Essays
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An extract from ‘A High Calling’ by John Greening
Below are two extracts from A High Calling (or Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?) by John Greening, recently published by Renard Press. Sharing what Greening has learnt during […]
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Losing ‘a sense sublime’: anosmia and poetry
William Wordsworth at 28, by William Shuter Nicola Healey Smell is arguably the poet’s sense, and the most poetic sense: it is the most mysterious, least understood sense; scent triggers […]
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‘One of the best Scottish poets of his generation’? – On Gerald Mangan
Matthew Stewart How many individuals really do manage to produce outstanding work in more than one medium of the arts? Very, very few is the inevitable answer – but Gerald […]
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From the shires: on Greening, Richardson, Branfoot, Self, & Nevett
Kevin Gardner Contemplating the literary significance of Huntingdonshire, that county that no longer exists outside memory and imagination, John Greening was reminded of all the poets who left their mark, […]
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‘In and out of time’: on Declan Ryan’s ‘Five Leaves Left’
By Nicola Healey Crisis Actor by Declan Ryan was my favourite poetry collection of 2023 – I wrote on it at length for The London Magazine in July 2023, where […]
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Causes in time: on ‘Thom Gunn – A Cool Queer Life’ by Michael Nott
Andre Bagoo Michael Nott’s Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life (Faber, 2024) begins with the seed of an idea. Over the course of its 720 pages, that seed builds into […]
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U. A. Fanthorpe: The Watcher
To mark the publication of a new edition of the late U. A. Fanthorpe, Not My Best Side: Selected Poems (Baylor University Press), its editor John Greening shares his thoughts […]
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Wit and wordplay: ‘After You Were, I Am’ by Camille Ralphs
Kevin Gardner Divided into three discrete units, Camille Ralph’s After You Were, I Am (Faber, 2024) transports the reader into a warped revisioning of the seventeenth century. The first section […]
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‘You must live through hell’: On Survivor’s Notebook by Dan O’Brien
Nicola Healey Survivor’s Notebook (Acre, 2023) interrogates the aftermath of Dan O’Brien’s recovery from cancer. A memoiristic sequence of prose poems, it forms a companion to Our Cancers (Acre, 2021; […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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On ‘Toys / Tricks / Traps’ by Christopher Reid
Mark Wynne Whilst Christopher Reid has often disguised deeply autobiographical work behind sophisticated role play – the fictional female translator of an Eastern European poet in the extraordinary Katerina Brac […]
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‘Rife with schools of shadow’: on the poetry of James Peake
Lily Searstone Through fragmented visions and memories, James Peake’s second collection, The Star in the Branches (Two Rivers, 2022), seamlessly distils the past, the starkness of […]
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‘Parts of us regenerate, others don’t’: On Dan O’Brien
James Peake The photojournalist and Pulitzer-prize winner, Paul Watson, is a friend, collaborator and in “complicated ways, almost family” to the poet and playwright Dan O’Brien. […]