Philip Gross dealt with death and ageing in his 2013 collection, Later, and with elemental forces in the T.S. Eliot Prize winning The Water Table, published in 2009. Love Songs of Carbon unites these interests in an extended contemplation of the molecule as the building block of life. In Love Songs, the ageing process is Read More
Paul Beatty (Oneworld, 2016); pbk, £12.99 Paul Beatty’s latest work, Man-Booker Prize 2016 shortlister, The Sellout, is a novel about town planning. Not, perhaps, the stuff of what the New York Times has called “the most badass” American novel in years but, as Beatty’s vivid depictions of L.A. and Washington show, appearances can be deceiving. Read More
You sink in wheat. Slowly. And the more you struggle the worse it gets. So warns the title poem of John Kinsella’s recent selected works. Children “on every farm” across Australia have been issued this warning, alert even “in the midst of play” to the “acrid / chemical smell / of treated wheat”, and the Read More
In a snug, lamp-lit, yellow-stoned vault underneath St. John’s House, StAnza hosts a series of poetry readings under the title, “Border Crossings”. These events, in which two poets read consecutively, stage not only the boundaries between poetic practices, but the national and cultural boundaries that many of the poets have crossed in order to be Read More
For those, like me, who are unfamiliar with haibun, Colin Will’s The Book of Ways looks initially like dense prose poetry. At the start of the book, however, Will provides an illuminating explanation of the form without prescribing interpretations. The advantages of haibun seem to be its ability to balance conversational, observational and autobiographical prose Read More
Lucy Newlyn’s latest poetry collection is, as she puts it in “Not Ours”, “scholar quiet, cerebral”. Earth’s Almanac is a journey both through the seasons and through grief, attempting to find “a grammar of loss – a way of grasping / the shape and structure of desolation” (“Wreck”). The poems cohere around the death of Read More