Three pamphlets: Casket (Andy Brown), Below this Level (Kevin Corcoran) and Lake Effect (Tim Craven)

Casket Andy Brown Shearsman (2019); pbk: £6.50 Below This Level Kevin Corcoran Shearsman (2019); pbk: £6.50 Lake Effect Tim Craven Tapsalteerie (2019); pbk: £5 Three excellent pamphlets, produced by courageous independent publishers, and it’s fair to say there are crossing references, though I will treat them alphabetically. Nonetheless, the booklets are very different creatures. However, Read More

Islander

If ‘Everything moves everything else’ can perception ever be static?                                                                                           Read More

The Mouth of The Earth

Manuel Rivas’ latest collection of poetry The Mouth of The Earth touches on themes familiar to his previous fiction, poetry and journalism: nature, historical memory, invisibility and necessary attention. In The Mouth of The Earth, it is the economic use of language that initially impresses. Witness the expanse of the three lines that open ‘The Read More

Twitters for a Lark 

Twitters for a Lark is not a single-author collection nor is it, strictly speaking, an anthology. What is hidden behind the colourful book cover emblazed with the words ‘Poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors’ is a unique endeavour bringing together some of Britain’s most innovative and exciting contemporary poetic voices. The book contains collaborative Read More

To an Unknown Shore

To an Unknown Shore is a collection of last poems by Theodore Enslin, the prolific, American avant-garde poet, who died in 2011. On the back cover he’s quoted as saying ‘I like to be considered as a composer who happens to use words instead of notes.’ His experience shows not only in the way he Read More

Tidal Events

Every day the new and new kind lose their shyness. They approach us, look us in the eye, lead us to the sea. Without fear together we stop to breathe. [‘Tidal Events’] The boundaries between ‘them’ and ‘us’ are explored with utmost attention throughout Mária Ferenčuhová’s new Shearsman collection whether these be in relation to Read More

No. 25

Poetics in Geraldine Clarkson’s work insist on our attention long before we have even embarked on our journey of understanding. Her latest chapbook is no exception. The collection opens with a reference to the “lovely” and “elegant” River Leam in Clarkson’s home in the Midlands, from where she wanders in time and place, but the Read More

She Lives There Still

Mary Leader, an American lawyer-turned-poet, has found a home with the British-based Publisher Shearsman Books. She Lives There Still is her second title to be published with them, and they are due to re-issue her two earlier works that are currently out-of-print. A fifth collection has already been completed. Perhaps this match should hold no Read More

THE BOOK OF THE PEONY

In a remarkable extension of thought, The Book of the Peony buds, expands and lets fall astounding petals: prose poems and haiku invoking an infinite, unattainable peony. The peony is allegorical. It is approached with the mind. It is the illusory peony of separation, of birth and death. Or, it is the shimmering unity beyond Read More

March

With every journey comes a risk of falling into melancholy – a passing landscape can spark a memory of a person, home, a string of events. These brief glimpses are at the heart of Andrew Taylor’s second poetry collection, March. The collection begins with “The Welsh Hills”: it starts with a bell then the harmonium Read More