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…
Emotional difficulties lie behind both these pamphlets. For Tait, love ends repeatedly in strange, uplifted sadnesses. For Irving, fear and unreason lie in wait. Overall, Irving’s view is the bleaker, as some of her last lines testify: “..I stand like…
White Sheets, a Poetry Book Society recommendation, is Beverley Bie Brahic's second collection. Born in Canada, she lives in France and the US and has translated a number of books by Cixous, Kristeva, and Derrida. A fascination with language's mutability…
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…
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.…
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