Stones (Shortlisted, TS Eliot Prize 2021)

Kevin Young’s accomplished collection of poems, Stones, moves with deliberate pace, an anodyne for those who have lost someone they will always love. The language is delicate and gentle—yet provocative in word and manner. In his review for The New York Times, David Orr describes Stones as a book about how families absorb and repurpose loss. Stones embraces grief by examining the root likeness of our ancestry—the way we grow into and out from our inheritance.

The Kids (Shortlisted, TS Eliot Prize 2021)

There’s an old adage that our pupils teach us far more than they are taught. The former teacher in me doesn’t quarrel with that, and nor, apparently, does Hannah Lowe. Drawn from her own ten years’ teaching in ‘an inner-city London sixth form’, the book erupts with classroom vibrancy, without confining itself to in-school tales.

Sometimes I Never Suffered

If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursèd lot. (‘If We Must Die’ by Claude Mackay) Shane McCrae’s latest TS Eliot shortlisted collection, Sometimes I Never Suffered, isn’t a sound-mirror for Read More

Love Minus Love

Love Minus Love is the second collection from Wayne Holloway-Smith. It reads as a continuous, fractured train of thought exploring the poet’s childhood trauma, his relationship with his dad, his mum and mental illness. Sitting on the cover with its hands on its knees is a skeletal robot, the box of its chest burst open. Read More

Life Without Air

Daisy Lafarge’s debut collection Life Without Air shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, is the ferment of a busy mind drawing from Louis Pasteur’s process of fermentation. Like the intersecting cells on the jacket, suggestive of their proximity, seven sections explore the complexity of human and ecological co-dependence, The inaugural poem, ‘Meridian Dream’, sits title-less Read More

How to Wash a Heart

Written against but within the context of an emerging fortress Europe, the philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote in Of Hospitality that ‘absolute hospitality’ seeks no conditions but ‘requires that I open up my home’ to ‘the foreigner’ and let them arrive and ‘take place in the place I offer them, without asking… either reciprocity (entering into Read More

The Martian’s Regress

This collection of 44 Science Fiction poems is a departure from Scots poet J O Morgan’s usual style. His 6 previous poetry publications have been single, book-length poems. Assurances, published in 2018, won the Costa Poetry Award and his previous collections have been nominated for major awards. His poetry tends towards physics and metaphysics;  its Read More

Deformations

Did I say I was never a victim? […] I helped him with good grace and inside I knew every complication I learned to lie and it was barefaced on my lies they built a civilisation (‘Odysseus welcomed from the sea by Nausicaa’) Poet, and significantly translator, Sasha Dugdale’s fourth collection, Deformations, takes two important, Read More

A Portable Paradise (Winner, 2019 TS Eliot Poetry Prize)

In his marvellous essay on writing about 9/11, ‘Can poetry console a grieving public?’, Mark Doty sets out the difficulties of writing about public tragedy. Can one bear witness to ‘the inchoate stuff of experience’ ─ intensely felt private pain or even anger ─ and yet also keep faith with ‘language’s project of discovering and Read More