Robert Peake - The Silence Teacher (Poetry Salzburg) £4 Martin Figura - Arthur (Nasty Little Press) £5 Rachel Piercey - The Flower and the Plough. Love Poems. (Emma Press) £4.99 In consistently even, deeply muted tones, The Silence Teacher is…
Omnesia is remarkable for being not one book but two – a ‘remix’ and an ‘alternative text’ – and W.N. Herbert prefaces both with an apology to the reader for requiring them to deal with two mirror texts. The content…
Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill presents poems from each of John F Deane’s previous five Carcanet collections alongside the substantial new title sequence. The opening piece, ‘In Dedication’, sets the tone with its affirming exploration of suffering, faith and endurance:…
Some time around 1981, I shared a bottle of British Council bubbly with the satiric writer Tom Sharpe, author of the Wilt books. He was telling me his father had been a fervent supporter of the National Socialists and thought…
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…
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