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
On a book tour of his novel about art and war, Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje tells a tale of moral responsibility, an Indian fable of a King who wakes up to find a corpse tied around his neck. Every time the King buries it, and the corpse returns; try as he might to dispose of Read More
Gerrie Fellows is no stranger to poetry, having written four other poetry collections in the past decade. However, having taken a break after Window for a Small Blue Child in 2007, she returns with The Body in Space. Fellows’ new collection explores the poet’s interest in the exploration of human insignificance by its use of Read More
Anglo-Breton poet Claire Trévien’s collection The Shipwrecked House is a bewildering yet heart-wrenching composition of myth, life and loss. In returning to the sea as a central theme, the poet creates a seamless transition from her pamphlet Low-Tide Lottery to this, her newest work. At first, these seemingly disjointed poems appear to follow no coherent Read More
Seeing the soft cover of Locust and Marlin, it was difficult not to grab the thin book from the proffered selection. There’s something magical about the marlin disappearing in the waves while the heron stands quietly on the back in an image which stretches across both covers. Certainly, it’s a scene familiar to me, my Read More
Sandeep Parmar is one of the most exciting emerging voices in British poetry. As a scholar, she is known primarily for her work on the modernist poet Hope Mirrlees; as a poet forging her own voice, she is known for the 2012 collection The Stone Orchard, and now (and, one hopes, pre-eminently) she is to Read More
“I’ve said on many occasions that if a poem, once written, is exactly the same as its author first imagined it would be, then it is almost certainly a failure, and that artistic success must always involve a process of transformation.” This is Simon Armitage reflecting on the “almost electrically bright” Snow Stone poem’s lettering Read More
Carolyn Forché’s single-authored 2003 collection, Blue Hour, is reviewed here in advance of her appearance at the StAnza 2015 International Poetry Festival. The eleven poems which make up the collection contemplate remembrance, the transition between life and death, and the effects of war. Above all, it seems to me that Forché is concerned to present Read More
Ahren Warner’s first two collections, Confer and Pretty, may have simple titles but inside the covers you’ll find poems teeming with conceptual and linguistic complexities. Both books demand the reader’s full participation – I found myself conferring not only with Warner’s explanatory endnotes but also with Google to find translations of French and Greek words, Read More
The cover of Sheenagh Pugh’s new collection features a photo of the long shadows of two people, standing on a beach, apparently looking back on their own footsteps. Backdropped by a close-up of round, eroded stones in a blue-grey scale, that opening image accurately reflects the title – Short Days, Long Shadows. Focused on the Read More