her black door like an omen […] As the title implies, Buried Music resonates with losses, being filled with many kinds of grief. The collection addresses bereavement (especially that of his father) principally, but also it considers the poet’s own challenged and diminishing health. For all that, Buried Music mines the quirkiness of Read More
…one about to dive in & about to dive in & still about to dive & & &[.] There is an element of this joint collection by Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn, the road north, which seems to tease the reader into believing Read More
Works of literature allow readers to escape to any location in the world and to any era in history, an idea put to work in Geraldine Clarkson’s latest collection, Declare in which she depicts unfamiliar locations in enthralling ways. Clarkson’s aptitude has already been acknowledged: she has won several poetry awards and most notably has Read More
Carmen Bugan was born in Romania in 1970 and emigrated to the US in 1989. When still a child, she witnessed first-hand the brutal and repressive regime of Ceausescu, the last Romanian Communist leader. A daughter of a pro-democracy pamphleteer, Bugan grew up fearing news of her father’s death, particularly after his imprisonment. She found Read More
Knowing she would soon be leaving New York, Mary Austin Speaker decided to create a piece of work which would honour the city she had called home for over a decade. The result is her wonderful new book of poetry, The Bridge. One of the reasons that this collection is so compelling is that it Read More
s s u n n s s e t t the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the CrookCrookCrookCrookCrookCrookCrookCrookCrookCrookCrookCrookCrookCrookCrook road road road road road road road road road road road road road road road Most poets prefer to work with a laptop or perhaps a pen and paper. Read More
In Staunin Ma Lane, Holton has selected classical Chinese poems from the 11th century BC to the 14th century AD, some of them well-known to generations of Chinese schoolchildren, for improvisation and translation into Scots, with English “glosses”. Holton states in his useful Afterword: “if you expect to find dictionary definitions of Chinese words in Read More
Em Strang (Shearsman Books, 2016); pbk: £8.99 Em Strang distrusts labels. For her “Eco-poetry” carries connotations of Green activism, yet she accepts her work is “ecological”. Undoubtedly a feminist, she won’t have her work so named. Equally, she is certain that she is not a nature poet, and though her work has roots in mythology Read More
On picking up Glaciation by Will Stone, my first thoughts were of death and religion in an Ice Age setting. This was prompted by the ice-covered sculpture of Christ on the front cover, and a quotation from Percy Bysshe Shelley seemed to confirm this assumption, “The glaciers creep like snakes that watch their prey, from Read More
Kate Ashton was born in Scotland and trained as a nurse in Edinburgh, after which she moved to London to work on Nursing Times. She has previously published fiction and non-fiction, reviews, and has worked in translation and in journalism ( mainly in the Netherlands), from 1979 to 2003. Her memoir, Losing Eric Gill’s Eden, is forthcoming. She Read More