Iain Bamforth’s A Doctor’s Dictionary: Writings on Medicine and Culture is a collection of essays, written by a doctor-cum-poet, which at first seems to offer little in the way of enticement to the reader: it contains copious amounts of enumeration and, as a consequence, lengthy sentences that are interlaced with heavy but necessary levels of Read More
As a poet who often courts the epithet, “a poet for the people”, one would think this phrase would perhaps daunt an artist as far into his career as the 77-year-old Les Murray. This is not the case, as can be seen clearly in Waiting for the Past, the prolific poet’s fourth full-length collection in Read More
The Observances of Kate Miller’s debut collection are more than observations, more than watchfulness; they are imbued with an appreciation of ritual, whether human or, in nature, a ritual-like patterning. Such is her acute scrutiny that for much of the time the poet erases herself, willingly passive in a world intensely experienced. The first two Read More
The epigraph for Eavan Boland’s latest collection is taken from Virginia Woolf’s essay, Three Guineas – “The outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country.’” Boland might herself be, “a woman without a country”, given her peripatetic life, dividing her time between Dublin and California where she is Director of the Read More
Carol Rumens, in the Guardian (24 March 2014) reviewed one short poem from this collection and used more words than I have for the whole book. The poem she picked, “Critique of Judgement”, is one of my own favourites because it is deceptively simple, using almost clichéd metaphors and similes but configuring them in a Read More
If Kei Miller hasn’t produced a poetry collection since 2010, the intervening years have been anything but unproductive: two marvellous novels, a blog, a doctorate, editing work and a wonderful collection of essays. Yet Miller’s poetic sensibility is special; his ability to suggest a transcendent luminosity in the single line or a small commonplace detail, Read More
Bill Manhire is the pre-eminent voice of New Zealand poetry; that country’s first Laureate, and author of over a dozen collections, stretching back to the earliest part of the 1970s. He found some notoriety in his early career when a short poem, “Wingatui”, whose meaning was partially rooted in the vernacular of the New Zealand Read More
Parallax is an astronomical term for the apparent displacement of an object caused by a change in the point of observation. In this wide-ranging collection of the same name, short-listed for the 2013 Forward Prize, Morrissey considers from different angles how our position affects what and how we see. In several poems, Morrissey’s lens is Read More