physical is Andrew McMillan’s debut collection following publications of his work in numerous prestigious magazines and anthologies such as London Review of Books, Modern Poetry in Translation and The Rialto. These poems are personal and moving works, and as the title suggests, they are focused for the most part on the body – exploring its Read More
Mona Arshi presents her debut collection Small Hands, described as “the slow detonation of grief after her brother’s death.” However, it soon becomes clear that death (and its aftermath) is only one of several themes to emerge from the book. At first, she offers such gems as “My Mother’s Hair” and “The Daughters”. Here she Read More
This is the twelfth poetry collection from Pulitzer Prize winner, Paul Muldoon, named by the TLS as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War”. Born in 1951 in Co. Armagh, Muldoon studied at Queens University, but moved to the US in 1980, where he is Howard G B Clark Professor in Read More
I wore out my youth first, and glad I did. How would My dress be newer now If I had played safer? (from Song of the Woman of Breare, translated by Ní Chuilleanáin), 9th Century Old Irish) The cover describes Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s “most recent excavation of memory and examination of time (and timelessness […]) Read More
The worst injury is feeling you don’t belong so much to you – (from “VII”) In a way that sounds obtuse and slightly absurd, I felt unworthy of reviewing this collection upon my first reading. A young Scottish white man forming opinions on the effectiveness of a middle-aged Jamaican-American black woman’s writings on racism (with Read More
McCarthy Woolf’s debut poetry collection, An Aviary of Small Birds, is an elegy to her stillborn son, Otto. Avoiding sentimentality, she relives the awful time of Otto’s stillbirth, and its aftermath, treating the practicalities and profound grief with unflinching honesty and courage. “My Limbs Beat Against Glass” is a terse eight-line poem which pulls Read More
Liz Berry opens her debut collection, Black Country, with the jubilant line, “When I became a bird, Lord, nothing could not stop me”, and, indeed, she never stops soaring. Themes range from summers of childhood innocence to sex and marriage, all set against Black Country landscapes, history and characters. In these dazzling, sensuous, and utterly Read More
If Kei Miller hasn’t produced a poetry collection since 2010, the intervening years have been anything but unproductive: two marvellous novels, a blog, a doctorate, editing work and a wonderful collection of essays. Yet Miller’s poetic sensibility is special; his ability to suggest a transcendent luminosity in the single line or a small commonplace detail, Read More
Parallax is an astronomical term for the apparent displacement of an object caused by a change in the point of observation. In this wide-ranging collection of the same name, short-listed for the 2013 Forward Prize, Morrissey considers from different angles how our position affects what and how we see. In several poems, Morrissey’s lens is Read More