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
Jane Draycott’s words have always encapsulated a timeless beauty with a charm which is somehow both otherworldly yet unmistakably rooted in our earth. In this her fourth collection of poems, following 2009’s Over, she continues in this vein. “It seems like forever”, she writes in the collection’s titular poem, “We are going to tame the Read More
Thomas McCarthy’s new collection Pandemonium is a war cry. Written post-economic collapse in Ireland (2008), he uses the tools of his trade to rage, amass and, ultimately, heal: (…) let pandemonium Cease, let the wild confetti of poets Be withdrawn from the bitterness of the streets. This passionate, thoughtful collection is at once a response Read More
Temples and monuments reach for transcendence, beauty lies in the carcass of an insect, cities within cities, take your eyes from the heavens, look long and deep. These words greet us at the collection’s beginning, encapsulating beautifully the essence of William Letford’s Dirt. In the eyes of many, skywards is not necessarily paired with insects Read More
Roger Francis Langley was a Warwickshire-born poet, as well as a close friend and contemporary of avant-gardist J.H.Prynne. Complete Poems is a summation of his writing spanning a relatively short career – from 1994’s Twelve Poems to his final collection The Face of It, published four years before his death in 2011. His poem, Read More
Ardent angler and Yorkshireman Chris McCully has followed a long and fruitful career in academia both at the University of Manchester and in the Netherlands. Born in Bradford in 1958, he now resides in Colchester where he researches English poetic form and metrics at the University of Essex and publishes in a range of genres Read More