The car hire company bestows upon you the great gift of abandoning you to the airport overnight. Returned to the eternal striplights of your early travels, you wrap your head in the checkered pakama, place the green Ethiopian Airways eyemask on your face, and insert the orange earplugs which can’t quite block the music of Read More
Not for Andy Jackson the esoteric or the pastoral lark ascending, it is realism that is essential to his work. Jackson has been published in a wide range of magazines and periodicals and had his first collection, The Assassination Museum, published in 2010, also by Red Squirrel Press. In this his second collection, Jackson takes Read More
Book jackets are interesting indeed, ideally giving generously before even a word inside is seen. Madeline von Foerster’s arresting tempera panel Invasive Species II makes an apt introduction to the complex nature of Caitríona O’Reilly’s third collection, Geis. On the back cover, Patrick Crotty, in The Irish Times, praises The Nowhere Birds (Bloodaxe 2001), shortlisted Read More
A luridly pink cover and a suggestive title first drew me to The Art of Scratching. Shazea Quraishi is a Pakistani-Canadian writer,and the second and middle sections of her new collection were published in her first pamphlet The Courtesans Reply (2012). Having lived in Pakistan, Canada, Spain, and London, her influences are myriad. Of Skyros, Read More
Poetry Centre Stage played host to exciting performances from two of the UK’s leading poets on the Friday of the StAnza festival. Lemn Sissay’s presence filled the auditorium as soon as he appeared on stage; his larger-than-life exuberance creates its own buzz. Effortlessly facing down some caustic remarks from a member of the audience, Sissay Read More
“This book begins and is made of gifts” writes Alan Riach in the introduction to Ian Brown’s new collection of poetry – a sentence that in it own curious syntactical imbalance strikes exactly the note of spontaneity and uncertainty that dances through every page of “Collyshangles in the canopy”. For is it that the book Read More
Should you wish to be transported into a fairytale world of Nordic myth then Transparencies by Meg Bateman may be just your thing. There are moments when one receives an antidote, often in an art form, which clears your mental fog. In this case it comes in the guise of poetry. Meg Bateman has a Read More
Laced with the sexuality and the associated violence we have come to expect from Angela Carter, her somewhat forgotten poetry does not disappoint. Editor Rosemary Hill highlights that very frisson in her new collection of Carter’s published verse Unicorn. Much like Carter’s earlier novels Several Perceptions and Heroes and Villains, her poetry has been neglected Read More
In his latest collection, seasoned poet and scrupulous “life critic” Alan Brownjohn writes candidly of modern life and the human experience. His penchant for the trivialities of la vie quotidienne manifests through an acutely realist and, at times, satirical lens. These thirty nine poems might be said to emulate the values of European cinema’s Neorealist Read More
Les Animots: A Human Bestiary is Gordon Meade’s eighth poetry collection. Taking animals – a perennially popular topic in poetry – as his theme, it quickly becomes apparent that Meade is playing with our preconceptions. The book initially appears to be a field guide with “68 species described with black & white drawings”, a hardback Read More