Matthew Caley’s fifth collection of poems – Rake – is adventurous, and deliciously eccentric. Having previously been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection with Thirst, and also having garnered much praise for the bold innovation of his last collection, Apparently, Caley has established himself as a poet who is unafraid to push Read More
Hwæt! Whether you take that iconic, still-contentious word as an exclamation, an exhortation, or accept Heaney’s gently Hibernian “So”, whatever aspects of the Anglo Saxon epic you unravel in Leásungspell , from the first Bob Beagrie alerts you that all is not as it seems. Huisht, lads, haad ya gobs [.] Set in Northumbria, 657 Read More
Rachael Boast won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2011 with Sidereal. That same collection also won the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. Her latest collection, Void Studies, “realizes a project that the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud had proposed, but never got round to writing.” The collection’s title is almost a Read More
Poetry Centre Stage played host to exciting performances from two of the UK’s leading poets on the Friday of the StAnza festival. Lemn Sissay’s presence filled the auditorium as soon as he appeared on stage; his larger-than-life exuberance creates its own buzz. Effortlessly facing down some caustic remarks from a member of the audience, Sissay Read More
In a snug, lamp-lit, yellow-stoned vault underneath St. John’s House, StAnza hosts a series of poetry readings under the title, “Border Crossings”. These events, in which two poets read consecutively, stage not only the boundaries between poetic practices, but the national and cultural boundaries that many of the poets have crossed in order to be Read More
The StAnza lecture is one the mainstays of Scotland’s International Poetry Festival with past luminaries such as Glyn Maxwell, Michael Schmidt, Gillian Clarke and Neil Astley holding forth. It is a tricky juggling act to get right because the lecture is heard by aspiring poets, established poets, academics and poetry readers, as well as folk Read More
Ageing is something we all experience and, as a society, to some degree fear. This fear is manifested in the selling of “anti-ageing products” – a market worth extortionate amounts of money that claims to reverse the outward signs of this process and, at its most extreme, even to outsmart life itself. The candid collection Read More
A creative project such as VERSschmuggel, of which this book is the offspring, is a remarkable thing. Funded by Literaturwerkstatt Berlin for the 2014 Berlin Poetry Festival, four Scottish and two Scotland-based poets spent time in Berlin with six German counterparts. With considerable assistance from translators, they paired to transform each other’s work into an Read More
Fresh from his win in the Edinburgh Fringe Slam Poetry final in 2015, Scott Tyrell’s momentum shows little signs of halting any time soon. The poet’s recent collection of poems, Grown Up, can only be described as a comedic satire on domestic life, follows the poet’s personal progression from cynical lost soul to grounded family Read More
Deeply embedded in its time, Lift, Harry Man’s first poetry collection, offers insight into how growing up in the late 20th Century, amidst rapid technological advancement and ground-breaking scientific research (especially in the domain of space exploration), might have oriented and shaped one’s personal experience of the world. His poems, imbued with a communicative and Read More