Reviews
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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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A psycho-geographer slipping the coordinates of time: on Tim Cumming
Julian Stannard ‘You sit/down to put into words your reckoning.’ I don’t read Tim Cumming with any expectation of the anodyne. The title of his latest […]
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An instinct for pace and balance: on Ruth Padel’s ‘Beethoven Variations’
John Greening Some composers keep themselves out of their music, but in Beethoven the life is always peeping through. It seems natural, then, for Ruth Padel to […]
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A primer on the nature of hearing: on Seán Street’s ‘The Sound Recordist’
Kevin Gardner As Britain’s first professor of radio, Seán Street (emeritus professor at Bournemouth University) brings to the writing of poetry a unique perspective on sound. The […]
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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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On the poetry of George Kendrick
Matthew Stewart Let’s take a forgotten poet who went from publishing with Carcanet, garnering a PBS Recommendation and receiving excellent reviews in the broadsheets in the process, […]
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Why do we care: Romalyn Ante’s ‘Antiemetic for Homesickness’
Holly Loveday Romalyn Ante’s debut collection Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto & Windus, 2020) – flitting between clinical-white, squeaky hospital wards and the tropical abundance of the Philippines […]
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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. […]
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On ‘Tiger Girl’ by Pascale Petit
King’s College London’s popular ‘Poetry And..’ series, chaired by Professor of Poetry Ruth Padel, returns on 30th November at 5pm with ‘Poetry And… The Wild in a Time of […]
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On the poetry of Douglas Crase
Declan Ryan “A shipwreck becomes a way of seeing things”, Douglas Crase writes in ‘Saggaponnack’, and a sense of the dredging up of what’s been lost occurs […]
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On ‘Dressing for the Afterlife’ by Maria Taylor
Matthew Stewart In her second full collection, Dressing for the Afterlife (Nine Arches, 2020), Maria Taylor makes a huge step forward from her already impressive first book, […]
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‘No right or wrong, only how I got here’: The Early Poetry of Richie McCaffery
Photo image: © Gerry Cambridge Jonathan Davidson In his second pamphlet, Ballast Flint (Small Press Publishing for Cromarty Arts Trust, 2013, with artwork by Hannah Fry), and […]
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On ‘Belladonna’ by Suna Afshan
Daniel Bennett Both grounded and detached, playing with a sense of narrative but also revelling in the rarefied brightness of the image, Suna Afshan’s debut chapbook Belladonna, […]
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On Natalie Diaz’s ‘Postcolonial Love Poem’
Holly Loveday Ultimately, ‘you cannot drink poetry’. Diaz precedes this statement in her self-aware second collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, with the prayer of an Elder Mojave woman […]
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‘A parent’s age’: on the poetry of Rory Waterman
Matthew Stewart ‘Belonging’ and ‘estrangement’ are key terms when getting to grips with Rory Waterman’s poetry. They played an explicitly pivotal role in his early years, but […]
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On Martin Booth’s ‘The Knotting Poems’
The main part of Knotting in 1884. Courtesy of the Bedfordshire County Archives. John Greening It’s unlikely that many readers will remember the original elegant editions of […]
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‘Mandrake and Scammony’: on the poems of Dorothy Molloy
G.E. Stevens No more wavering… Burn through the parochial states of mind. Cut and burn away to the truth. This is Dorothy Molloy’s credo, found in one […]
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Pixel Perfect: Stephen Sexton’s ‘If All the World and Love Were Young’
Chris Larkin When I was seven or eight years old, I was desperate to own either a Sega Mega Drive or a Super Nintendo. Much to my […]
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‘Time a river we swim in freestyle’: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poetry & prose
Katie Da Cunha Lewin Throughout Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry as Insurgent Art, his manifesto on poetry written in aphorisms published in 2007, he returns to central questions about […]