REVIEWS
+ Red House, Sasha
Dugdale
'The red house
lies
without the parish of the soul' is not an opening line I can imagine
any of Sasha Dugdale's contemporaries risking...
+ Lobe Scarps and
Finials, Geraldine Monk
Geraldine
Monk's
poetry crackles with oppositions...
+ Farmers Cross,
Bernard O'Donoghue
The opening
poem in
Bernard O’Donoghue’s beguiling new collection Farmers
Cross
tells us that 'In the real world, of course, there’s no such
person
/ as a Bona-Fide traveller.' Read
the full-length review here (PDF).
+ Vendange Tardive,
Peter Reading (PDF)
Peter
Reading once remarked in an interview that “One of the things I
suppose I wanted to do was not be like anybody else”...
+ New
Collected Poems,
Tomas Tranströmer
Mystical
poetry: the phrase conjures
fridge-magnet platitudes and
joss sticks...
+ November,
Sean O'Brien
Sean
O'Brien's stunning last collection, The
Drowned Book,
swept all before it...
+ Wait,
C.K Williams (PDF)
“I was
traversing the maze of my brain: corridors, corners, strange, narrow
caverns, dead ends...” So begins “Brain” –
though it would make an equally apt opening line for any number of C.
K. Williams’s poems...
+ Taller
When Prone, Les Murray
In
one of his most celebrated poems, Les Murray tries repeatedly to
define the quality of sprawl...
+ How
Snow Falls, Craig Raine (PDF)
Craig
Raine is best known for his early collection,
A Martian Sends a Postcard Home...
+ The
Art of Struggle, Michel
Houellebecq
Depression
is poet's flu: we all get it sooner or later. Michel
Houellebecq is unusual in that he has brought the black dog indoors
and put it to work.
+ Dreams
and Other Nightmares: New and Uncollected Poems,
Edwin Morgan
An
unrivalled appetite for formal challenges, a range of dramatic
personae to shame Robert Browning, and a territory that stretches
from Glasgow to Venus...
+ Jilted
City,
Patrick McGuinness (PDF)
The
in-between place is
overcrowded poetic territory,
but Patrick McGuinness has a sound claim to it...
+ A
Cure for Woodness,
Michael Haslam
Michael
Haslam's compelling, densely musical work emerges from a
joyous cauldron of babble...
+ Human
Chain,
Seamus Heaney (PDF)
One
of the pleasures of listening to the CDs Faber released last year of
Heaney reading his Collected
Poems
is the sense of steady, inevitable progress the poet maintains.
+ Standard
Midland, Roy Fisher
In
a wry note to his new collection, Roy Fisher informs us that the
title, Standard
Midland,
refers to the “plain way of talking we people of central England
like to believe we have”.
+ Seeing
Stars,
Simon Armitage
Seeing
Stars
is as disorienting as its title promises, a wildly inventive mix of
satire, fantasy, comedy and horror.
+ An
Autumn Wind,
Derek Mahon
“The
rain it raineth every day” is the refrain of Feste's final song
in Twelfth
Night...
+
Through the Square
Window, Sinéad Morrissey
The cover of
Sinéad Morrissey's excellent TS Eliot prize-shortlisted
collection, Through the Square Window,
shows a young girl in the head-bowed, arms-raised, slightly knock-kneed
posture of a preacher channelling the word of the Lord...
+ Outside the Narrative,
Tom Leonard
Political poetry
often fails because poets set it apart from their other work, as though
it were a genre. Bad political poems have a way of announcing
themselves, like the point in a conversation when someone says "but
seriously . . ." and you immediately lose interest in whatever they're
about to say...
+
Burnside, Little, Dickinson (PDF)
Here are three expeditions
into the unknown from three very different poets...
+ Talking Myself Home, Ian Macmillan
Ian McMillan is one of the UK's
best-loved poets and performers, and his new verse memoir exudes an
easygoing warmth. This is a self-deprecating self-portrait, in which
McMillan presents himself as the innocent bystander to a surreal life...
+ David Constantine, Jane
Draycott, Carrie Etter, Pauline Stainer
The point of
literary prizes, I suppose, is partly to provoke argument about who the
winners should have been. The Forward Prize shortlist for Best
Collection of Poetry is disappointingly conservative...
+ The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: Rilke
Rainer Maria
Rilke’s poetry continues to find translators and an audience
around the world, especially in Britain and America, and he is widely
acknowledged as one of the defining poets of the 20th century...
+ Briggflatts: Basil Bunting
Basil
Bunting's life and poetic career were highly unusual. He was born
in 1900 in a village near Newcastle, and raised in the Quaker faith...
+ Rimbaud: The Double
Life of a Rebel: Edmund White
Auden once
quipped that poets die when their work is finished: an eerily prophetic
one-liner - but Rimbaud is an exception...
+ Sasha
Dugdale, Paul
Summers, Elizabeth Whyman (PDF)
Sasha Dugdale
is a
poet of great subtlety and rare formal resource. She is able to use
personae from myth and history convincingly...
+ Martín Espada, Durs
Grünbein, Mervyn Morris, Togara Muzanenhamo (PDF)
Durs Grünbein
was born in Dresden in 1962. Today, his country of origin only exists
insofar as its conditions have been internalised...
+ Goblin
Lawn: Selected Poems: Peter Bennet (PDF)
There are no
overtly autobiographical passages in Goblin
Lawn, but Peter Bennet's work is immediately identifiable for
its formal tact and precision...
+ God's Own Country:
Ross Raisin
Sam Marsdyke,
the anti-hero of this much-praised debut novel, is an unforgettable
creation...
+ New and Collected
Poems: George Szirtes
George
Szirtes’s poetry is imbued with a sense of being both at home and
in exile in England...
+ Collected Poems: Ted Hughes
Selections
of Ted Hughes's poetry usually start with 'The Thought Fox'. The poem
is often read as a parable of the quintessential Hughesian moment of
creativity: a violent displacement of the poet through ego-obliterating
inspiration...
+ Inside from the Start: Ken Smith
Ken
Smith's poetry is crammed with information: people, places, dates...
+ Morphic Cubism: Barry MacSweeney's Apollinaire
In a
winning but eccentric overestimation, Tristan Tzara praised
Apollinaire
for his use of ‘the exact, real, totally unpromiscuous nudity of
the word which is only itself, intended in its round force, with no
background of allusions, or, rather, with none of the seductions of
sublimated imagery’...
+ Terms for Grief: Penelope Shuttle
Why
does Redgrove's Wife find
Penelope Shuttle so eager to dictate terms and conditions to the
reader?...
+ Here is the
News: Lorna Goodison, Philip Levine and Dunya Mikhail
Here
are three poets who differ greatly in their backgrounds, resources and
priorities; but are united in having had to create or re-imagine their
literary
traditions...
+ Public Dream:
Frances Leviston
Towards
the end of Public Dream,
Frances Leviston's superb first collection,
we are told “man has always looked for/one thing prisoned in the
sap of
another”...
+ Verse from Three Perspectives: Patience Agbabi, Jorie
Graham and Mick Imlah
Reading
these three collections, I was struck by how differently these poets
define their responsibility to their readers...
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