I was drafting this review when the news came that Matthew Sweeney had died on August 5th. I’d like to think of him, poet with a dried sunflower in one buttonhole and a dwarf red tulip in the other (as…
Jo Burns - Circling for Gods (Eyewear), £6 John Challis - The Black Cab (Poetry Salzburg), £6 Hera Lindsay Bird - Pamper Me to Hell & Back (Smith/Doorstop), £7.50 Jo Burns’s debut pamphlet, Circling for Gods, skirts across the seas…
The description ‘compulsive reading’ rarely applies to a poetry collection, no matter how well written, so it’s a welcome surprise to find a book that’s hard to put down until every poem is read. Martina Evans has achieved this with…
A Selected Poems is often a good way to assess the development of a poet, to see both where they have come from, and to see how they have developed. This is especially true of this selection, Rough Breathing. Gilonis…
Martyn Crucefix Reviews Vahni Capildeo, Sean O'Brien and Alice Miller Vahni Capildeo, Venus as a Bear (Carcanet Press, 2018) Sean O’Brien, Europa (Picador Poetry, 2018) Alice Miller, Nowhere Nearer (Liverpool…
This book begins with the gentle image of deer pacing into a city, and closes with a desperate echo of Goethe’s ‘More light!’ The deer disturb our notions of what city existence may be – elsewhere feral children or urban…
Broken Cities Katy Evans-Bush Smith Doorstop H Is for Hadeda Alexandra Strnad Poetry Salzburg Winner of the Poetry Business Competition judged by Mimi Khalvati and Ian Duhig, Katy Evans-Bush’s pamphlet Broken Cities explores the shifting boundaries between fiction and reality…
Poetry is a many-splendored thing. Some poetry is intricately shaped, is allusive and difficult and associative and full of serious depth. This is not that kind of poetry. This is contemporary, relatively plain-speaking and about surfaces. There’s a poem in…
“You forget parties” Much Possessed John Foggin (Smith / Doorstop, £9.95) Reviewed by Helena Nelson Much Possessed is packed with people. Nearly a quarter of the poems are dramatic monologues from characters as various as Lucifer, Richard III, Myra Hindley,…
Magma 67, extra review, Claire Crowther Reviews Jeffery Wainwright’s What Must Happen, Carcanet Press, £9.99 What Must Happen Jeffrey Wainwright Carcanet What Must Happen is not as positive as it sounds: things and people go nowhere or break up or…
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