Gerry Cambridge, nature photographer, essayist, editor and award-winning poet, journeys the shifting landscapes of life from Arbroath to Glasgow, youth to middle-age, natural and domestic, in this, his eighth poetry collection. His meditations on regret, loss and acceptance (among others), are captured with his characteristic photographic precision, and rendered sharply by the elegance of his Read More
Reading Charlotte Van den Broeck’s recent Bloodaxe collection makes it clear to the reader exactly why she is acclaimed as one of Europe’s most innovative and original new voices in poetry. Her first English-translated poetry collection, Chameleon, was published in 2015, followed by her second poetry collection with the untranslatable title; Nachtroer in 2017. Chameleon Read More
In Catch and Release, place and person meld into one and the same, giving voice to both so that they may reveal how they give life to one-another. Canadian-born Beverly Bie Brahic has already published a relatively substantial number of titles, such as The Hotel Eden and Hunting the Boar, and White Sheets, which won Read More
This collection, Maitreyabandhu’s third with Bloodaxe, has an unusual format. It is illustrated with 25 paintings by the post-Impressionist painter, Paul Cezanne, and together the poems in the collection form a meditation on aspects of the artist and his work. Maitreyabandhu, who studied fine art at Goldsmiths, trained as a Buddhist monk and now lives Read More
The petals gleam the utter blue of the welder’s flame[.] ‘The Dockyard’ Oh, the succinct and perfect use of ‘utter’ here to convey the blueness of that flame! What better word to use? Lines such as this continue to resonate long after reading John Glenday’s fourth collection of poetry, The Golden Mean. ‘The Dockyard’ works Read More
Tim Turnbull’s writing seems oddly familiar – and not just because we share a surname. His work evokes the sense within us that there is something more to our lives than the simple 9 to 5 routine. Avanti!, his fourth poetry collection, presents many Turnbull-esque qualities, for example he focuses on ‘adult lives blighted by Read More
Already a much published and praised poet, Footnotes to Water is Zoë Skoulding’s most recent work. This collection has rivers at its heart: the Adda in Bangor, Wales, where she works as a critic and translator, and the Bièvre in Paris. The mystery behind these hidden rivers bursts forth as language and as a symbol Read More
I carry the war in my womb. At night it kicks and sings stories of the first night that war came calling. In the first lines of Songs My Enemy Taught Me, Joelle Taylor sets the reader on a journey that begins with her own early experience of abuse, and travels across the globe into Read More
I can only give you back what you imagine. (‘The Fluffer Talks of Eternity’) It’s true, every poem in Useless Landscape gives the reader only what they can imagine. However, in reality Powell gives his readers anything and everything they can imagine. Across its 100 pages, this collection surprises the reader at every turn of Read More
