There are not many books of poetry that can be classified as genuinely original and large in scope; even among the disputed ground of ‘innovative writing’ there is little that is truly groundbreaking. Reading The Last Wolf of Scotland, however,…
Angela Cleland's second collection shows up that ever-present, subtle gap between the way a book is marketed and the different pleasure it yields. The publisher's blurb for Room of Thieves flags up the poetry's quirkiness: 'a six toed cat skeleton,…
I first came across the work of Gottfried Benn as little as seven years ago when I read Michael Hamburger’s The Truth of Poetry, a book which ever since has been something of a touchstone for me whenever I find…
Almost all the poems in Matt Merritt’s third collection, The Elephant Tests, are concerned with the outdoors. The landscapes in question are sometimes urban but more often rural, though that’s not to suggest that these poems are concerned purely with…
The opening poem of Salt Pier, ‘Cleave’, begins: “Close to the city, a deer/ leaves a hoofprint/ in our yard.” To a surprising extent, this first sentence provides a template for the whole collection. Rarely is a book of poems…
One rarely discussed distinction between poets is between those who capitalize the first words of lines, and those who don't. In general, you either do or you don't, but in The Rose of Toulouse, Fred D'Aguiar switches back and forth…
Following her previous collection Dirty Work, Angela Kirby’s latest book of poems, A Scent of Winter, is a substantial and delightful read that combines craft, humour and intelligence. Readers can readily find a handful of poems such as ‘Green Wine’…
Lunar Poems for New Religions is a curious book: mixing English and Scots, spirituality and earthiness, minimalism and expansiveness, it makes a refreshing mockery of many of the perpetual divisions in British poetry. The long poem at the centre of…
Chrissy Williams - Flying Into The Bear (Happenstance) £4 Donald Mackay - On Time (Mariscat) £5 Ben Parker - The Escape Artists (tall-lighthouse) £4 These three pamphlets are all more conventional collections than those covered in part 1 of this…
Robert Peake - The Silence Teacher (Poetry Salzburg) £4 Martin Figura - Arthur (Nasty Little Press) £5 Rachel Piercey - The Flower and the Plough. Love Poems. (Emma Press) £4.99 In consistently even, deeply muted tones, The Silence Teacher is…
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