Reading Amira Thoron’s For My Father is like trespassing someone’s dream. Through the retelling of childhood memories and family past, she brings the reader on a journey into her private world, a world with hidden fears and recurring questions. Her…
I’d only read one poem by Tom Duddy but its simple grace stayed with me. There was a mysteriousness and sweetness to it, a gut feeling that this was a real poem by a real poet (much as I felt…
Before I opened this book, I liked the cover’s atmosphere — sedges against a hazy grey-blue background. Imagine fenland, mist and water. The title Lowland stands pale and eerie across the top, as ‘there’ and ‘not-there’ as a vapour trail…
Believing that ‘creativity and play are symbiotic’, Lit from Below, Terence Winch’s sixth collection, grew from an invitation in the early 90’s from poet and visual artist Ray di Palma, often associated with the Language poetry movement, to contribute a…
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,…
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’…
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