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…
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…
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…
Tony Williams’ second collection, The Midlands, begins on a rather gloomy note, with the first line proclaiming, ‘The Midlands are crying’. But the detail of what provokes the despair makes it convincing, heartfelt and all the more pervasive: They cry…
It says something, perhaps, about the power and mystery of Rosemary Tonks’ life (once the toast of literary 1960s Soho, turned religious recluse who repudiated all of her work) that I should have heard of her long before I read…
There are four pamphlets in 2014's Faber New Poets series: 9: Rachael Allen 10: Will Burns 11: Zaffar Kunial 12: Declan Ryan Sixteen pages is quite a slender space in which to make your mark, but Rachael Allen gives us,…
Here are the names of some of the flowers of Carrigskeewaun – sandwort, saxifrage, asphodel; and here are some of its songbirds – red bunting, blackcaps, chiffchaffs, a wren, “its tumultuous/ Aria in C or/ Whatever the key/ In which…
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…
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