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…
I don’t like jazz. Therefore, I had immediate misgivings when confronted with the pastel-painted jazz scene adorning the cover of Hannah Lowe’s latest collection Chan. Not wanting to judge a book by its cover, I forged ahead, only to find…
After Memorial, her rendering of military deaths in Homer’s Iliad, Alice Oswald’s seventh collection returns mostly to poems about the natural world. Traditionally poems have described nature either as evidence of God’s handiwork or as a comfort or inspiration for…
Cain, Luke Kennard’s sixth collection, could be described as the poetry collection equivalent of a concept album, and as such it risks disappearing down the rabbit hole of its own conceptualised universe. Does it emerge? Yes and no. In the…
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