Reviews
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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 the existential problem of poetry: ‘What is the use of poetry? The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.’ …
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Breaking the Unthinkable Silence: on Michael Hofmann’s ‘One Lark, One Horse’
(photograph by Jemimah Kuhfeld: www.jemimahkuhfeld.co.uk) André Naffis-Sahely Poetry critics, just like the rest of us, are largely ungenerous to the middle-aged. More often than not, we expect our poets to vanish once the fury of youth has abated, and we ignore them all too happily until the reflective wisdom of senility has finally…
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The World of the Half-Seen: on Ruth Padel’s ‘Emerald’ and writing loss
Nadia Saward Emerald, Ruth Padel’s new collection (Chatto & Windus, 2018), is primarily an elegy for her mother who passed away in 2017 at the age of ninety-seven. In it, through careful observation of the world around her, Padel has created a nuanced portrayal of the transformations that occur in our lives when…
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‘Back into the socket’: William Fuller’s Playtime
Photo credit: Anna Fuller They are tempted to note patterns in the scene below, but its aspects are so various and the names to be applied to them so few that nothing can be described —‘¶¶’, William Fuller Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be A deeper outside thing, a…
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‘Life beyond the glass’: Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel
Released in 2009 to celebrate Darwin’s bicentenary, Darwin: A Life in Poems is a selection of snapshots of the naturalist’s life, using quotations from his journals, papers, autobiography and letters. Acting as a miniature biography, Padel (Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter) follows the progress of Darwin’s thought; both in the discovery of evolution to the growing tension in…
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Andrew Elliott – Only Disconnect
Julian Stannard Part of the pleasure of reading Mortality Rate is knowing so little about the man who wrote it. Some official data: Andrew Elliott was born in Northern Ireland in 1961 and is now living – according to the most recent reports – in East London. He is the author of two previous collections,…
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‘It is a wild fucking Kingdom’ – Toby Martinez de las Rivas’s Terror
Rose McLaren: Which is more complicated, life or poetry? Whatever the case, they are seldom complicated in the same way. Yet Toby Martinez de las Rivas has that rare thing, an ability to fuse verbal and lived experience in complex detail. This offers a sort of succour – if things can’t be solved, they can…