Kelly Michels(The Gallery Press, 2024); £11.25, pbk Sean Scully’s oil and pastel on aluminium depiction of the American flag (‘Ghost Gun’) on the front cover of Kelly Michels’ debut collection, American Anthem, confronts and provokes its reader – the facile drawing of a gun swaddled in blood-tinged bandages in the box-section where the stars usually Read More
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin(The Gallery Press, 2023); pbk: €11.95 ‘Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.’ (Eavan Boland, A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming A Woman Poet) This is true of the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, poet, academic, translator and former Poetry Professor of Ireland now elected to the Read More
In the poem prefacing Some Integrity, Padraig Regan’s first full collection, ’50 ml of India Ink’, commissioned by Belfast School of Art, shows how integral art is to nature and to language. The collection addresses how forms change, and how lived experiences are transmuted revealing their true value and essence:
Opaque, & black as gravity,
the ink […]
[…] performs its tiny fractal
creep through the paper’s
knitted capillaries[.]
Polly Morland’s book builds on the irony of first finding a copy of The Fortunate Man (1967) hanging ‘in suspended animation’ while clearing out her mother’s house, John Berger’s witness account of the vicissitudes of a country doctor’s life in the same Gloucestershire valley in which the author now resides. This find sets in motion a series of emotionally charged events pinning memory, persons, place to what it is to be a woman GP in a country practice in the last two years of Covid.
Far-reaching in his enquiry, Michael Symmons Roberts in Ransom, his eighth published collection of poetry, addresses some fundamental issues about human nature – who and what guides us, and in turn keeps us in thrall. Some poems have a more traditional meditative rendering while others tend more toward the performative, riffing off contemporary themes about living in the city. Yet, all are united by the ubiquitous theme of ransom. Jeanette Winterson has monikered Roberts as a religious poet for the secular age. Reading through the sequences in this collection, I can see why for it understands ransom as levied on us by how we live now, the creeds we might follow, our education, to say nothing about the cultural and ethical legacies of the past.
In this most innovative of collections, Notes on the Sonnets, epigraphs taken from the first lines of Shakespeare’s sonnets are conjoined, non-sequentially, with lines of prose poetry. These convey thoughts as digressive, associative and reflexive as any creative prose essay – in the Paul Klee sense of ideas being taken for a walk – lines that contain vestiges of the original tropes only recustomised for the 21st Century.
We carry it around in our heads and visit the places where it once visited: Charlotte Square, gates locked to this greenest of glades since the last of the new turf was laid last year; now marked in time as the last time. I mark it idling at high railings reanimating stills of a once-tented Read More
