The Manchester Review

Jane Hirshfield | Ledger | Bloodaxe: £10.99 There is a quiet quality to much of Jane Hirshfield’s poetry which sits between the zen-like and the vatic.  Hirshfield is not afraid to flirt with rhetoric, but manages to contextualise it with a neatly drawn reality. Ledger is Hirshfield’s sixth Bloodaxe volume in the UK and begins with a […]

Amy Woolard Neck of the Woods, Alice James Books, $16.95 There’s a perky, feisty quality to the writing in Amy Woolard’s debut collection, Neck of the Woods.  A glance at a few of the titles of the poems will give some of the overall flavour of the collection: ‘All Get Out’, ‘Girl Gets Sick of […]

Keith S. Wilson | Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love | Copper Canyon Press: $16.00 The back-cover blurb for this, Keith S. Wilson’s first collection, notes, ‘these are poems that speak in layers, bridging the interstitial spaces between the personal and societal longing.’ This sense of layers suggests that there is a horizontal ‘flow’ to Wilson’s poems. There is […]

Arthur Sze Sight Lines Copper Canyon Press $16.00 I had not encountered Arthur Sze’s poetry before and his approach is one of the most interesting and surprising that I’ve come across in a long time. It is almost as if Sze is a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet with images. The images roll out and around in Sze’s […]

Pablo Neruda | The Unknown Neruda edited and translated by Adam Feinstein | Arc Publications: £11.99.   Described by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who might be considered just a little parti pris, as ‘the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language’, Pablo Neruda has had a multitude of translators. Such a great poet will always […]

Thomas Travisano | Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop | Viking: £18.99 That Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry had autobiographical roots, even as it eschewed the ‘confessional’, was acknowledged in the reception of her work from the beginning. Randall Jarrell, ‘the most severe and exacting poetry critic in midcentury America’ reviewed Bishop’s first book, […]

Nathaniel Farrell Lost Horizon Ugly Duckling Presse $17 In her recent book, Prose Poetry and the City, Donna Stonecipher quotes Baudelaire on the prose poem, commenting that ‘out of my explorations of huge cities, out of the medley of their innumerable interrelations, that this haunting ideal was born.’ This ‘haunting ideal’ of Baudelaire’s was of […]

Jana Prikryl | No Matter | Tim Duggan Books: $15.00   There’s often a bouncy joie de vivre, sometimes a swagger about much of Jana Prikryl’s poetry. It seems to tilt on that fulcrum between observation and perception, which is a kind of muted introspection. We are often in the presence of someone who feels on the […]

John Gurney | Meister Eckhart and the Predicate of Light | Poetry Salzburg: £6.00 John Gurney was one of those writers, present in any culture, who become rather niche figures, rack up a small, focused succés d’estime, and then quietly disappear. So it’s greatly to the credit of Poetry Salzburg who’ve published much else of […]

Dunya Mikhail | In Her Feminine Sign | Carcanet: £10.99 The word ‘luminous’ is used on the back cover blurb to Dunya Mikhail’s new collection, In Her Feminine Sign. And ‘luminous’ seems apposite; there is a clarity and directness to the poems here which does seem luminous. There is also the sense that the poems […]

David Baker | Swift: New and Selected Poems | Norton $26.95 David Baker’s first Selected Poems, Treatise on Touch, was published by Arc in the UK in 2007. Treatise on Touch introduced the British poetry public to that rarer American poet, the formalist. If there is an obvious lineage into which David Baker fits, it […]

The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry | edited by Jim Johnstone | Palimpsest Press: £13.99 The Suicide’s Son | James Arthur | Signal Editions: £10.00 In the introduction to their 2010 anthology, Modern Canadian Poets (Carcanet), the editors, Evan Jones and Todd Swift give a fairly exhaustive list of anthologies of […]

Brenda Shaughnessy | The Octopus Museum | Alfred A. Knopf: $25.00 Brenda Shaughnessy’s basic style is to have long prose poem lines composed of short, declarative sentences. The effect of this is both to sustain argument while delivering snap and weight. At the same time, there is sometimes a slightly curt, slightly overly driven feel […]

Carolyn Forché | The Country Between Us | Bloodaxe: £9.95 Forché’s The Country Between Us is a reissue of a book which was originally published by Jonathan Cape shortly after its original publication in the US. It is a book of poems that documents Forché’s time in El Salvador as it was turning to civil […]

Michael O’Neill | Crash and Burn | Arc Publications: £10.99 Michael O’Neill’s death in December of last year was a grievous loss to British letters. He was one of our finest commentators on Romantic poetry, in particular Shelley, whose collected works he edited with Zachary Leader, although these were not his only academic interests. O’Neill’s […]

Patricia Smith | Incendiary Art | Bloodaxe Books: £12 …and indeed it is. There is, perhaps, little surprise about the contents of much of this immensely powerful book. Given the events that are reported, and, as Smith would undoubtedly say, not reported, on our screens each day, Smith has a harrowing if ready stream of […]

Martina Evans, Michèle Roberts, Denise Saul, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch | Speaking Again: Poems for International Women’s Day | Rack Press: £5 Even though each poet in Speaking Again: Poems for International Women’s Day has a slim selection, four quite individual voices are present in this Rack Press pamphlet for International Women’s day. The importance of those […]