Fran Lock(The Poetry Bus, 2023); pbk, £8.50 ‘This human form where I was born, I now repent’. This quote from Pixies ‘Caribou’ sets the tone for Fran Lock’s Hyena!, an intoxicating blend of the melancholic and the apocryphal, a charged, crudely honest, experimental, and intricate exercise in reflection. The collection is dedicated to Scottish poet Read More
It is not the question of How the Hell are You, but rather the question of who the hell were we (‘How The Hell Are You.’) that encapsulates Glyn Maxwell’s most recent poetry collection of the same title. Maxwell has won many awards for his poetry and has been previously shortlisted twice for the TS Read More
Hannah Sullivan’s first book of poems breathes, from the tumultous living of the opening poem through a steadier still-vibrant growth in the second, to the painful inspirations of the third. Having led an academic career on both sides of the Atlantic, she’s translated her keen observations of the minutia of existence into something moving and Read More
According to the cover in this, Leontia Flynn’s fourth collection, the poet explores and “resolves the concerns and forms” raised in earlier work, suggesting that the central sequence considers “the constructed (my italics) nature of childhood”. This it does, but elsewhere too there is a pervasive and chafing sense of the constrictions associated with childhood Read More
Jacob Polley is the author of four poetry collections. Previously shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, with The Brink(2003); Jackself is both a move away from the style of his previous collections, and also follows quite naturally in the same vein. Polley’s work tends to explore eerie, curious stories and tales. Rather like Ted Hughes, 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
Originally from Cullen, Co. Cork, Bernard O’Donoghue has been an English don at Oxford University since 1965. This is his sixth collection. O’Donoghue has been a recipient of the Whitbread (now Costa) Prize for Poetry and Faber published his Selected Poems in 2008.Being shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize (for the best collection of Read More
The American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain”. Katharine Towers’ second poetry collection, The Remedies, is a clarion call to a kind of modern day transcendentalism. She might not wear Read More
Early in the 1980s, I visited an extraordinary installation in the Centre Georges Pompidou. Viewers wore special slippers to enter a room, a carpet to ceiling, wall to wall kinetic/op art environment which seemingly undulated, changing entirely when studied from different positions. The artist’s use of lenticular printing on folded surfaces, in precise mathematical terms, Read More
From one son of Dundee to another, Don Paterson, allow me to commend this finely wrought collection – it pulls off something quietly virtuoso that reads keen, true and varied. I sensed something redeeming and intimate about this work, so forgive me if I contrive this review as something like an open letter. This does Read More