Phoebe Power’s Shrines of Upper Austria beckons to the wayfarers. An amalgamation of poetry and prose, the collection is a seamless combination of imagery and narration. With its vocal fragments and lyricism, it is both political and perspicacious. Power’s Shrines of Upper Austria reads like the “humming” of a relic folk tune, remembered, re-sung, and Read More
The great Gaius Valerius Catullus lived, loved and died in northern Italy around the time of Julius Caesar and Cicero. Not much is known about him other than what can be gleaned from his poems, for example, that he had a great fondness of kissing: Give me a thousand kisses, then one hundred, then a Read More
At a forgotten house I see my mother opening some back pantry door, Her who died forty years later, Remind her who I am. She seems preoccupied, Almost fades out, the scene – a home? – suspended. Perhaps, though, turning, less absorbed, she whispered: ‘Come back when you have died.’ (‘Wild and Wounded’) A Michael Read More
Gillian Clarke is a writer with a deep sense of attachment. Born in Cardiff in 1937 and living now in Ceredigion, Clarke held the position of National Poet of Wales from 2008 to 2016. Her newest collection of poetry continues this relationship, but also broadens it: the landscape and the culture of Wales is a Read More
Imagine the poet as a sandwich-board man, with his daily routine of spreading the word. Dennis O’Driscoll was such a poet – plain-speaking, astute, wary of ornament – his poetry pronounces ‘every day’ on the board at the front, and ‘death’ at the back, as he walks away. Born in Tipperary, on New Year’s Day Read More
Has David Morley really “cast off the worlds of myth and magical fable” as the back blurb of this collection suggests? His shape-shifting, shift-shaping Romani folk tales are what has made his work so wonderfully distinctive so far. He won the 2015 Ted Hughes Award for The Invisible Gift, his Selected Poems. Is this collection Read More
The poems in this, Bird’s fifth collection, explode on the page, bristling with a vision of sanity within madness, order within chaos. She has the ability to describe a tortured soul in a twenty-first century manner, bringing humour, contemporary idiom and irony into the work. The poems often sound like the poet is coming down Read More
Sure, there is a kernel of some mattered thing in here and understood if only you can eat it and make it matter much. ({{du|he|tao}}) Eric Langley works as a lecturer at UCL, specialising in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature. Although he has had previous publications Read More
This is Tara Bergin’s second poetry collection; her first, published in 2013, This is Yarrow, won the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Shine/Strong Award so it comes as no surprise that The Tragic Death of Eleonore Marx should excite much interest. Deservedly so, this is a collection from a unique poetic voice. Playful, dreamlike, with Read More
Time, which is itself encased in stunning script: Baikal poured into a single shell or glass receptacle. Belfast folk aver there was nothing wrong with the Titanic when she left their slipway. As that city’s inaugural laureate Sinéad Morrissey arrives in Newcastle, her most recent collection On Balance opens by contemplating the fated liner’s Read More