Olio Tyehimba Jess Wave $25 Tyehimba Jess’s second collection Olio is a beautiful rendering of minstrel performers post-slavery. Jess and Wave Books have deliberately cultivated a coffee-table art book effect …
The Hatred of Lerner: Caleb Klaces on his struggle with Ben Lerner’s poetics
Ben Lerner The Hatred of Poetry Fitzcarraldo, £9.99 My two-year-old daughter has a frustrating habit of asking for orange juice, then objecting to every way she might drink it. The juice …
Pushing Through to Redemption: Dai George finds poets exceeding the expectations they create
Luke Kennard Cain Penned in the Margins £12.99 Helen Mort No Map Could Show Them Chatto £10.00 In 2006 Luke Kennard held a funeral for irony. Commemorated in ‘A Sure-Fire …
Racism’s Metre and Rhyme: Kayombo Chingonyi on Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine Citizen Penguin £9.99 Citizen, Claudia Rankine’s most recent collection, opens in understated fashion: ‘When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, …
The Journey to Words: Chris Beckett & Isao Miura on the life’s work of a modern Japanese master
Shuntarō Tanikawa New Selected Poems (translated by William I Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura) Carcanet £12.99 ‘Giving people poems / is like giving people air’ writes Tanikawa in 1991. And this …
The Less Consoled | Helen Mort on poetry and landscape
Peter Riley Due North Shearsman £9.95 Blake Morrison Shingle Street Chatto £10.00 In a recent New Statesman article, naturalist and environmental activist Mark Cocker described a subtle shift in British …
We’ll Photograph Everything | John Clegg brings light to the ‘obscure small epics’ of JH Prynne
JH Prynne Poems Bloodaxe £25.00 For dent inflict yet amuse enamel will livid exceed tactic nursing humid loss, nolore even alert at numb unwind entry. Level ground pacific inversion has …
A Neo-Modernist Chameleon
Drew Milne on the revived reputation of Nicholas Moore Nicholas Moore Selected Poems (edited by John Lucas and Matthew Welton with an introduction by Mark Ford) Shoestring £14.99 Amid the scrambled …
The Gaelic Objectivists
David Wheatley on a new anthology of Early Irish poetry Maurice Riordan (Editor) The Finest Music: An Anthology of Early Irish Lyrics Faber £14.99 Seamus Heaney was not the first …
The World or the Self
Michael Hulse divides the Mariannes from the Sylvias David Harsent Fire Songs Faber £12.99 Ruth Padel Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth Chatto £10.00 Roddy Lumsden Not All Honey …
Realities and Dreams
Sue Rose Heart Archives Hercules Editions, £10 Richard O’Brien The Emmores The Emma Press, £5 Harry Man Lift tall-lighthouse, £5 Holly Hopkins Soon Every House Will Have One Smith/Doorstop, £5 …
Chaucer: Movie Stills or Slam Remix
Lavinia Greenlaw A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde Faber £16.99 Patience Agbabi Telling Tales Canongate £14.99 Both A Double Sorrow and Telling Tales borrow their basic frame from works by …
Chuang-Tzu and Prospero
Caleb Klaces on the improbable range of Christopher Middleton’s work Christopher Middleton Collected Later Poems Carcanet, £25.00 Christopher Middleton’s Collected Later Poems begins with something missing. The first poem, ‘For …
Returning an Echo
Peter Robinson on the aspirations of Derek Mahon’s ‘adaptations’ Derek Mahon Echo’s Grove Gallery, €22.50/€13.90 Derek Mahon’s ‘Echo’, subtitled ‘from the Latin of Ovid, Metamorphoses III, 356-402’, begins by explaining how …
Narrating from the Margins
Chrissy Williams Flying Into The Bear HappenStance £4.00 Fiona Moore The Only Reason for Time HappenStance £4.00 Tim Liardet Madame Sasoo Goes Bathing Shoestring £7.00 Shazea Quraishi The Courtesans Reply …
Everyday Odysseys
Clare Pollard Ovid’s Heroines Bloodaxe £9.95 Kate Tempest Brand New Ancients Picador £9.99 Ovid’s Heroides, written some time between 25 and 16 BCE, was pretty groundbreaking stuff. A series …
How Hard Can It Be?
Keston Sutherland The Odes to TL61P Enitharmon £8.99 Simon Jarvis Eighteen Poems Eyewear £12.99 Luke Kennard A Lost Expression Salt 12.99 Cherry Smyth Test, Orange Pindrop £9.99 Well before …
Rocking On and Off the Page
Paul Muldoon Songs and Sonnets Enitharmon, £9.99 Paul Muldoon The Word on the Street Faber, £12.99 Benjamin Zephaniah (Film directed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce) To Do Wid Me Bloodaxe, £12.00 Luke …
The Slum Landlord, Time: Ellen Cranitch talks to Glyn Maxwell
EC: I wanted to ask you to what extent you regard your new book Pluto as a departure? The long poems explore your relationships, or, like the lyrical ‘Birthplace’, your home town. Writing …
Frontiers Through Every Word
Abdellatif Laâbi The Rule of Barbarism (Translated by André Naffis-Sahely) Island Position $12.00 Ingeborg Bachmann Enigma: Selected Poems (Translated by Mike Lyons and Patrick Drysdale) Ariadne $16.00 Manuel Rivas The Disappearance of …
