The subtitle for Robert Macfarlane’s Orphans is, intriguingly, “Poems borrowed by Martin Johnson.” The collection started life as a public challenge to writer Robert Macfarlane to “release the poetry that lay undiscovered in his prose.” When Macfarlane declined the task, Johnson took it on. The back cover offers a precedent for Johnson’s proposal: “Edward Thomas, Read More
her black door like an omen […] As the title implies, Buried Music resonates with losses, being filled with many kinds of grief. The collection addresses bereavement (especially that of his father) principally, but also it considers the poet’s own challenged and diminishing health. For all that, Buried Music mines the quirkiness of Read More
The mysterious thin threads of rain, wrist-high beneath a bright February near-cloudlessness, beneath the chiming of the wire and metal masts of the yacht club, over the heads of bairns and dogs: they sheen like web and are gone, while the crows lift and drop, drop and lift, the mussels on the shore. © Read More
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
Seren Book’s In Reality: Selected Poems is the first major glimpse of poetry by award winning Luxembourger Jean Portante, translated for English speaking readers. The book gathers selected poems from his major collections, notably In Reality and What Does and What Doesn’t Come to Pass, and provides the original French in parallel with Zoë Skoulding’s Read More
Con-men, poker-players, poets put the solid world at risk and then enjoy the dance… (“The Water Magician of San Diego”) Elaine Feinstein — poet, novelist, playwright, biographer and translator—has selected poems for The Clinic, Memory from twelve collections written over five decades which, alongside newly-written poems; these do indeed “put the solid world at risk”. Read More
If you remember where you were on the 13 November 2015, you are no doubt thankful that you were not in Paris. Paul Stephenson however, was there; in the weeks following he wrote The Days that Followed Paris: 13 November 2015. The formal voice the poet adopts mimics the content of the work which is Read More
Jimi Hendrix’s melodies merge with the symphonies of George Frideric Handel; an ode to “philosophical couch Platos” resides snugly amongst verse confronting Western imperialism. Unconventional? Indeed – Agard dances between the light and the dark of the human condition throughout Travel Light, Travel Dark, his mischievous ingenuity shining throughout. Split into four sections, this collection Read More
This crashes around the skull. It whispers and it wails. It is the sound we hear when the space around us is silent. Recently shortlisted for the Ted Hughes award, Zoë Skoulding’s The Museum of Disappearing Sounds explores the notion of sound as a codependent relationship between a reader’s external and internal ear. The Museum Read More
Carmen Bugan was born in Romania in 1970 and emigrated to the US in 1989. When still a child, she witnessed first-hand the brutal and repressive regime of Ceausescu, the last Romanian Communist leader. A daughter of a pro-democracy pamphleteer, Bugan grew up fearing news of her father’s death, particularly after his imprisonment. She found Read More