Lancashire-born Michael Symmons Roberts is a poet whose time has clearly come, confirmed by a string of recent awards, most notably for his 2013 collection Drysalter which garnered both the Forward and Costa awards. As an ex-pat Mancunian, I was especially looking forward to reading his latest collection, a thrillingly dark tour of my home Read More
The poems in this, Bird’s fifth collection, explode on the page, bristling with a vision of sanity within madness, order within chaos. She has the ability to describe a tortured soul in a twenty-first century manner, bringing humour, contemporary idiom and irony into the work. The poems often sound like the poet is coming down Read More
The very act of opening The Abandoned Settlements is pleasurable. With its tactile, foldback cover and ink-blue end papers, as an object, this book is beautiful. The cover photograph – an aged light switch on a wall of peeling turquoise paint – foreshadows the textures and layers within the poems themselves. The first poem, “Line Read More
Robert Minhinnick’s newest volume of poetry comes to us in the form of a modest collection, wrapped in an austere white cover with narrow bands that leak bright, naturalistic details on closer inspection. Minhinnick, himself an established environmentalist, has filled his verse with wildlife and a sublime delight in nature. His “Song of Sleet” declares, Read More
Sean O’Brien’s sixth full collection, The Beautiful Librarians, may be seen as large in comparison to its range of overplayed political themes. Opening with the poem “Audiology”, the speaker describes hearing the “unfracked oil of Lancashire”, which may not be termed a tired poetic subject yet, but certainly the rhetoric has the potential to become so. Read More