-
‘Five Breaths’: a poem by Eleanor Rees
Five Breaths were needed to extinguish the flameand now a red wick leans into the melt, diving into a quarried lakehigh in the mountains to find mouthfulsof salt in the freshwater under the slate. Here, dust edges the decorations. The holly wreath curls, browns,is a woodland floor alongside a streamwhich pours towards the quarry. Inside…
-
A Scholar of the Everyday: on ‘Collecting the Data’ by Mat Riches
Christopher Horton Collecting the Data (Red Squirrel Press, 2023) is a pamphlet that decrypts everyday experiences, observing in them both the complex and the sublime as an integral part of the poet’s coming of age. These experiences constitute a kind of life-induction programme for Riches that at times comes across as almost predestined, as is…
-
Two poems by Matthew Paul
Photo by Thomas Verbruggen on Unsplash A Short History of Greenhouses In the end, my father’s greenhouse was shipwreckedBy ivy, which spiralled round bamboo canes, stuckLike octopus suckers glued to a crab-shell, cracked The last surviving glass and snaked through holesAt the bottom of terracotta plastic pots. An oddballNurseryman, a character actor throwing colourful Shade,…
-
A poem by Rory Waterman
Below is a poem from Rory Waterman’s fourth collection, Come Here to This Gate, published by Carcanet on 25th April. Until that date, the Carcanet website is offering a 25% discount on the collection, and free UK postage, with the pre-order code RWGATE25 at checkout. There will be an online launch, hosted by Declan Ryan,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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 . . .…
-
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…
-
‘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…
-
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…
-
‘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…