Tripping Over Clouds

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.’

Forgetting

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

Fury (SHORTLISTED, 2020 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION)

In this latest collection of poems, David Morley, prize-winning poet and Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University, puts his versatile lyrical toolkit on display. Sustaining his interest in the Romany gypsy community, its mythology and folklore—subjects of his previous Poetry Book Society Recommendation and Choice books, The Invisible Kings and The Gypsy and the Read More

Homunculus

‘I cannot live, just fucking let me die.’ Whether intentionally or not, James Womack’s translation, if we can call it that, of Maximian’s Elegies comes at a rather appropriate time. A global pandemic ravaging the world with seemingly no end in sight, ecological and societal collapse perhaps just a few decades around the corner, we Read More

Moving House

Theophilus Kwek is a prolific writer with five collections to his credit. His latest, Moving House, articulates a preoccupation with the themes of migration, belonging, colonial history, and the turbulent politics of the present. Kwek is uniquely qualified to tackle these themes. He grew up in Singapore, graduated with a degree in history and politics, and Read More

ERRANT

Errant is a fascinating collection that delves into the poet’s past experiences, with influences from other writings and encounters with other creative minds. Gabriel Levin’s sixth collection doesn’t fail to uncover, intrigue and take the reader through a myriad of places journeying between the poet’s homelands in the West and the Middle East. Levin who Read More

Poems

  Sextus Propertius (ca. 50 BCE – 15 BCE) may not be the most famous Roman poet of the Augustan age, but possibly unjustly so. Patrick Worsnip has now translated Propertius’ elegiac poems for the modern reader, reinterpreting the 2007 Oxford Classical Text as swift, easy-to-read verse poetry. No prior knowledge of Latin literature is Read More

A Kingdom of Love

Rachel Mann’s A Kingdom of Love is a collection of incantatory free verse that leaves a pattern of allusions for readers with religious inclinations to discover. The sensual and intellectual writing within demonstrates what language can do when tackling weighty issues such as the presence of God, the reality of death, suffering and love. In Read More

City of Departures (FORWARD PRIZE SHORTLISTED, BEST COLLECTION)

City of Departures represents departures from home, touching down in a number of European cities, but it also represents a departure from reality, diving deep into an uncanny, dream landscape. That landscape is urban, but it is not to be found in the busy carriageways and shopping centres, nor the packed pubs and restaurants and travel Read More

Significant Other (FORWARD PRIZE SHORTLISTED, THE FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION)

Isabel Galleymore’s first full collection begins with an epigraph from Donna Haraway drawing attention to a planetary ecology where different species share developmental trajectories and living spaces; these are ‘companion species’ that are nevertheless distinct and irreducible one to another. The challenge in Significant Other is to avow species strangeness without estrangement. Not to exoticize Read More