American poet and playwright Dan O’Brien recently won the 2014 Troubadour International Poetry Prize, 2013 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize for War Reporter. You can read two new poems by O’Brien in . Exclusively for Magma, he considers the issue’s theme of…
Kei Miller's wonderful new book, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion combines uniformly strong writing with a mythic unifying theme, and even a few ventures into the realm of form. The collection comprises a spiritual/philosophical journey undertaken…
Following the success of the inaugural Winchester Poetry Festival, we asked poets, performers, organisers, attendees and Magma team members for their highlight of the weekend and to share an individual moment that might have gone hidden or unseen. Check back over…
Reading Amira Thoron’s For My Father is like trespassing someone’s dream. Through the retelling of childhood memories and family past, she brings the reader on a journey into her private world, a world with hidden fears and recurring questions. Her…
I’d only read one poem by Tom Duddy but its simple grace stayed with me. There was a mysteriousness and sweetness to it, a gut feeling that this was a real poem by a real poet (much as I felt…
Before I opened this book, I liked the cover’s atmosphere — sedges against a hazy grey-blue background. Imagine fenland, mist and water. The title Lowland stands pale and eerie across the top, as ‘there’ and ‘not-there’ as a vapour trail…
Believing that ‘creativity and play are symbiotic’, Lit from Below, Terence Winch’s sixth collection, grew from an invitation in the early 90’s from poet and visual artist Ray di Palma, often associated with the Language poetry movement, to contribute a…
There are not many books of poetry that can be classified as genuinely original and large in scope; even among the disputed ground of ‘innovative writing’ there is little that is truly groundbreaking. Reading The Last Wolf of Scotland, however,…
Angela Cleland's second collection shows up that ever-present, subtle gap between the way a book is marketed and the different pleasure it yields. The publisher's blurb for Room of Thieves flags up the poetry's quirkiness: 'a six toed cat skeleton,…
I first came across the work of Gottfried Benn as little as seven years ago when I read Michael Hamburger’s The Truth of Poetry, a book which ever since has been something of a touchstone for me whenever I find…
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