Twenty Years of Reviewing for Magma
Twenty years ago I wrote my first review for Magma, in the autumn 1999 issue (Magma 15, for those counting). Little was I to know that two decades on I would still be reviewing for what has become something of…
Twenty years ago I wrote my first review for Magma, in the autumn 1999 issue (Magma 15, for those counting). Little was I to know that two decades on I would still be reviewing for what has become something of…
I was drafting this review when the news came that Matthew Sweeney had died on August 5th. I’d like to think of him, poet with a dried sunflower in one buttonhole and a dwarf red tulip in the other (as…
The description ‘compulsive reading’ rarely applies to a poetry collection, no matter how well written, so it’s a welcome surprise to find a book that’s hard to put down until every poem is read. Martina Evans has achieved this with…
A Selected Poems is often a good way to assess the development of a poet, to see both where they have come from, and to see how they have developed. This is especially true of this selection, Rough Breathing. Gilonis…
Martyn Crucefix Reviews Vahni Capildeo, Sean O'Brien and Alice Miller Vahni Capildeo, Venus as a Bear (Carcanet Press, 2018) Sean O’Brien, Europa (Picador Poetry, 2018) Alice Miller, Nowhere Nearer (Liverpool…
This book begins with the gentle image of deer pacing into a city, and closes with a desperate echo of Goethe’s ‘More light!’ The deer disturb our notions of what city existence may be – elsewhere feral children or urban…
Broken Cities Katy Evans-Bush Smith Doorstop H Is for Hadeda Alexandra Strnad Poetry Salzburg Winner of the Poetry Business Competition judged by Mimi Khalvati and Ian Duhig, Katy Evans-Bush’s pamphlet Broken Cities explores the shifting boundaries between fiction and reality…
Poetry is a many-splendored thing. Some poetry is intricately shaped, is allusive and difficult and associative and full of serious depth. This is not that kind of poetry. This is contemporary, relatively plain-speaking and about surfaces. There’s a poem in…
I don’t like jazz. Therefore, I had immediate misgivings when confronted with the pastel-painted jazz scene adorning the cover of Hannah Lowe’s latest collection Chan. Not wanting to judge a book by its cover, I forged ahead, only to find…
Cain, Luke Kennard’s sixth collection, could be described as the poetry collection equivalent of a concept album, and as such it risks disappearing down the rabbit hole of its own conceptualised universe. Does it emerge? Yes and no. In the…