If you keep up with magazines such as 3:AM, Under the Radar, Hearing Voices or Tears in the Fence, you may be familiar with many of Melissa Lee-Houghton’s poems in Beautiful Girls. Previously recognised in the Lupus UK Competition as well as by The New Writer Collection, Beautiful Girls is now listed as a Poetry Read More
The human body is constantly changing. Capable of being strong, developing healthily through adolescence, for example, it can also weaken through illness or injury. In One Still Thing, Nell Regan’s latest poetry collection, the fluctuating fortunes of the human body is presented through the weather and different elements. These changes (from solid to water to Read More
Stuart Paterson is an Ayrshire-born poet writing in both English and Scots. Border Lines is his third collection, its twenty-four poems focusing on Dumfries & Galloway’s landscape and people. Beginning with a manifesto of sorts; “High Tide at Sandyhills” sees the world open up beyond the Galloway coastline, but ultimately the poet is unable or Read More
Small Consolations, is Gary Glauber’s first collection. Divided into four sections “Occupations”, “Explorations”, “Situations” and “Infatuations”, this meaty volume appears not only dense in format on the page, but also uniformly dense in thought, image and rhythm. The titles of the sections themselves reflect the degree to which Glauber uses alliteration, assonance and rhyme to Read More
Lucy Newlyn’s latest poetry collection is, as she puts it in “Not Ours”, “scholar quiet, cerebral”. Earth’s Almanac is a journey both through the seasons and through grief, attempting to find “a grammar of loss – a way of grasping / the shape and structure of desolation” (“Wreck”). The poems cohere around the death of Read More
Where am I? – Oh I just stepped out, No need to make a fuss, or shout. No need to comb the nearest wood Or roam about the neighbourhood. Felix Dennis lived a remarkable life, making his fortune from magazines covering advances in the technology sector, before devoting his final fifteen years to poetry. I Read More
Be you a globetrotter or a home-bird, Pia Tafdrup’s words, aptly translated by David McDuff, will grab and carry you across the world and pack you into her own personal recollections. The two collections in Salamander Sun & Other Poems deal with the tension between the poet’s desire for freedom and her deep-rooted familial ties Read More
Jackie Kay’s new collection of poetry The Empathetic Store could only be described as ‘very Kay-ish’ in that her body of work has brought about its own adjective. As a novice to reviewing poetry I felt quite daunted by the plain blue paperback, turning over its front page over to encounter what I assumed would Read More
Dante drives the borrowed squad car direct. He’s an accident of flesh and blunt bones Shaped human, ugly and mostly scowling, Made bitter by the job and the city. A 2013 graduate of Dundee University’s MLitt in Writing Practice and Study, Ollie Langmead’s first publication is a sci-fi neo-noir murder-mystery, told entirely in Miltonesque decasyllabic Read More
Byssus – strong, tenaciously anchoring; the mussel’s beard, all delicate multiple fibres, with the capacity to be woven into highly desirable cloth. Jen Hadfield’s title for her first collection since the Eliot-winning Nigh-No-Place is a near-perfect metaphor for her attachment to her adopted Shetland, and for that land’s own bedrock hold. Byssus challenges with its Read More