displays of pride, the concupiscent eye bent inward w/ súch deep longing. When readers omit a poem’s title, I’m perturbed. Poets fret over titles. Not just their wording. Should it hold to the left, be centred? Capitalisation? If there is superscription, are italics necessary? Are endnotes too hidden? Are footnotes overly close and distracting? Don’t Read More
This poetry collection is Douglas Dunn’s first since 2001. Since then he has focused on editing poetry anthologies; The Noise of a Fly is an innovative return to form. Here we find work by a mature poet, sometimes painfully self-aware. As ever, Dunn casts new light on diverse subjects, whether environmental or cultural. Douglas Dunn Read More
Pale with a title etched in a sombre serif on the spine, Beast lies waiting for you. The front cover features only the blood-red outline of a man lying on, or perhaps falling through empty space; the back says, in that same copperplate font: “Come to a place like this… and you will understand soon Read More
This is not a read for the faint-hearted for two main reasons: the ghastly topic, and the sheer length of this melancholy novel. Five-hundred-and-sixty pages long, it tackles the difficult subjects of experimentation on and euthanasia of children in Austria during its annexation by Germany. Based on fact, this story is largely set in Am Read More
Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s pre-eminence as a poet is too well known to need any elucidation of course, but perhaps it is worth noting here that his prowess as a translator was also already evident in his Beowulf. Heaney undertook his verse translation of the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid to honour the memory of Read More
Night Photograph is a reissue of Greenlaw’s first collection, originally published in 1993. The collection was shortlisted for the Whitbread and Forward Poetry prizes. Greenlaw’s subsequent work has included fiction and non-fiction, and she has also produced several radio programmes with the BBC. The poet was born in London and she has lived there for Read More
Published under the Faber New Poets initiative and funded by Arts Council England, this is Rachel Curzon’s first collection of published poems. The poet, born in Leeds in 1978, studied English at Oxford and now teaches at a boys’ school in Hampshire. She won the Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and her poems have been Read More
From one son of Dundee to another, Don Paterson, allow me to commend this finely wrought collection – it pulls off something quietly virtuoso that reads keen, true and varied. I sensed something redeeming and intimate about this work, so forgive me if I contrive this review as something like an open letter. This does Read More
…because he has no highfalutin song to sing, no neat message for the nation. (“Goalkeeper with Cigarette”, 1995) To open up this Simon Armitage retrospective is to delve into a treasure trove of the surreal, the unlikely, the ironic, the laugh-out-loud comic, the darkly humorous and the downright horrific. Above all, it is a delightfully Read More