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A Romantic two centuries late: ‘The Ghost Net’ by Alan Jenkins
Richie McCaffery The Ghost Net is Alan Jenkins’s eighth book-length collection and the first full collection from New Walk Editions, marking a very auspicious new venture for the press which began by producing elegant, quality poetry pamphlets and grew out of the much admired and missed poetry magazine, New Walk. From the collection title onwards…
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Three poems by Andrew McNeillie
Spring Offensive A day to go and it will be June.Yet we’re in March-to-April weather still.Will we get there in time?All the forecasts sayit’s going to happen soon. Spilling off the jetstreamto the east, ill winds sweepdrizzle into our minds.It seems in keeping with the timesthat nothing is as it should be. 31 May 2023…
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Two poems by Selina Tusitala Marsh
We are delighted to have former New Zealand Poet Laureate Selina Tusitala Marsh as our featured reader at the inaugural event in the Wild Court Reading Series. The event – introduced and hosted by TS Eliot Prize 2022 winner Anthony Joseph – will take place at The Anatomy Museum on King’s College London’s Strand campus,…
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‘Aveley Lane’: a poem by Matthew Stewart
The poem below was originally published in The Spectator and appears in Matthew Stewart’s second collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, forthcoming from HappenStance Press in November. A launch for the collection will take place at The Devereux pub, Temple, London, from 7pm on Tuesday 7th November; free entry. Aveley Lane Lights turned on but…
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Three poems by Teresa Forrest
Versions of the poems below appear in Teresa Forrest’s debut pamphlet, The Stories in Between, forthcoming as part of the Five Leaves New Poetry series. The pamphlet will be launched on the evening of 28th November at Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham. Details here. In Ballerin Village The fat-bellied range in my grandmother’s house worked hard,to…
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Memorable mastery: on ‘My Hollywood’ by Boris Dralyuk
Tom Branfoot Anachronism is a stylistic quality that governs translator and poet Boris Dralyuk’s debut collection My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry Books, 2022). In both form and subject – the dilapidated past of émigré Hollywood – My Hollywood is motivated by an interwar, formalist style that is objectively anachronistic. Dralyuk, born in Odessa…
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‘Fairey’: a poem by John Greening
The poem below is from John Greening’s The Interpretation of Owls: Poems 1977-2022, edited by Kevin Gardner (Baylor University Press, 2023). The volume’s UK launch will take place at Hatchards, Piccadilly, on the evening of Thursday 9th November. Tickets include a discount on the book and are available here. Fairey The first public conjuring show…
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Kingdoms of Earth and Sea: on Rishi Dastidar, Jane Draycott, and Ruth Padel
Kevin Gardner Three new and seemingly distinct collections by Rishi Dastidar, Jane Draycott, and Ruth Padel join their voices in opposing the kind of exceptionalism that deludes nations and their leaders to the climate crisis and their own impending ruin, that continues to convince some that Britain was chosen to rule the waves. British exceptionalism…
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Two poems by Chiara Salomoni
Veneto Bassano is my birthplace wherethe Dal Ponte family were born and worked on the six paintingsI counted at the Louvre years ago: true sketches of 16th-century folklife,religious works; realistic as photos. Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana,in all its majesty, hangs in the room of the Mona Lisa; I turned aroundto see Tiziano’s name,…
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A Shilling Book from Praed Street: on Daniel George
Mark Valentine Daniel George (1890-1967) was the author of To-morrow Will Be Different (1932), a book-length narrative poem about a day in his life, getting up, bathing and shaving, going for a walk with friends, visiting the pub, then meeting at a cottage for tea. It is, as the epigraph quotation from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Notebooks…
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Two poems by Richie McCaffery
Image © Gerry Cambridge Scrap Your last words to me were written, not spoken,a paper cut severing us and our shared 14 yearsbecause you felt it was for the good of us both,how your happiness lay beyond this sacrifice. Two years on I hope your forecast proved true,it didn’t for me. I kept your letter…
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‘Siena 1978’: a poem by Bernard O’Donoghue
Siena 1978 ‘the red-haired girl from Palaeography’ The photograph was taken when the sun broke throughAnd shone on the copper red of her hairAs we sat in the Piazza del CampoAfter seven days of unrelieved rainfall.We’d come out from seeing the LorenzettiFrescos: Good and Bad Government,And the attendant golden-haired angelsSurrounding the Virgin and her child.…
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Toughness & tenderness: on ‘Crisis Actor’ by Declan Ryan
John Fuller How can we be prepared for all the difficult life-choices we may have to make? It’s a commonplace that there can be no rehearsal for life, since life has already begun. At the core of ‘Halcyon Days’, a beautiful love poem, and one of the longer and most philosophical in Declan Ryan’s very…
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‘The Ghost of Emily Hale Replies to T. S. Eliot’: a poem by Nicola Healey
The Ghost of Emily Hale Replies to T. S. Eliot ‘I see myself as a blood-sucker’– T. S. Eliot, in a letter to Emily Hale (2 August 1934) Our posthumous letters to the world hang oncurious computers everywhere, like Twitter statements.I was requested to write mine by Princetonwhen I gave them all your letters. It…
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Wisdom joined with simplicity: on Andrew Motion’s New & Selected
Patrick Davidson Roberts It’s been twenty-five years since Andrew Motion’s first Selected Poems was published by Faber & Faber and for him personally, and for the world, a lot has occurred in the meantime. For him, there has been ten years as Poet Laureate, personal upheavals, professional successes, and a relocation to Baltimore. For all…
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‘What the Arborist Saw’: a poem by Audrey Molloy
What the Arborist Saw A cat, among the finches, the sparrows and the wrens.A cat, stuck, in the highest fork of a sycamorethe afternoon he scooped her in one fluidmovement into his jacket and kept searching,calling down to the upturned faces of the boys,No sign of the rascal, must have done a runner. He feeds…
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The death-drive and the drive to self-indetermination in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Ariel’
Bethany Smith If death is seen to be the ultimate fear of the human psyche, the subject is faced with two options — to find any means necessary to escape it, or to aggressively confront it in hopes of making it less of a fear. Many human actions are driven by the desire to escape…
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‘Ghost and Chrome’: a poem by Nicholas Hogg
Ghost and Chrome I wanted a life like a burning comet, and got an engine fireon the Nullaboor Plain. I was riding at the heart of Australia,the red dirt towns and crocodile creeks, tin roof shacksand termite mounds. But I was doomed to expirein the middle of sand, a motorbike ditchedby the side of a…
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Three poems by Dina Kafiris
Maria Dear old man, why do you sit alonereflecting on a war fought long ago on the young girlwho spent with you those last few daysleaving you with the promise of a kisson your return. Did you not find solacein the woman who later bore your childrenas you scratch your head in grief… With a…
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‘Arctic’: a poem by Christian Ward
Arctic The first time you tasted chemotherapy,there were no side effects apart from an Arcticchill turning your lips blue like the wiryhospital blanket you wrapped yourself in. You shivered the troughs and peaksof the Cordillera range, mirroringthe echocardiogram to come. No snowfell in your cubicle, but it was cold enough to trace the outline of…