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…
Jane Bonnyman’s first pamphlet, An Ember from the Fire: Poems on the Life of Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, is a gothic wonder of a book, an adventurous, swashbuckling exploration of an extraordinary life. The pamphlet opens as the heroine…
Magma’s third National Conversation Event: Peel & Portion organised by board members John Canfield and Ella Frears opened up a fascinating discussion about the poetic process and different attitudes to drafting, editing and when a poem is considered finished. Poets…
I’ve now been reading Transparencies, on and off, for almost two years. This is a good period of time over which to think about a collection that works across Gaelic and English as well as seeming to span at least…
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