The Weepers by Lindsay Macgregor, is a collection of poems which deals very eloquently with loss. Openly autobiographical if not always obviously confessional, these poems began to form in 2008 after Macgregor’s partner was diagnosed with terminal cancer. A short time after she was bereaved, the poet embarked on a creative writing course at the Read More
It becomes clear from the very first poem in this collection, that Crib is no light bedtime reading. This sub-sequence of forty poems is a selection from a larger collection of a hundred and eleven poems, written for the poet’s young son and completed on his first birthday. All of these one hundred and eleven Read More
Eleanor Rees’ latest collection, Blood Child, deals primarily with people and places, with Rees taking great care in establishing tone and atmosphere through skilfully painting romantic landscapes. To me, it seems that Rees’ poetry is much more concerned with creating images and aesthetic appeal rather than an exploration of subject matter or themes. Often the Read More
The Girl in the Dog-Tooth Coat is the debut collection of emerging talent Zelda Chappel. This compilation of fifty-nine short free-verse poems confronts themes of loss and longing, grief and regret, anxiety and escapism. Chappel’s voice is delicate yet biting, like a crisp morning frost. She cuts to the core of a distinctly female experience, Read More
Janet Sutherland’s third collection, Bone Monkey, features a trickster of that name. Sutherland develops a whole mythology for him, from creation through to death, told in sonnets, ballads, prose poems and free verse. In the opening lines of the sonnet, “Prequel”, Out of the void of chaos came the Earth and then Bone Monkey sprang Read More
An arresting title offers a strong launching place for any book but the reader who tries to find the source of this particularly wonderful one will have to wait. The titular poem, unusually, is the very last in this, Ellen Phethean’s most recent, collection. By the time the reader finds it however, she will have Read More
Katherine Stansfield’s debut collection, Playing House, is quirky and surreal, witty and menacing. Her subject matter includes the auction of John Lennon’s tooth, bleach, jetlag, crisp sandwiches and office politics. It’s a collection which is refreshingly unthemed and varied in style, form and voice. In “Africa on BBC One”, an East African Shoebill is addressed: Read More
Click on the above image to view Writers Read: Kirsty Gunn in conversation with Chris Powici. Powici is a poet and academic, and also the editor of literary magazine Northwords Now. His latest poetry collection is This Weight of Light (Red Squirrel, 2015). You can read a new poem by Powici, “The God of Read More
I was born between the Creggan and the Bogside, To the sounds of crowds and smashing glass… “Derry”, The Whole and Rain-domed Universe To enter into conversation with Colette Bryce is to be drawn into a life marked not only by an Irish Catholic childhood, with its pleasures as well as its vivid memories of Read More
Sean O’Brien’s sixth full collection, The Beautiful Librarians, may be seen as large in comparison to its range of overplayed political themes. Opening with the poem “Audiology”, the speaker describes hearing the “unfracked oil of Lancashire”, which may not be termed a tired poetic subject yet, but certainly the rhetoric has the potential to become so. Read More