This comprehensive gathering together of the poetry and prose of one of the key figures of non-mainstream British poetry is long-overdue, with much of the work included here having been long out of print, or scattered across a plethora of…
I was having another read through Magma 52 the other day and came to Glyn Maxwell’s fascinating article on poetry and theatre. He finishes off with a plea to young poets to create verse theatre. Here’s the quote (I’ve left…
Natalya Gorbanevskaya will be best known to some as the activist to whom Joan Baez dedicated her song 'Natalia'. Part of the Soviet dissident movement, Gorbanevskaya was arrested in 1969 and interred in a Soviet psychiatric prison for several years…
I was interested in reviewing The Model Shop because Williams hails from my own part of the world and is just a few years older than me. I hoped to find the cultural icons I grew up surrounded by, rooted…
There was a moment during my reading when these two books merged. It occurred shortly after I set down my copy of The Tempest Prognosticator and picked up Neptune Blue. At one moment I was visiting the Motel in Fairvale…
The title poem, 'House of Tongues', is after Paul Bowles’ 1947 short story A Distant Episode which recounts the capture and physical mutilation of a linguistics professor travelling through an unnamed country that is probably Morocco. The professor suffers an…
Noel Duffy’s choice of title for his debut collection is a good early omen. It neatly and precisely draws together the book’s deepest concerns. In the Library of Lost Objects is primarily concerned with preservation and restoration: the poems that…
The richest events occur in us long before the soul perceives them. And, when we begin to open our eyes to the visible, we have long since committed ourselves to the invisible. Gabriele D'Annunzio Poets are often advised to ‘find…
In one of many gems in this extraordinary first collection, Ailbhe Darcy compares her emotional (and, implicitly, artistic) self to “a solitary magpie”: reflecting every colour and none, playing I-Spy with the gleams of a mind ‘Caw Poem’ contains everything…
Karen McCarthy Woolf’s point about short poems not winning competitions makes me ask, why not? Do judges somehow feel short-changed, reckoning that poets don’t put as much work into writing a short poem as a long one? I don’t think this…
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