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The sound of hope: ‘Before We Go Any Further’ by Tristram Fane Saunders
Kevin Gardner Imbedded in the heart of Before We Go Any Further (Carcanet, 2023) is a wickedly subversive sequence, “Five Songs on a Cruel Instrument”, purporting to contain translations of neglected medieval manuscripts – a ballad from the Anglo-Saxon, a Welsh elegy, an Irish drinking jig, and so forth. The songs, “translated” by the recently…
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A poem by Nicola Healey
Below is a poem from Nicola Healey’s debut pamphlet, A Newer Wilderness, published by Dare-Gale Press this month. Summer/Winter This brazen blue day is a dangerous scene.My mind clashes like a dropped cymbal.My skin, like all my clothes,doesn’t fit well. I go indoors but I can’t shake myselfand the sun still glowers:Enjoy me, make the…
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A poem from Paul McLoughlin: Selected Poems
Below is a poem from the Selected Poems of the late Paul McLoughlin (1947-2021), recently published by Shoestring Press and edited with an introduction by John Forth. Mother in Murreigh You wanted to be seventyhere – despite your brotherbeing the most contrary manever to put shoes on his two feet. You spent the morning up…
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Two poems by Will Stone
Eternal Life Slowly the leaves grow yellow and fall,and I hear leaders of corporate empiresfully confident of achieving eternal lifefor select customers in their lifetime.But in the Aveyron in the year 1851,most peasants the traveller encounteredexpressed a sincere longing for death. Lone swan on the Goudenhandreilifting off, permitted by ancient lawto tear open the pristine…
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A poem by Erin O’Luanaigh
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Suzanne Pleshette in The Birds I. Comes the silver Aston-Martinand the vague apprehensionthat some terror is on the wing.Don’t they ever stop migrating,these bottle-blondes from the city,flying down the highway, san souci? II. While the heiress slept though transcontinental flights, she ran aground. A slash of dirt on…
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Two poems by Mat Riches
Mat Riches recently published his debut collection, Collecting the Data, with Red Squirrel Press. Below are two new poems. Sticks The time to cut a stickis when you see it in the hedgehe said on one of our walks,before they became too much. A countryside carpe diem;it was the soundest advicehe ever gave me, a…
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Two poems by Anthony Joseph
For the latest event in the Wild Court Reading Series, King’s College London lecturer and T.S. Eliot Prize winner Anthony Joseph will be reading from his forthcoming Precious and Impossible: New & Selected Poems, published by Bloomsbury this autumn. Anthony will also be in conversation with Luke Roberts, Senior Lecturer in Modern Poetry at…
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Lie down and be counted: on Geoff Hattersley’s ‘Instead of an Alibi’
Dane Holt I discovered Geoff Hattersley in 2019, after reading Wayne Holloway-Smith’s poem ‘Some Waynes’ in an issue of Poetry magazine: ‘a cavalcade of Waynes fucking each other up in a Geoff Hattersley poem – in a pub, in Barnsley.’ I was born about 30 miles from Barnsley. I mention this because I used to…
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A poem by Maëlle Leggiadro
He Could Leave You Tomorrow He buys me roses; I forget to put them in water,once again too caught-upin my tangled and scattered thoughts.They’re beautiful but– a little too pinkas if they’ve got prickedon a poisoned spindleperforming an ideaof everlasting beauty.I know soon enough they’ll be wiltedand that’s probably why I don’t water them,so I…
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Blake’s Poetic Insight into Splitting of the Ego in ‘The Four Zoas’
From a plate in Blake’s ‘Milton: A Poem’, depicting the relationship of the Four Zoas Dr Emily Bilman The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate the precocious development of William Blake’s intuition which enabled him to anticipate and write about the conflicts that the unconscious processes of anxiety, melancholia, and splitting caused on his…
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Two poems by Oliver Comins
Early Doors They always said the larks were here in spirit,having disappeared while meadows were transformedto streets and drains when this became a gardened suburb. Heading for their allotment, my neighbours rose earlyto catch the day’s best light. On relished mornings,blessed with beginning, the earth still damp with dewwelcomed their trays of tender seedlings. Each…
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Three poems by Suzannah V. Evans
Image © Sophie Davidson Never More, Sailor after Walter de la Mare and Tristan Corbière So this mariner, whether a sailor,captain, indeed whoever he may be,is dead below the wind-riddenbrine-infused sea.Come! so many have died mid-labourwith their boots on, for all the worldvividly alive, now under the weightof salted blankets, gale-hurled.A squall . . .…
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What being human entails: on ‘Say It With Me’ by Vanessa Lampert
Christopher Horton In Say It With Me (Seren, 2023), Vanessa Lampert’s poems, at first, immerse themselves in familial, domestic subject matter before revealing darker themes underlying everyday routine. By way of example, in ‘Halloween’, a visit to her ailing stepfather, and a shared joke with him, infers uncertainty in relation to the speaker’s historic relationship…
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‘Rite of Passage’: a poem by D.R. James
Rite of Passage In Bali, it’s the filing of the caninesto limit boys’ wild adolescence.Among Cameroon’s Baka Pygmiesit’s the Spirit of the Forest killing boys to be reborn as men. And in ruralIllinois, 1964, the May grass green,resilient as Astro Turf, it’s initiationinto the fraternity of boys-who-mow. My turn now to untangle the Craftsmanfrom the…
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Beauty before Age: on Seán Street, Michael Vince, & Tony Connor
Kevin Gardner The books reviewed here come from three well established and accomplished poets, whose first collections appeared, respectively, in 1976, 1978, and 1962. Unsurprisingly, all three opt for traditional structures rather than formal ingenuity, and no one is likely to use the word ‘ground-breaking’. Without the distraction of structural variation, however, the words themselves…
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‘Julian’: a poem by Sally Festing
Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay Julian, there’s a lost language between us. I can’t walk through it but like a cloud it stays in my mind,circling round the differences that make me sad. Here, I am almost nothing among tousled hedgeson the sea’s edge, the calming marshes, the rawnesswhere I come to save myself. I’m…
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Two poems by Patrick Davidson Roberts
Lilburne’s Prayer Oh god; guide of hand and tongue through pamphlet, pillory and prisonwho walked with me from Kineton, washed me in blood all the way to Marston,who spoke within my Elizabeth as a happy band of offspringand never held my temper whether facing mob or king.God that cast the fortune which would not let…
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Two poems by Tess Jolly
Through an Office Window I am not at work hearing a service user saythe tremors were bad this morning, he’s been told it could be years or weeksbut he’s got no intention of stopping, I’m walking the ridge, crossing dependable fieldsbetween rooftops and clouds to the farm. And my dad is not in bed in the afternoonbut pottering in…
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Measured economy: ‘Whatever You Do, Just Don’t’ by Matthew Stewart
Matthew Paul Admirers of Matthew Stewart’s first collection, The Knives of Villalejo (Eyewear, 2017), will undoubtedly remember how its intense, tightly compressed poems navigated the overlaps and tensions between memories of his upbringing in Farnham, deep within ‘Stockbroker Belt’ Surrey, and the adult life he’s made, as a wine-trader in Extremadura, with his wife and…
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Two poems by Dina Kafiris
Alitheia The Greek truth –is it not every man’s truth,that the written word of the poetin its finality, will be,as we will come to know it,our only trusted ally? … War (her) bitten fingernails reap the scalp,religiously peeling at raw skin. Bloodfalls, like pellets into winter water. as a day ages, its waste journeys down…