Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill presents poems from each of John F Deane’s previous five Carcanet collections alongside the substantial new title sequence. The opening piece, ‘In Dedication’, sets the tone with its affirming exploration of suffering, faith and endurance:…
Some time around 1981, I shared a bottle of British Council bubbly with the satiric writer Tom Sharpe, author of the Wilt books. He was telling me his father had been a fervent supporter of the National Socialists and thought…
Stephanie Norgate's collection, The Blue Den, is a thoughtful study of the people and things which inhabit the edges of the conventional society. The poems are so well constructed that the reader becomes enmeshed in narratives that demand continual attention,…
There's often a certain cynicism, which I share, regarding poems about poetry and poets. The American journal PANK once tweeted, viciously, “Whenever someone submits me a story in which the protagonist is a writer, I think 'Why does this author…
Drawn from her past observations while working as a psychiatric nurse in London, Sally Read’s third collection, The Day Hospital, contains dramatised accounts of twelve patients over one day in a psychiatric hospital in London. Despite their longings and compulsions…
The Angel’s Share is, as a note accompanying the title poem helpfully tells us, "a distiller’s term for the evaporation from casks as whiskey ages". The collection is divided into three parts: the central one, called the Mallory sonnets, is…
Jon: More than ever, it seems Frank Kuppner is the Douglas Adams of poetry; his short, questing stanzas in The Same Life Twice take on God, time and the Universe but are shot through with droll self-deprecation and bathos, not…
Alec Finlay writes mainly short, fragile poems, using lineation to draw attention to the felicities and poky bits of language, leaving things unadorned, cutting away everything but the nub. More than anything he seems to be interested in people speaking…
The Rapture, Tim Cumming’s first book since 2004’s The Rumour, is divided into three sections: Chapel of Carbon, Improvisations and First Music. The short poems in the first section find portents in everyday occurrences. Cumming is also a film-maker and…
In his essay concluding Jade Ladder, Brian Holton discusses the trials, tribulations, negotiations and compromises involved in translating Chinese poetry into English. Some of Yang Lian and Qin Xiaoyu’s first choices were shelved, he writes, “because the joke just wasn’t…
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