Based on a thirteen-poem series, The Wilds is a powerful poetry comic – written by Russell Jones and illustrated by Aimee Lockwood – connects the themes of grief, the natural world, and survival. It explores the experience of a teenage girl coming to terms with the death of her mother, understanding that loss is never easy but can be survived.
This insightful collaborative project, funded by the Edwin Morgan Trust and facilitated by Ken Cockburn in 2019, creates a firm linguistic bridge between English and Hungarian and explores what can be achieved through the art of translation. Having the same poem in two languages side by side on double-page spreads creates a real, tangible sense of collaboration. Even though an English reader might only understand the language on one side, the mirroring of enjambment, spacing and general rhythm emphasizes that no matter where we come from or what language we speak, we experience similar concerns. The epigraph of ‘Bird Woman’, ‘nothing is yet in its true form’, gives the sense that these poems are not yet at rest; this collection thrums with the anticipation of change and readjustment—with the potential to be reinterpreted and reimagined even further—thereby exploring the beautiful complexity and flexibility of language.
In poems that deftly explore humanity’s entanglement with, and reliance upon, the fossil fuel and oil economy, Rebecca Sharp has created an intelligent addition to her growing portfolio of poetry, plays and performances with her new collection Rough Currency. The addition of a supplementary soundscape by Philip Jeck made available externally through the platfrom, soundcloud, moulds Rough Currency into a hybrid form of printed words and sounds, thereby exposing the increasingly hybrid and cyborglike nature of our machine-reliant human race.
Wedding Grief is an astutely chosen title; it encapsulates the fraught, traumatic relationship between Paul Éluard and his wife, Gala Diakonova, from meeting in a TB Sanatorium during World War 1 to the eventual ménage à trois with Max Ernst, and their eventual divorce. AC Clarke’s award-winning hand works fully within this collection. Her work of three years wraps within itself inversions and extrapolations of grief and trauma, shifting between perceptions, tones, and meanings.
Casket Andy Brown Shearsman (2019); pbk: £6.50 Below This Level Kevin Corcoran Shearsman (2019); pbk: £6.50 Lake Effect Tim Craven Tapsalteerie (2019); pbk: £5 Three excellent pamphlets, produced by courageous independent publishers, and it’s fair to say there are crossing references, though I will treat them alphabetically. Nonetheless, the booklets are very different creatures. However, Read More
No voices just a roar and the birdsong of gunfire in winter sunlight slouched down the well of leather seats yielding diminishing her height a dead giveaway: this the mother of all riots speak only Farsi There are autobiographical narratives, then there are those grounded in exceptional circumstances and Read More
The Parting Glass is a collection of 14 sonnets by Northern Irish poet, Neil Young, long resident in Scotland. True to its title, each sonnet is a farewell to a beloved family member or a friend, a toast to memories – private and public, and a nod to the present that will soon be lost. Read More