Gallop, an overview of Alison Brackenbury’s nearly 40 years of work, is appropriately named for its many poems about horses, but it could also be a gallop through her impressive career. Tonally, though, it’s probably more of a horseback ramble…
The description ‘compulsive reading’ rarely applies to a poetry collection, no matter how well written, so it’s a welcome surprise to find a book that’s hard to put down until every poem is read. Martina Evans has achieved this with…
A Selected Poems is often a good way to assess the development of a poet, to see both where they have come from, and to see how they have developed. This is especially true of this selection, Rough Breathing. Gilonis…
Martyn Crucefix Reviews Vahni Capildeo, Sean O'Brien and Alice Miller Vahni Capildeo, Venus as a Bear (Carcanet Press, 2018) Sean O’Brien, Europa (Picador Poetry, 2018) Alice Miller, Nowhere Nearer (Liverpool…
Kei Miller's wonderful new book, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion combines uniformly strong writing with a mythic unifying theme, and even a few ventures into the realm of form. The collection comprises a spiritual/philosophical journey undertaken…
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…
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…
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:…
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…
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…
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