Such is the reputation of Poetry London, and its poetry competition, that I knew the standard would be high and my choices would be tough. I had the privilege of judging this competition once before, when Kathryn Simmonds won with ‘Sunday at the [...]

Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring is set at that moment in Moscow when the change of seasons is marked by a quickening sense of liquefying movement: the melting of ice, fluidity of streams, the unsealing and opening of windows [...]

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 Preface a Lacuna’, has lost Saint Francis. Francis left his [...]

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 she ‘can’t speak first but answers back’ and concludes: ‘the [...]

The most unexpected, and as it turned out inspiring, book I read last year was Airmail (Bloodaxe, 2013), a collection of letters between the American poet Robert Bly and the Swedish Nobel Laureate, Tomas Tranströmer. There is a similarity in the practice [...]

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 Flipped Eye £4.00 Ian Parks The Cavafy Variations Rack £5.00 [...]

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 of verse letters from fifteen women from Greek and Roman [...]