William Letford(Carcanet, 2023); pbk, £14.99 ‘Now the world’s broken I feel safer being surrounded by people who can put things together’ (‘Starlings’) From Our Own Fire is William Letford’s third poetry collection, following Bevel (2012) and Dirt (2016). He was the winner of the New Writer’s Award from the Scottish Book Trust in 2008. It Read More
Joe Carrick-Varty(Carcanet, 2023); pbk, £11.99 ‘O rain falling on the stillest lake that was all of our futures’ (‘Ode to a Shotgun’) More Sky is Joe Carrick-Varty’s debut poetry collection and the winner of The Irish Times Book of the Year. Carrick-Varty won the New Poets Prize in 2018 and the Eric Gregory Award in Read More
Kit Fan’s new collection is one that delves into the power of writing, on both the individual and collective level. Its conversation between suffering and healing is made ever more brilliant by Fan’s eloquence and linguistic dexterity. Drawing from life and lived history, the poems shift and change, touch upon love and suffering, running like the ink he so eloquently describes…
In Jason Allen Paisant’s latest collection, Self Portrait As Othello, we see ekphrasis as the active choice of self-examination through the lens of the other. He jumps in and out of the titular painting, looking back on himself through the culture and history that shaped the connection between him and the artwork. The collection intertwines Paisant’s experiences and the fictionalised character of Othello. As Paisant travels the world, so does Othello travel in time, appearing through the collective experience of Black men finding selfhood in a society that denies their humanity….
In spite of the poet’s undeniable fastidiousness in presenting his lines, being Les Murray’s editor must have had mercurial moments. Jamie Grant provides an illuminating ‘Note on the Text’ to open the great Australian’s final collection.
In her first collection, Forty Names, Fayyaz names these women over and over again and often women from her family, whose stories she grew up being told even if, at the time, she didn’t fully understand them. Names are echoed, written first in Persian and then translated into English – an act which revels in the ‘emotional and imaginative’ aspects of translation, as Fayyaz discusses in a Youtube video for Carcanet. The effect is such that the names become almost internalised mini-poems in and of themselves…
Sheri Benning’s Field Requiem is crosshatched with both Biblical and grid references. In the terrifying enormity of the Canadian prairies, which this collection both hymns and mourns, the reader may manage to avoid locating the exact locations (and some may, in any case be fictionalised, wisely), but the layer of the religious aspects cannot be skimmed. The New Testament reference above takes the reader to The Parable of the Minas, which is perhaps less self-evident in its truths than some others.
Victoria Kennefick’s latest collection, Eat Or We Both Starve, is a considered and powerful meditation on what it means to hunger and, subsequently, to consume. Kennefick weaves historical figures, literary references and personal memories into her work in a painstaking attempt to examine hunger in its myriad forms – be it physical, sexual, relational or spiritual. At times, the poems are so interconnected in theme that the entire collection feels concentrated into one sharp burst of writing. Yet it is clear that Kennefick’s process has been refined and reoriented, as many of the poems contain a wisdom and strength – the voice of an embodied womanhood.
Ezra Pound suggested that poets ‘go in fear of abstractions’, and his advice continues to hold much weight. Like any principle of course, not only will excellent exceptions keep occurring, but it deserves to be held to account. Pound would have expected no less. In her second full collection Tripping Over Clouds, Lucy Burnett does exactly that, and ‘underpinning this is a re-imagining of abstraction as a prior state of possibility and potential from which the world and ourselves are constantly re-emerging – as abstraction to, not from.’
This little book addresses big themes. It is a serious but engaging essay which invites reflection on loss and the ways we respond to it, individually and collectively, and how these have changed culturally over time. Josipovici tightly structures twelve short sections, each focussing on an aspect of forgetting and its counterpart remembering, weaving them Read More
