Red peppers and plantain, hibiscus and hummingbirds, saltfish and snapper, kaiso and calypso – all feature in Malika Booker’s debut collection, Pepper Seed, as its narrative slips between Guyana, Grenada, Trinidad and Brixton to tell intertwined personal and political stories. Booker’s writing is at once both searing and beautifully lyrical, the past slipping into the Read More
James Arthur’s collection is elegantly jacketed; an exquisite, somewhat Oriental-looking painting, framed in grey seems to capture the essence of that very lightning. Can we judge this book by its cover? Firstly, that arrestingly beautiful image, La Mer,is by renowned American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell. Perhaps all is not quite what it seems. On the Read More
Donna Stonecipher’s Model City is an evocative and thought-provoking collection; despite an at times formulaic structure and expression, each poem feels new and progressive. Over the course of seventy-two separate pieces, the collection answers the simple question: “What was it like?”. In spite of being deliberately ambiguous about what the “it” is (perhaps the experience Read More
Do you ever wonder what was it like for a Black person to live under the iron regime of Margaret Thatcher? Well wonder no more. Grab Lemn Sissay’s Rebel Without Applause and submerge yourself in his free verse, which bears witness to the lives of Black people in Manchester. Born and raised in Britain, Sissay Read More
For those, like me, who are unfamiliar with haibun, Colin Will’s The Book of Ways looks initially like dense prose poetry. At the start of the book, however, Will provides an illuminating explanation of the form without prescribing interpretations. The advantages of haibun seem to be its ability to balance conversational, observational and autobiographical prose Read More
Dark Matter is a poetry collection that may be problematic to get to grips with. This is in part due to the fact that Aase Berg was a member of the Surrealist Group of Stockholm in the 1980s. The problem, however, does not primarily rest with the collection’s surrealist undertones, but with the overall complexity Read More
The seventh poetry collection by poet, artist, curator and vanguardist SJ Fowler, {Enthusiasm} is raw, fast and ferocious in its delivery, taking on subjects such as war, modernity and the environment, mixing these with references to popular culture. Full of energy, sometimes aggressive, Fowler’s collection is aptly titled, as its pieces are thrust at the Read More
Bashabi Fraser
In the fairly recent publication, Hallaig and Other Poems, two of Sorley Maclean’s most devoted acolytes, Aonghas Pàdraig Caimbeul (Angus Peter Campbell) and Aonghas MacNeacail – both respected poets in their own right – have selected over seventy of what I assume are their personal favourites from the renowned, late Raasay poet’s work. Drawn mainly Read More
Chris Powici is a champion of Scotland’s poetry scene, being a generous contributor to that community, not least through his free, and highly respected Northwords Now magazine. This Weight of Light is his latest work and second collection. Its concern for the natural world is not too dissimilar to that of a number of his Read More