A statement for the importance of poems in a life: on Jonathan Davidson’s ‘A Commonplace’
Daniel Bennett A sense of place abounds in Jonathan Davidson’s A Commonplace (Smith-Doorstep, 2020), and while that might seem natural from the …
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Three pamphlets reviewed by Richie McCaffery
Richie McCaffery It is apt that John Greening recently edited the Carcanet selection of Iain Crichton Smith’s poems. There’s an anecdote that …
Pushing her own boundaries: on Alison Brackenbury’s ‘Thorpeness’
Matthew Stewart Alison Brackenbury’s new collection, Thorpeness (Carcanet Press, 2022), provides a perfect rebuttal to Larkin’s notorious disavowal of a poet’s …
‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’: reading A. E. Housman
Nell Prince I partially recall A Shropshire Lad’s thirty-first poem, ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’, because it’s in a …
In Defence of Inspiration
Photo by Rohan Makhecha on Unsplash Sarah Fletcher I want to start with an anecdote: I was at the pub after a …
On ‘Rite of Passage’ by Dom Bury & ‘What Fire’ by Alice Miller
Charlie Baylis Environmental poetry has made a comeback, with terror-infused natural disaster coverage and polarising climate protests riding high in the news …
‘Marginalised and Pigeonholed’: a re-evaluation of Evangeline Paterson
Matthew Stewart urges the re-evaluation of Evangeline Paterson as a major poet of her generation Blurbs tend to get a justified bashing …
The voyage to ‘eternal silence’: Male heroism and the evasion of death in Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’
Ulixes mosaic at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, Tunisia. 2nd century AD. Lily Searstone Tennyson’s nuanced reworking of Homeric epic in his …
On ‘Bloom’ by Sarah Westcott
Daniel Bennett The poems in this luminous book, Bloom (Pavilion Press, 2021) are tight, fragmented things, varying in shape and typesetting, in a …
An excerpt from ‘Wendy Cope’ by Rory Waterman: on her ‘Saint Hilda of Whitby’
Rory Waterman writes: This is a slightly edited short excerpt from my recent book Wendy Cope (Liverpool University Press, 2021), reprinted here with thanks …