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…
I was interested in reviewing The Model Shop because Williams hails from my own part of the world and is just a few years older than me. I hoped to find the cultural icons I grew up surrounded by, rooted…
There was a moment during my reading when these two books merged. It occurred shortly after I set down my copy of The Tempest Prognosticator and picked up Neptune Blue. At one moment I was visiting the Motel in Fairvale…
The title poem, 'House of Tongues', is after Paul Bowles’ 1947 short story A Distant Episode which recounts the capture and physical mutilation of a linguistics professor travelling through an unnamed country that is probably Morocco. The professor suffers an…
Noel Duffy’s choice of title for his debut collection is a good early omen. It neatly and precisely draws together the book’s deepest concerns. In the Library of Lost Objects is primarily concerned with preservation and restoration: the poems that…
In one of many gems in this extraordinary first collection, Ailbhe Darcy compares her emotional (and, implicitly, artistic) self to “a solitary magpie”: reflecting every colour and none, playing I-Spy with the gleams of a mind ‘Caw Poem’ contains everything…
Rupert Loydell is not one of those poets who will publish a mere 100 or so gems of perfect poetry over a whole lifetime. He’s not Larkin, or Bishop, or Bunting. He’s more like Emily Dickinson, or John Ashbery: he…
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