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…
The launch reading for Magma 57 was a buzzing event with well over 100 in the audience. On this page we’ve picked a few highlights and some distinctive styles so if you were not there you can get a flavour…
A hundred years ago Ezra Pound was busy creating modern poetry in London. He helped Yeats to write more directly and more symbolically, then set about “breaking the pentameter” by following T E Hulme and others to create imagism and,…
Almost all the poems in Matt Merritt’s third collection, The Elephant Tests, are concerned with the outdoors. The landscapes in question are sometimes urban but more often rural, though that’s not to suggest that these poems are concerned purely with…
The opening poem of Salt Pier, ‘Cleave’, begins: “Close to the city, a deer/ leaves a hoofprint/ in our yard.” To a surprising extent, this first sentence provides a template for the whole collection. Rarely is a book of poems…
One rarely discussed distinction between poets is between those who capitalize the first words of lines, and those who don't. In general, you either do or you don't, but in The Rose of Toulouse, Fred D'Aguiar switches back and forth…
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