And the wild ways we think we walk Just bring us here again. In her latest poetry collection, The Bonniest Companie, Kathleen Jamie considers not only the Scotland of today, but the Scotland of the past, of her childhood and its timeless myth-shrouded wilderness. The poet presents the natural and political landscapes of her native Read More
Jacob Polley is the author of four poetry collections. Previously shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, with The Brink(2003); Jackself is both a move away from the style of his previous collections, and also follows quite naturally in the same vein. Polley’s work tends to explore eerie, curious stories and tales. Rather like Ted Hughes, Read More
Rachael Boast won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2011 with Sidereal. That same collection also won the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. Her latest collection, Void Studies, “realizes a project that the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud had proposed, but never got round to writing.” The collection’s title is almost a Read More
“Shine the torch, count the eyes and divide by two”. My own mother’s description of checking the sheep always seemed odd to me but Gillian Clarke says much the same thing in her poem “Ark”: We wake nightly in the early hours, dress for the rain To count their faces in the flashlight, their glittering Read More
Kate Tempest’s latest publication, Let Them Eat Chaos, comprises of a single long-poem which winds its way through seven individuals’ lives, each at 4:18am in London. On the title page there is a short and simple disclaimer: “This poem was written to be read aloud”. As a reader, you may have a nagging feeling that Read More
You sink in wheat. Slowly. And the more you struggle the worse it gets. So warns the title poem of John Kinsella’s recent selected works. Children “on every farm” across Australia have been issued this warning, alert even “in the midst of play” to the “acrid / chemical smell / of treated wheat”, and the 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
After the success of Denise Riley’s prizewinning elegiac sequence A Part Song, it was with great anticipation that I opened her new collection Say Something Back. As well as being highly regarded as a poet, Riley has also published various academic works of language and Feminist theory. Say Something Back is her first collection since Read More
Jessie Burton’s debut novel has certainly attracted a lot of attention. One look at the list of awards and recognition the book has received is enough to entice any curious reader. The Miniaturist is also in the process of being translated into thirty-two different languages, an impressive feat for an actress/executive assistant who wrote a Read More
Sanjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways could not have been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize at any better a moment than in the current political climate. Sahota’s political novel outlines the lives of three Indian migrant workers and Narinder, an Indian-British woman fighting her own personal battle between morals and abiding by the Read More