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…
Simon Barraclough has been, for the past year, Poet in Residence at Mullard Space Science Laboratory. Barraclough remarks that his path there began with a fortuitous reading in 2013, but also long ago as a child looking up at the…
Chris McCabe, Speculatrix (Penned in the Margins, £9.99) Andre Bagoo, Burn (Shearsman Books, £8.95) Dorothy Lehane, Ephemeris (Nine Arches Press, £8.99) Chris McCabe’s collection Speculatrix juggles language like he’s juggling knives, mixing contemporary urban scenes with Elizabethan and Jacobean references…
A poet’s voice is a much discussed aspect of a poet’s work, but just how relevant or limiting it is being recognised by your voice provoked an interesting discussion by a panel of well-known poets taking part in Magma’s National Conversation…
Poets Hannah Lowe, Joelle Taylor, Chris McCabe and Jon Stone read their collaborative poems at The Crypt in Clerkenwell earlier this month as part of Magma’s ongoing National Conversation about Poetry. The audience listened attentively to the new work, which responded…
Carrie Etter’s Imagined Sons doesn’t have a jacket that would make me buy the book. It quotes Bernard O’Donoghue: “These are poems of the utmost importance,” while artist Paula Rego’s cover image of St Christina with a swaddled baby on…
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