Honorifics (Shortlisted, Forward Prize for Best First Collection)

We have been reading Roland Barthes’ explorations of image and memory in our writing classes. Photographs record the presence of someone “that has been”, but they also express a “temporal hallucination”, like a severed limb whose presence is felt viscerally, an after effect of amputation. This return to a time past in the present moment is beautifully imagined in Honorifics. Miller is Malaysian-American now resident in Scotland, and her debut collection renders loss and separation as memorable, lingering encounters, almost hallucinatory yearnings of leaving and homecoming.

House

Myra Connell (Nine Arches Press, 2015); pbk, £9.99 Myra Connell has previously released two poetry pamphlets: A Still Dark Kind of Work (2008) and From the Boat (2010). Last year, House, her first full collection emerged. People often view a house as protection from the outside world; its sense of safety may also extend, in Read More

Plenty-fish

Sarah James’ Plenty-fish cannot be gulped in one go, slipping as it does magnificently around in the imagination, never quite solidly poetry, but fleshy and fresh. The seventy-one-piece collection contains poems of varying lengths – all semi-anecdotal and detailed accounts of everyday life. As a graduate in Modern Languages, James’ sense of poetic form is Read More