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…
I am going to start this article with a statistic. No poem under 10 lines has won the National Poetry Competition since (online) records began in 1978! The website shows winning poems only prior to 2000, but between 2001-2010 you…
Rupert Loydell is not one of those poets who will publish a mere 100 or so gems of perfect poetry over a whole lifetime. He’s not Larkin, or Bishop, or Bunting. He’s more like Emily Dickinson, or John Ashbery: he…
I’ve been around Magma since before it was Magma, a name chosen “to suggest the molten core within the world, hidden as deep feelings are and showing itself in unpredictable movements, tremors, lava flows, eruptions”. Magma began not so much…
I’m a sucker for dogs. Dogs are not taboo in poetry as cats are. I cite Suzanne Batty’s 'The Barking Dog' and Chase Twitchell’s 'The Language of Dogs'. Mark Doty, too, writes dogs into poems and his memoir Dog Days…
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