‘No right or wrong, only how I got here’: The Early Poetry of Richie McCaffery
Photo image: © Gerry Cambridge Jonathan Davidson In his second pamphlet, Ballast Flint (Small Press Publishing for Cromarty Arts Trust, 2013, with …
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On ‘Belladonna’ by Suna Afshan
Daniel Bennett Both grounded and detached, playing with a sense of narrative but also revelling in the rarefied brightness of the image, …
On Natalie Diaz’s ‘Postcolonial Love Poem’
Holly Loveday Ultimately, ‘you cannot drink poetry’. Diaz precedes this statement in her self-aware second collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, with the prayer …
The Lustre in Dullness: Philip Larkin, Sinéad Morrissey and Balance
© National Portrait Gallery, London Nicola Healey In Sinéad Morrissey’s collection On Balance (2017), Morrissey selectively quotes from Larkin’s ‘Born Yesterday’ (1954) …
‘The Terrific-Strange’: some student poets of 1965
Mark Valentine In 1958 a group of tutors and students at the University of North Staffordshire, Keele, published a booklet anthology entitled …
‘A parent’s age’: on the poetry of Rory Waterman
Matthew Stewart ‘Belonging’ and ‘estrangement’ are key terms when getting to grips with Rory Waterman’s poetry. They played an explicitly pivotal role …
On Claudian’s ‘The Old Man of Verona’
Photo by Henrique Ferreira André Naffis-Sahely Situated halfway between Venice and Milan, recently the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, the city of …
On Martin Booth’s ‘The Knotting Poems’
The main part of Knotting in 1884. Courtesy of the Bedfordshire County Archives. John Greening It’s unlikely that many readers will remember …
Devilled Almonds and Doomed Boys: some avant-garde poetry of 1920
Portrait of Edith Sitwell by Roger Fry, 1915 Mark Valentine The copy of The Wooden Pegasus (1920) by Edith Sitwell that I …
‘But freedom is not so exciting’: Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal
Louis MacNeice by Howard Coster, nitrate negative, 1942. NPG x1624. © National Portrait Gallery, London. (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) Jonathan Hitchens ‘Oppression and …