This volume is a Complete Poems in the sense that Elizabeth Bishop published her Complete Poems in 1969: these are the poems which Roger Langley completed for publication. This volume is also similar to Bishop’s book in that it is full of poems which seem both perfected and perfect. Perhaps Langley, for whom Pound was […]
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Jee Leong Koh, Steep Tea (Carcanet Press) £9.99
In an interview Jee Leong Koh describes himself as ‘a lyric poet in an anti-lyric age’. He goes on to criticise the lyric ‘I’ in robust, post-modern terms, while defending the lyric itself as ‘answering to some very deep human need for complex music made by the human voice.’ There is a wide variety in […]
New collections from Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Jan Wagner, reviewed by Ian Pople
Jan Wagner Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc) £10.99 Hans Magnus Enzensberger New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) £15.00 Two orders of magnitude, you might say: Enzensberger, born in 1929, who has bestrode German poetry since the late 1950s, who was associated with Boll and Grass in Group 47, who grew up in the west, but […]
Donna Stonecipher, Model City (Shearsman Books) £8.95
There has always been a hypnotic, meditative quality to Donna Stonecypher’s writing. Her previous book, The Cosmopolitan, was inspired by Joseph Cornell’s boxes; its delicate self-contained prose poems held small moments up to the light and turned them so that their angles and lights gleamed and twinkled. Model City is divided into 72 numbered sections, […]
A Love Supreme, 2015, reviewed by Ian Pople
Love Supreme, Glynde Place, Sussex. 3rd – 5th July There is a stunned silence around Glynde Place on the first Monday in July. People wander from the toilet blocks, and back and forth from the Wide Away Café with a pinched look on their faces. It’s not just that someone’s taken their holiday away, […]
Rebecca Perry, Beauty/Beauty (Bloodaxe Books) £9.95
Rebecca Perry has already garnered a lot of attention and a number of prizes in her short career so far. Her Seren Pamphlet little armoured was a PBS Pamphlet Choice and this book is a PBS recommendation. This book shows just why Perry has gained this recognition, but it is a book I admire rather […]
Volker Braun, Rubble Flora: Selected Poems trans. by David Constantine and Karen Leeder (Seagull Books) £14.95
The opening sentence of the introduction to this handsomely produced book reads, ‘Volker Braun is one of Germany’s foremost lyric poets’. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Constantine and Leeder just further down the page declare, ‘…he is perhaps better known, internationally at least, as a dramatist, novelist and essayist.’ Later, they strenuously deny […]
Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, National Portrait Gallery, London, reviewed by Ian Pople
Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, National Portrait Gallery, May 2015 Madame Ramon Subercaseaux sits tilted back away from the piano on whose keys rests her right hand. Her tilted form creates a diagonal with her head to the right and her train to the left under the keyboard. A colour contrast forms the other […]
New Collections from Peter Robinson and John Dennison, reviewed by Ian Pople
Peter Robinson Buried Music (Shearsman) £8.95 John Dennison Otherwise (Carcanet Press) £9.99 Early in Peter Robinson’s Selected Poems are the lines, ‘A seamless landscape,/there’s nothing the tired eye/will not integrate’ and later in the same poem ‘What goes away/is only your attention’. There’s a double-take here as the writing suggests that only tiredness will blend […]
New Collections from Arundhathi Subramaniam and Brian Bartlett, reviewed by Ian Pople
Arundhathi Subramaniam When God is a Traveller (Bloodaxe) £9.95 Brian Bartlett Ringing Here and There: A Nature Calendar (Fitzhenry & Whiteside) $19.00 Arundhathi Subramaniam’s When God is a Traveller is both a PBS Choice and, as a result, is on the T.S.Eliot award list. Brian Bartlett’s Ringing Here and There has received a slew of […]
Two Collections from Roy Fisher, reviewed by Ian Pople
Roy Fisher Interviews through Time, ed. Tony Frazer, (Shearsman Books, £9.95) Roy Fisher, An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963-2013, (Shearsman Books, £12.95) It is often suggested that Roy Fisher the interviewee is a somewhat slippery customer. Kenneth Cox remarks in an essay on Roy Fisher’s poetry that reading an interview with Fisher is like […]
New Collections from Louise Glück and Joshua Mehigan, reviewed by Ian Pople
Louise Glück Faithful and Virtuous Night (Carcanet Press) £9.95 Joshua Mehigan Accepting the Disaster (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) $23.00 Louise Glück has an astonishing record in the US having been awarded almost every poetry prize there is. Her last book, Poems 1962-2012, was garlanded with praise in every review it received. In the UK, this […]
Colin Harper, Bathed in Lightning: John McLaughlin, the 60s and the Emerald Beyond (Jawbone Press) £14.95
