“The poetic moans of this century have been, for the most part, a banal patina of snobbery, vanity and sophistry: we’re in need of a new prosody[…]” (“Letter on Riots and Doubt”) If, like me, you spend too much of your free time skulking around the darker, meme-ier corners of YouTube, you may have encountered Read More
Born in Cambridgeshire to American parents in 1933, Anne Stevenson has over sixteen published collections to date of predominantly lyrical works. Although her early adult years were spent in the United States where she graduated from the University of Michigan and published her first collection, Stevenson later returned to the U.K. to live permanently. She Read More
They say a lifelike portrait has eyes that follow you round the room; the four pairs of eyes on the cover of this collection by Maureen Duffy seem to do just that. The striking design by Rupert Gowar-Cliffe is arresting. Whose eyes are these? Are they Duffy’s? Or are they our mind’s eyes as we Read More
There are more than seven words for winter in Greenlandic, and when you have read Nancy Campbell’s Disko Bay you’ll know why. The poet has worked as writer in residence for many ecological institutions and over her career has authored many non-fiction books – including How to Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic: An Arctic Read More
Every Little Sound is Ruby Robinson’s debut collection. The title embodies the inspiration behind the poems – “internal gain”: the “internal volume control which helps us amplify and focus on quiet sounds in times of threat, danger or intense concentration”. This concentrated mastery of attention is reflected in the poet’s lines, both in those which Read More
One might think that if you are the Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Cambridge University creative attempts might turn out to be overly academic. Or you could be Simon Jarvis and write Jerusalem Deleted, which is an epic poem – an unusual choice considering that most contemporary poetry tends to be published Read More
This collection of Cornish poet Jack Clemo’s work consolidates poetry from all his published volumes in the first major poetry publication since his death over twenty years ago. These Selected Poems, edited by Luke Thompson, are designed to reinstate Clemo as a celebrated national poet. With this resurgence of interest in Clemo, it is important Read More
In his latest collection, seasoned poet and scrupulous “life critic” Alan Brownjohn writes candidly of modern life and the human experience. His penchant for the trivialities of la vie quotidienne manifests through an acutely realist and, at times, satirical lens. These thirty nine poems might be said to emulate the values of European cinema’s Neorealist Read More
It becomes clear from the very first poem in this collection, that Crib is no light bedtime reading. This sub-sequence of forty poems is a selection from a larger collection of a hundred and eleven poems, written for the poet’s young son and completed on his first birthday. All of these one hundred and eleven Read More
The human body is constantly changing. Capable of being strong, developing healthily through adolescence, for example, it can also weaken through illness or injury. In One Still Thing, Nell Regan’s latest poetry collection, the fluctuating fortunes of the human body is presented through the weather and different elements. These changes (from solid to water to Read More