“The loss of a mother must be something very strange…”. This epigraph from Sigmund Freud sets the scene for Emily Berry’s superb second collection, Stranger, Baby, which concerns the sense of dislocation, “dismantlement” and alterity brought about by intense grief. The suicide of her mother left the narrator/Berry all at sea from the age of Read More
Time, which is itself encased in stunning script: Baikal poured into a single shell or glass receptacle. Belfast folk aver there was nothing wrong with the Titanic when she left their slipway. As that city’s inaugural laureate Sinéad Morrissey arrives in Newcastle, her most recent collection On Balance opens by contemplating the fated liner’s Read More
Choman Hardi (Bloodaxe Books, 2015); pbk, £9.95 This is the second poetry collection by Kurdish poet, Choman Hardi. Born in Sulaimani, Iraq, Hardi moved to the UK with her family as asylum seekers after the genocide of Iraqi Kurds in 1988 when 100,000 civilians were killed. She is the daughter of celebrated Kurdish poet, Ahmed Hardi. Read More
It seems self-evident that there are different kinds of poetry but this truism is well worth restating. For readers of the modern lyric whose appeal might lie in the small imagistic fragment, a well-wrought urn of words and music that speaks to a sudden, vital moment of perception as creative renewal (that sudden slant of Read More
There are few poets active today with the wit, warmth and erudition of Ian Duhig. Since his 2003 debut The Lammas Hireling he has assembled a body of work rivalling that of any other poet for sustained colour, insight and invention. His work mixes comedy and tragedy, and his poems often come with a complex 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
Harry Giles, brought up tri-lingually with Orcadian, Scots and “English”, sets out his stall in “Brave”, the opening poem of his first full collection, Tonguit, which was short-listed for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award in 2015: Acause incomer will aywis be a clarty wird, acause this tongue A gabber wi will nivver be the real Read More
True, we will never be beyond our histories. And so I am the island. And so this is a warning. Wife opens with “Dangerous Things” ; a few pages later, the full-page prose poem “Dictionary” sets out a clear stall as to how that titular word might be explored, initially from a European perspective, then Read More
Peter Riley’s 18th poetry publication, Due North, is a poem of twelve chapters that builds a larger story with roots deeply imbued in movement. Whether it be a search for work or finding inner happiness, the poet is concerned with the restless nature of the human mind and the displacement of those who wander without Read More
“My body is a series of bodies: / now & before” writes Matthew Siegel, in “The electric body”, and there is perhaps no better way to introduce Blood Work. His collection addresses themes of the physical self primarily, dealing with illness (hospital visits, and relationships), but also features occasional portraits of a broken family. For Read More