her inspiration from the River Dart and the folklore of the Read More

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