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 contemporary life, and premonitions of the future, to create an introspective – yet also transportive – portrayal of the fractured times we find ourselves living…
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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 put it. James’ new pamphlet, The Storm in the Piano (Maytree Press, 2022), confirms his ability to combine the fantastical with poignancy so that even…
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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 existential order implicitly hints at the disorder lurking just beneath the surface of our sentences and our lives. Read in this context, the unshowy method…
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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 Santiago de Compostela in Spain, a distance of around 780km. But that’s not quite accurate. The Camino is the narrative around which the rest 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. He tells O’Brien that “people don’t notice how quickly we die”. You might expect such from someone who has successfully reported on some of the…
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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 Poetry Group on 17th September 2022. Peter Redgrove (1932-2003) would have been ninety this year. According to his biographer, Neil Roberts, he did…
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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 lives, and her attention to the idiosyncratic, often overlooked, details of living, but Unexhausted Time (Faber, 2022) is my favourite of her collections to date.…
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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 found myself in conversation with two very different species of poet: a young whippersnapper straight from the Oxford colleges, and a seasoned editor. The whippersnapper…
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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 its binding of ancient and modernist narratives. The layered intertextuality and multiplicity of Ulysses as a symbol of masculine heroism in decline works to express…
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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, I was asked to review Cope’s new collection, Anecdotal Evidence, for the Times Literary Supplement, which got me thinking: why has nobody written a book…
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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 slip has been inserted by mistake’. A wee postmodern gimmick, but a funny one nonetheless. Copies of this book are rare nowadays with that original…
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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) – we’re offered a sense of distance, a dispassionate realm of depiction, the chart not the territory. In reality, anyone who has ever looked at…
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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, on 2nd November 2021. Details, including how to get your free tickets, can be found here. Rose McLaren I will start where I…
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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 pushing out of the village with the bairn, up beneath the hills, along a gravely track parallel to the disused reservoir (replete with a 100-foot,…
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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. A woman becomes the fog. An unanswered prayer is the fog. A body disappears into the fog. The fog is a way to make a…
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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 titillation of prying fades, however, we are left craving an indulgence. If only this invasion of privacy were permitted, encouraged even, by the letter writer.…
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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 (b.1942) is one of her – mostly male – generation’s (the “60s Generation” or less commonly “Neomodernist Generation”)[1] most acclaimed poets, and arguably the most…
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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 Passes with a Loaf of Bread on His Shoulder by Peruvian poet César Vallejo, one of the most influential Spanish-language poets of the 20th century,…
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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. The coats that carried a copy when it had just come out would have also contained an identity card and a ration book, probably a…
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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. The pamphlet, the chapbook, the little magazine: these are as essential a part of the medium of poetry as the poems themselves. Heredity/ASTYNOME is a…