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 [...]

In a recent feature in the FT, a journalist quotes the painter Frank Auerbach as saying ‘some people are natural draughtsmen. I sometimes feel sorry for them – you have
to work through that to something deeper. I don’t know how you would [...]

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 he had become the poster-boy of the ‘difficult’ in English [...]

Judging the Poetry London competition was like going on a journey. Sometimes I recognised the terrain; often it was over-familiar. Then suddenly I’d get a jolt and wonder where I was. I’d try to get my bearings, feeling the excitement [...]

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 Wright Mondeo Man Penned in the Margins, £9.99 John Hegley [...]

Jennifer Militello for ‘A Dictionary of Having Been Prey in the Voice of the Grandmother’ Alex Toms for ‘Becoming Sei’ NJ Hynes for ‘The Hands Washing Us’ David HW Grubb for ‘Joe Boy Learns His Words’