Stephanie Norgate's collection, The Blue Den, is a thoughtful study of the people and things which inhabit the edges of the conventional society. The poems are so well constructed that the reader becomes enmeshed in narratives that demand continual attention,…
There's often a certain cynicism, which I share, regarding poems about poetry and poets. The American journal PANK once tweeted, viciously, “Whenever someone submits me a story in which the protagonist is a writer, I think 'Why does this author…
Drawn from her past observations while working as a psychiatric nurse in London, Sally Read’s third collection, The Day Hospital, contains dramatised accounts of twelve patients over one day in a psychiatric hospital in London. Despite their longings and compulsions…
The Angel’s Share is, as a note accompanying the title poem helpfully tells us, "a distiller’s term for the evaporation from casks as whiskey ages". The collection is divided into three parts: the central one, called the Mallory sonnets, is…
Poetry: at first it’s all around us, in nursery rhymes, ‘children’s poems’, at primary school, even in some form on children’s television. We learn to speak in rhyme, which is patterned language, and it makes up our earliest games. It’s…
Sometimes people ask of a particular poem: Did it have to be written? Is this a necessary poem? They are wondering if there was sufficient pressure for the poem to become meaningful in the assumption that validity is based on…
Jon: More than ever, it seems Frank Kuppner is the Douglas Adams of poetry; his short, questing stanzas in The Same Life Twice take on God, time and the Universe but are shot through with droll self-deprecation and bathos, not…
The post will soon bring me a fat package of poems, long promised, the programme of reading and judging them marked in my diary in advance. Every poem will carry its author’s hope of success, every page a glimpse of…
One evening, the bell rang Softly around the port. Is that poetry? If it is (highly debatable!), it has little poetic quality. It reads like prose cut up into lines. Somehow, it has a prose rhythm, and there’s little attention…
Alec Finlay writes mainly short, fragile poems, using lineation to draw attention to the felicities and poky bits of language, leaving things unadorned, cutting away everything but the nub. More than anything he seems to be interested in people speaking…
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