Raymond Antrobus(Picador Poetry, 2024); pbk, £10.99 Much has been written more recently about new mothers, laughed at, or conspiratorially grimaced with, in face-to-face encounters in various post-natal and toddler groups. And because pregnancy and childbirth are necessarily bodily states, I have often wondered about how fathers imagine themselves into a relationship with the unborn or Read More
Carl Phillips(Carcanet Press, 2024); pbk, £11.99 Carl Phillips asks in ‘Foliage’, ‘When did syntax and life become indistinguishable from one another?’ Art and Life: poetry as the transformation (not transcription) of experience in words. In reading Scattered Snows, to the North, I shall take my cue from Phillips’ essay. For these are thoughtful, expansive, if sometimes Read More
Marjorie Lotfi(Bloodaxe Books, 2023); pbk, £10.99 Majorie Lotfi was born in the United States and moved to Tehran as a child, and then back to her American mother’s hometown of Ohio on the cusp of the Iran Revolution. Currently living in Edinburgh, she seems to have moved around a fair bit. This debut title comes Read More
Leontia Flynn(Cape Poetry, 2023); pbk, £12. Is an image always a representation of something material that we see on the outside of us, or can it be something that we inhabit internally, providing us with a shape to express something otherwise that isn’t quite so easily realised? In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard suggests Read More
Ishion Hutchinson(Faber and Faber, 2023); pbk, £12.99 In a recent interview, Ishion Hutchinson remarked on the invitation to respond to the Imperial War Museum archive that resulted in the discovery of material relating to Caribbean soldiers who fought in the British Army in the First World War which is all but lost to history. Each Read More
Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa’s debut collection of poetry starts with a quotation from Richard Ligon in 1657, ‘For what can poor people do, that are without Letters and Numbers, which is the soul of all business that is acted by Mortals, upon the Globe of this Word.’ Kinshasa asks, how does one speak outside of what is conventionally recognised as words? Might there be alternative languages? How might one recover from ‘the void of first-hand narratives from enslaved people (particularly women)’ something that will make sense to present lives?
The title of Mary Chan’s new poetry collection, Bright Fear, is intriguing. Fear is typically described as dark—even black—moods and colours that suggest negative qualities. In what sense is fear bright then? Well, we are taken on a journey of discovery in three distinctive sections: ‘Grief Lessons’, ‘Ars Poetica’ and ‘Field Notes on a Family’….
A prolific essayist, Chris Arthur’s writing is marked invariably by an expansive curiosity, an omnivorous reading life and spooling philosophical enquiries that begin with an attentiveness to the ordinary. His finely wrought essays are what challenged me to think about essaying as an activity outside the schoolroom, beyond those dry-as-dust abstracts and arguments of professionalised, templated writing that sometimes masquerade for life in the Humanities….
Scottish Dance TheatreDundee Rep, 17-18 March Two pieces from the SDT’s new production are inspired by nature—imagining how we could be something else (a tree or a flock of birds). These create a shared space in a joyous & expansive act of poetic imagination. Pauline Torzuoli, the choreographer, has suggested seeing the piece as ‘a Read More
I picked up this title initially because I still blanche whenever my daughter shows me her new tattoos; but I also heard Helen Mort’s very interesting exchange with Lou Hopper about ‘getting inked’ on Radio 4’s One to One in February last year. Mort is, of course, an award-winning poet that is based in Sheffield and whose interests take in an astonishing range–mountain climbing, trail running, northern cites, conflict and motherhood—all handled with a sure and delicate lyricism, and a poet’s ear for the cadence and fall of the line. So The Illustrated Woman promised much.
