The Manchester Review

John Matthias, At Large: Essays, Memoirs, Interviews (Shearsman, £16.95). John Matthias, Complayntes for Doctor Neuro & other poems (Shearsman, £9.95). John Matthias, Jean Dibble, and Robert Archambeau, Revolutions: a Collaboration (Dos Madres, $20.00). John Matthias’ At Large is a compendious and welcome collection of Matthias’ essays, memoir and interviews. Very welcome because Matthias is a […]

Ange Mlinko, Distant Mandate (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $23.00). Ange Mlinko’s previous book was called Marvellous Things Overheard, a quotation from Aristotle. ‘Distant Mandate’ is, according to the dust jacket of this new book, a quotation from the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai and is a quotation from Krasznahorkai’s essay on the Alhambra. In the previous […]

Bill Knott, I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014, edited with an introduction by Thomas Lux (Farar, Straus and Giroux, $28.00). In his introduction to Bill Knott’s Selected, Thomas Lux comments that Knott’s first book, Nights of Naomi was ‘straight from the surrealist manifestos, but entirely his own. The poems are violent, dark and […]

Ian Parks, Citizens (Smokestack Books, £7.99). Over the years, Ian Parks has produced about a dozen books and pamphlets, from a variety of publishers. His shtick seems to be to have a new book out with a new publisher. But that variety of publisher never seems to diminish or dilute the quality of Parks’ writing, […]

William Palmer, The Water Steps (Rack Press, £9.95). There is a corner of English poetry which is forever Georgian. It traces its roots back to Edward Thomas and tends to go there directly; it does not pass Larkin and has a nodding genuflection to Yeats, but it goes straight to Thomas. This means that it […]

Nicholas Murray, A Dog’s Brexit (Melos Press, £5.00). Nicholas Murray’s ‘Get Real’ a verse satire on the coalition government was published in his fine book Acapulco, also from William Palmer’s Melos Press. That poem used a modified Burns stanza to show just how hypocritical the coalition was; in all it’s fine rhetoric about balancing books […]

Thomas Dilworth, David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet (Jonathan Cape, £25.00). When David Jones suggested that the engraver and painter Eric Gill had ‘a different kind of otherness’ he might quite easily have been writing about himself. As Thomas Dilworth’s subtitle suggests David Jones’ ‘otherness’ took many forms. Kenneth Clark called Jones the painter, ‘absolutely […]

Joey Connolly, Long Pass (Carcanet, £9.99). Joey Connolly’s first book has elegance and charm to spare. But it also has a huge sense of doubt and a willingness to share that doubt with the world. Its epigraph is from John Ashbery’s Three Poems, and includes the statement ‘Better the erratic approach, which wins all or […]

Christian Wiman, Hammer is the Prayer: Selected Poems (Farrar, Strauss and Giraux, $26.00). Towards the beginning of his wonderful prose book, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, Christian Wiman comments, ‘I grew up in a flat little sandblasted town in West Texas: pumpjacks and pickup trucks, cotton like grounded clouds, a dying strip, […]

Marilyn Hacker’s A Stranger’s Mirror is an extraordinary book. A book which runs to 288 pages, and which is a selected from just twenty years’ worth of writing. The poems must pour out of Hacker as if there were no tomorrow. And there is a highly charged, highly pressured feel to all of this writing; […]

  David Morley has had more than his fair share of prizes recently;  this year the Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry for his Selected Poems.  This beautifully presented pamphlet continues the writing Morley has done using vocabulary from Romani, for which Morley has made a project of bringing Romani back into the mainstream of […]

The Khartoum I knew in the early ‘80s, was a dry, sprawling low-rise city, where the dominant mode of transport was still the horse and cart.  The Hilux pick-up bus, known locally as a ‘box’ had started to become more commonplace, bouncing over the vaguely tarmacked, sandy roads that ran even in the city centre.  […]

A.C.Bevan, The Encyclopaedist; Nicolas Murray, The Migrant Ship; Jo Dixon, A Woman in the Queue, (Melos Press, £5.00). A.C.Bevan’s The Encyclopaedist is subtitled ‘A ready reference in 16 volumes’. The contents page somewhat belies that subtitle as the sixteen poems in the pamphlet are each given an alphabetical designation, beginning with A-AU, and ending with […]

London has just been through one of its public engagements with the Mahabharata.  Thirty years after his acclaimed nine-hour version of the original text, Peter Brook has just brought a short play called ‘Battle’ to the Young Vic;  the reviews were very mixed.  In January, at London’s Round House, the choreographer Akram Khan staged his […]

Carl Phillips has long been feted as a subtle and dexterous technician.  In a New Yorker review, Dan Chiasson pushes Phillips forward as a ‘candidate for the author of the most interesting contemporary English sentences’.  A Phillips poem may consist of anything between 10 and 15 lines, each part of one or two long sentences.  Such sentences […]

Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country begins, famously, with a prose paean to the South African countryside.  Paton’s description of the ‘holiness’ of this ground establishes it as the place to which the character, Kumalo, must return even though the land ‘cannot be again’.  Sheena Kalayil’s fine debut novel begins with a sentence which also […]