Judging a poetry competition is like putting your ear to a seashell to hear what the sea has to say: a strange, choric and slightly unreal experience, a multitude of voices rising up and washing over you from out of [...]

Mervyn Morris Peelin Orange: Collected Poems Carcanet £14.99 Lorna Goodison Collected Poems Carcanet £14.99 I first encountered poems by Mervyn Morris and Lorna Goodison over twenty years ago, at a time when I was living in a rural town in [...]

In Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart recounts a strange haunting. It concerns one of Nicholas Abraham’s psychoanalytic patients: an amateur geologist and entomologist, who spends his weekend hikes breaking rocks and catching butterflies. Through these pastimes, [...]

Ed Atkins A Primer for Cadavers Fitzcarraldo £12.99 Ed Atkins is known as an artist, not at all as a poet, so he’s not an obvious candidate for the review pages of a poetry magazine – but then I started [...]

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 in which the book’s scale, typography and illustrations are woven [...]

Scandinavian folklore has made us familiar with a particular form of monster. Unlike the beast-humans in Grimm or classical mythology, a troll can scarcely be distinguished in appearance from an ordinary human being; he is perhaps only a little stocky, [...]

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AK Blakemore reading backstage before the Spring launch of Poetry London.

A student at the Poetry School (whose day job is as a magazine journalist) recently remarked to me that her interest in poetry came from it being a form of extreme writing. The analogy, I supposed, was to extreme sports [...]