Poetry Parnassus
Poetry Parnassus begins today at the Southbank Centre, London. By the looks of the online programme, there are many amazing events taking place and I’m only sorry that I’m hundreds of miles away from it all. But, if you’re in…
Blog Review 10: Matt Merritt Reviews ‘An Andrew Crozier Reader’
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…
Do We Need More Verse Drama?
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…
Blog Review 9: Helen Mort Reviews Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s ‘Selected Poems’
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…
Blog Review 8 – Angela Topping Reviews F.J. Williams’s ‘The Model Shop’
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…
Blog Review 7: Donald S. Murray Reviews Simon Barraclough’s ‘Neptune Blue’ and Isobel Dixon’s ‘The Tempest Prognosticator’
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…
Blog Review 6 – Karen McCarthy Woolf Reviews Susan Wicks’s ‘House of Tongues’
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…
Blog Review 5 – Dave Coates Reviews Noel Duffy’s ‘In the Library of Lost Objects’
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…
Finding a voice: influences of the past and present
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…
Blog Review 4: Miriam Gamble Reviews Ailbhe Darcy’s ‘Imaginary Menagerie’
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…
Supported by Arts Council England