Features
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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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On ‘The Storm in the Piano’ by Christopher James
Neil Elder Christopher James – winner of the 2008 National Poetry Competition and author of several volumes of poetry – remains “criminally underrated”, as Martin Malone once […]
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On ‘Fear of Forks’ by Hilary Menos
Matthew Stewart One of the main reasons for exerting restraint in poetry is to play with what is held back, left unsaid. The portrayal of linguistic and […]
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On ‘Book of Days’ by Phoebe Power
Rob A. Mackenzie Book of Days (Carcanet, 2022) is Phoebe Power’s account of making the ‘Camino’, a pilgrimage from St Jean Pied de Port in France to […]
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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. […]
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Peter Redgrove: Dreaming in a Wakeful World
Peter Redgrove, sometime in the 1970s John Greening discusses Peter Redgrove and his poetry. Based on a talk given to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Falmouth […]
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‘All our past lives’: on Emily Berry’s ‘Unexhausted Time’
Nicola Healey I have long admired the way Emily Berry’s poetry handles complex thought, not just feeling, within carefully considered sentences, her intelligent sensitivity to our interior […]
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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 poetry reading in London. I […]
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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 Ulysses (1842) is monumental in […]
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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 to the publisher. In 2018, […]
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On ‘Corrigenda for Costafine Town’ by Jake Morris-Campbell
Richie McCaffery The first edition of Alasdair Gray’s debut collection of short stories (Unlikely Stories, Mostly) carries with it a little snippet of paper saying ‘Erratum: This […]
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On ‘Map of a Plantation’ by Jenny Mitchell
Daniel Bennett The title of Jenny Mitchell’s follow-up collection to 2019’s Her Lost Language begins with a gesture to objectivity. Map of a Plantation (Indigo Dreams, 2021) […]
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Handbrake turn on a hair-pin bend: Lavinia Greenlaw and poetic feat
This essay was originally published by Wild Court on 1st March 2016. Lavinia Greenlaw will be taking part in the latest online ‘Poetry And…’ event, curated by Ruth Padel, […]
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‘Man of the region’: an appraisal of poet Will Burns
Will Burns in Wendover Woods, Buckinghamshire; photograph by Antonio Olmos Jake Morris-Campbell, April 2021 May 2020, the seventh week of lockdown measures. It’s about 9.30 in the morning and I’m […]
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Fog Theory: lost in the white gaze
Alycia Pirmohamed “Fog is a cloud that touches the ground.” A metaphor for vanishing, for dissolving, for withholding, fog often finds its way into my poetry. […]
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Fifty Forty: on the incomplete histories of Carcanet and the LRB
Kevin Gardner One of the most pleasurable of readerly experiences is the subversive frisson of snooping into the conversational intimacy of an author’s letters. When the initial […]
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Ana Blandiana: Poet, Civic Figure, Woman
Photo: Miguel Ruiz Durán Andreea Iulia Scridon Though her name may only be familiar to relatively few readers globally, Romanian poet, essayist, and translator Ana Blandiana […]
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‘Like walking in the rain’: César Vallejo, Carolyn Forché, and the problem of witness
César Vallejo in 1929; the cover of Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us (Harper & Row, 1982) Jonathan Hitchens The very first couplet of A Man […]
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The Haunted Forties: Wrey Gardiner and Poetry Quarterly
Mark Valentine On the trestle table beneath the balconies and chandeliers of the Winter Gardens in the old spa town there was a run of pocket-sized poetry journals. […]
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On ‘Heredity/ASTYNOME’ by Naush Sabah
Daniel Bennett If poetry ever had ‘must have’ purchases, then Naush Sabah’s debut release from Broken Sleep Books proved to be one of these over the summer. […]