While A Map Towards Fluency might be Kelly’s first poetry collection, it shows an impressive imagination and originality. The poet is both partly deaf and partly Danish, though entirely unable to understand her mother’s native tongue, and she has incorporated both of these aspects of her life into her poetry, which focuses on the power of words and the idea of fluency.
Did I say I was never a victim? […] I helped him with good grace and inside I knew every complication I learned to lie and it was barefaced on my lies they built a civilisation (‘Odysseus welcomed from the sea by Nausicaa’) Poet, and significantly translator, Sasha Dugdale’s fourth collection, Deformations, takes two important, Read More
The Air Year is Caroline Bird’s sixth collection with Carcanet. Her most recent and highly successful, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. Bird, who published her first collection at the age of 15, displays an astonishing talent and a unique ‘voice’, and is Read More
Rebecca Watts’ second poetry collection Red Gloves is a gathering of objects and their willingness to remain or disappear, along with our willingness, as humans, to stay or to leave; it is an embodiment of a decline transpiring right under our noses. The author uses a hobnob of narrative and lyrical techniques, creating arcane, uninterrupted Read More
Nineveh is an astounding debut collection full of originality and adding to the vast and rich culture of Jewish poetry. It uses the stylistic device of hyperbole to disclose some of our self-destructive habits in the age of media. The author borrows, rethinks and comments on many of the literary greats before; Yehuda Halevi, Paul Read More
Donegal Tarantella is Irish poet Moya Cannon’s sixth collection of poetry. In proper Cannon style, this assemblage of poetry incorporates a raw, lyrical cadence in the appreciation of landscape and history to deliver a melody of words finely tuned for the page. Cannon’s poetry is a slow burn of rich imagery and poetic diction, creating Read More
Sigmund Freud coined the phrase ‘afterwardness’ to describe the belated understanding that occurs with the passage of time. It is the ripening of past events by age and experience – a form of alchemy. The concept has inspired the title of a new book of poetry by Iranian born, British poet Mimi Khalvati. Her collection Read More
Christine Marendon’s debut collection Heroines from Abroad are poems written in her native German. She has been published online, in magazines, and anthologies. This bi-lingual collection is about reflecting on life. The poems are not always straightforward and take some time to process. Since they are never longer than a single page, one has time Read More
Evelyn Schlag’s All Under One Roof captivates the reader using conversational prose, and a pattern of discovery in the innocent encounter of the places and the experiences that the speaker of the poem grows through. Translated by Kareen Leeder with a fine touch, the collection draws from her two German-language collections – Language of a Read More
Gabriel Josipovici’s The Cemetery in Barnes (2018) is a very short novel, with the story spread across a mere one hundred pages. However, this is a novel of burning intensity that leaves the reader in a constant state of uncertainty with plotline that jumps between different phases in the protagonist’s, an unnamed translator, life. These Read More