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
Oh Heart of the Web, Heart of Bracken, give me the strength to persevere. (“Walking the Wood”) For a reader who loves the mystery and fairy-tale quality of wild forest lands, the nature of Anna Robinson’s second collection, Into the Woods, is pure food for the creative soul. Set in imaginary woodlands in Read More
“Carnal”, “emetic”, “wilfully avant-garde”, “dizzying”, “onanistic”, “brave”…. These are but a few of the impressions that ended up scribbled in front of me as I read through [————]: Placeholder, a collection that cherry picks from the 2004-15 work of American poet Rob Halpern. In truth, this collection pummelled me: it pulled me all over the Read More
“I’ve said on many occasions that if a poem, once written, is exactly the same as its author first imagined it would be, then it is almost certainly a failure, and that artistic success must always involve a process of transformation.” This is Simon Armitage reflecting on the “almost electrically bright” Snow Stone poem’s lettering Read More