Reviews on The Review

Reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
 In his Introduction to this volume, Harish Trivedi says that Kunwar Narain is probably the most highly regarded Hindi poet alive today. Both Trivedi and Apurva Narain emphasise how deeply the poet has read Indian literature from its Sanskrit roots to now. As an outsider to Indian culture I’m not in a [...]

Rourke’s novel is set on a stretch of the Regent Canal between Hackney and Islington, a symbolic hinterland between Old London and New Labour’s London. Its unnamed narrator, having recently resigned from his job, returns daily to the same bench and watches the swans and the coots and the slick-suited workers going about their business [...]

 
On this side of the Atlantic, Elizabeth Hardwick tends to live in the shadow of her husband, Robert Lowell.   In America, however, she is seen as a major literary figure in her own right.  Born in Kentucky, she decided early on that New York was the place to develop a career that encompassed the creation [...]

Byrne’s half-travelogue, half-pro-cycling-manifesto is probably not, unfortunately, the magic book that will persuade car owners to leave their vehicles at home, bus drivers to give cyclists an extra foot of room,  Jeremy Clarkson to take a monastic vow of silence, or any of the other things that would make life safer and more enjoyable for [...]

Reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
 
In her Translator’s Preface, Tiina Aleman explains how closely she and Doris Kareva worked on the poems in this volume. Kareva herself is a well-regarded translator who has translated widely from English into Estonian, so I assume these versions achieve a high level of fidelity to the originals. They certainly read [...]

Like Eliot’s Webster, Roy Fisher is much possessed by death.  However, it’s not the skull beneath the skin he sees; it is the relationship we have with the dead in the transition of dying; what he elsewhere calls the ‘pass and return valve’ of death, and the ‘life of the dead’.   This relationship is  a [...]

Michael Haslam’s writing is an eerie combination of late High Modernism of the Bunting and David Jones kind, and an unswerving allegiance to the poetics of the ‘Cambridge Axis’ of Prynne, Crozier and the Rileys.  Like the Bunting and David Jones, Haslam reaches back through Modernism to the alliterative foundations of Early English verse, and [...]

Jill Bialosky’s first publication in the UK, consists of substantial selections from her three US collections. The first of these, The End of Desire, consists mainly of pitch-perfect narratives of childhood and growing up. Bialosky moves between her own life and those of her mother and her two sisters, and gathers details of the domestic [...]

This new anthology from Bloodaxe, edited by Roddy Lumsden, is their second such offering in recent months, arriving hot on the heels (in poetry terms) of their last, Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (September, 2009); that anthology concentrated on newness and this one in many ways is no different, aiming to introduce [...]

Lalami’s Secret Son, long-listed for the Orange prize, is an interesting debut novel.  Set in Lalami’s home country, Morocco, it deliberately eschews that cliché ‘Write about what you know’, in that the central figure of the book is a young man, Youssef.  He has been brought up by his widowed mother, Rachida, to believe that [...]