Liz Berry opens her debut collection, Black Country, with the jubilant line, “When I became a bird, Lord, nothing could not stop me”, and, indeed, she never stops soaring. Themes range from summers of childhood innocence to sex and marriage, all set against Black Country landscapes, history and characters. In these dazzling, sensuous, and utterly Read More
If Kei Miller hasn’t produced a poetry collection since 2010, the intervening years have been anything but unproductive: two marvellous novels, a blog, a doctorate, editing work and a wonderful collection of essays. Yet Miller’s poetic sensibility is special; his ability to suggest a transcendent luminosity in the single line or a small commonplace detail, Read More
Bill Manhire is the pre-eminent voice of New Zealand poetry; that country’s first Laureate, and author of over a dozen collections, stretching back to the earliest part of the 1970s. He found some notoriety in his early career when a short poem, “Wingatui”, whose meaning was partially rooted in the vernacular of the New Zealand Read More
You can tell much about a city by its attitudes to the arts. Or perhaps it’s the art that alerts us to the victories and vicissitudes of a city. Even a brief list of Dundee’s leet of literati would include a high number of leading poets, such as W. N. Herbert (one of the editors Read More
The cover of Helen Mort’s debut collection consists of a photograph of a miner confronting policemen during the 1984 Strike; Division Street promises a work “marked by distance and division”, “[f]rom the clash between striking miners and police to the delicate conflicts in personal relationships”. The title itself announces this. Outwardly then, the book indicates Read More
Parallax is an astronomical term for the apparent displacement of an object caused by a change in the point of observation. In this wide-ranging collection of the same name, short-listed for the 2013 Forward Prize, Morrissey considers from different angles how our position affects what and how we see. In several poems, Morrissey’s lens is Read More
Clare Best’s first collection, Excisions, opens with a sequence entitled ‘Matryoshka’ (“nested Russian dolls”) about the death of her parents, and feelings of grief and memory. Best’s poems, which have an intensity and physicality about them, include arresting descriptions of the body, as for example in “Stitch”, My grandmother knew about seams- her abdomen ruched Read More
Anne Stevenson’s sixteenth collection, Astonishment, examines the everyday in an extraordinary way. Love, nature, childhood and old age are put through her alembic of lyrical compression and technical inventiveness. The opening poem, “The Loom”, marks the beginning of life itself: “ And once my lungs were gills”. The image of the loom shapes both the Read More