John McLaughlin is a guitarist who for many, I would suggest, rose with little trace in the 1960s, until the complete revelation which was his debut album Extrapolation¸ in 1969. McLaughlin’s next move was to conquer America and dominate a particular style of jazz-rock guitar, in the seventies and beyond. In seventies, McLaughlin played with […]
New Collections from Gerður Kristnỳ and Sigurður Pálsson, reviewed by Ian Pople
Gerður Kristnỳ Bloodhoof, trans. Rory McTurk (Arc Publications) £9.99 Sigurður Pálsson Inside Voices, Outside Light trans. Martin S. Regal (Arc Publications) £10.99 If Icelandic literature means much to the sometimes translation resisting readership in the UK, it means the Sagas. More recently, however, Icelandic writers have contributed to the vogue of Scandi-Noir in the novels […]
Love Supreme Jazz Festival, reviewed by Ian Pople
Love Supreme Jazz Festival: Glynde Place, 4 – 6 July Love Supreme, now in its second year, promised bigger and better and, in some ways, delivered. The weather forecast wasn’t promising, and the driving drizzle that swept over the campsite on Friday night/Saturday morning didn’t bode well. Fortunately, Saturday was comparatively clear and the sunshine […]
The Pied Fantail, The Magnolia
The Pied Fantail, The Magnolia Anyone who submits to his own impulses is bound for trouble (inscription at Loha Prasat temple, Bangkok) Accustomed to live under corrugated zinc, in transparent houses, the afternoon is a gated community of silence and butterflies, finches in pairs, moving among the leaves, until the wind and rain return, moving […]
David Scott Beyond the Drift: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books £12), reviewed by Ian Pople
David Scott is an ex-Warden of the Winchester Diocese School of Spirituality, and a translator and editor of, amongst other things, Lancelot Andrewes. He’s also written on what he describes as a ‘family’ of spiritual writers, including Andrewes, Herbert, Donne, Vaughan and Traherne. In the volume under review, he also writes poems ‘On Not Knowing […]
On the Thirteenth Stroke of Midnight: Surrealist Poetry in Britain, reviewed by Ian Pople
This is a very fine book with a whole range of surrealist documents including manifestos, commentaries and beautiful artwork. It is the first book of its kind since Germain’s Surrealist Poetry in English published by Penguin, in 1978. And whereas Germain’s book contained work from the US, Remy’s book concentrates solely on surrealist writing produced […]
Richard Burton, A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting (InfiniteIdeas) £30
In Under Briggflatts, Donald Davie declared that Thom Gunn has a public, whereas Basil Bunting has a following. That the former may no longer be guaranteed might have been confirmed with the recent news that August Kleinzahler has had to step in and buy the deceased Gunn’s library, because no-one else wanted to. But those […]
Two Collections from Ian Parks, reviewed by Ian Pople
Ian Parks, The Landing Stage (Lapwing Press) £10.00; The Exile’s House (Waterloo House) £10.00 Parks is not afraid of the definite article; not only in the titles of his books, which also includes The Cage but also with the titles of the poems: ‘The Northern Lights’, ‘The Girl in the Garden’, ‘The March’. He also […]
Jules Smith, Looking for Larkin (Flux Gallery Press) £8.95
A couple of years ago, I took my son up to Hull University. It was an open day for potential Chemistry students, but in the middle of the opening presentation, the tutor showed a slide of ‘Hull’s Three Poets’.The slide was the famous picture of of Larkin, Andrew Motion and Douglas Dunn outside the University […]
James Fenton, Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968 – 2011 (Faber and Faber)
The quarrel isn’t often with the poems, though it can be; the quarrel often seems to be with Fenton as a purveyor of his own extravagant gifts as a poet. Because Fenton is always likely to be excising parts of his canon in ways that can seem supremely irritating to his many deep admirers. In […]
Evan Jones, Paralogues (Carcanet Press) £9.95
It would be too easy to point to the Evan Jones’ autobiography to find the dynamic for this book: a Canadian-Greek, resident in Manchester, married to a German. What would be more natural than for Jones to look at the world askew? And to view it from the various kinds of transport that take the […]
John Matthias, Collected Shorter Poems Vol. 2: 1995 – 2011 (Shearsman Books) £14.95
John Matthias is a kind of mid-Atlantic national treasure; he was born in Ohio, but married a woman from Hacheston, Suffolk and has spent most of his life shuttling between the two areas. And his status is such that celebratory volumes of essays have been published on him in both the UK and USA. But […]
Once upon a time in Anatolia (2011), dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan
The Jury in Cannes were obviously feeling that films should be on the slow side last year. Having given the Palme D’Or to Terence Malick’s ‘Tree of Life’, they gave the Grand Jury Prize to this very, very slow, exquisitely shot film from Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Ceylan’s film lives almost entirely in real time. […]
Coriolanus (2011) dir. Ralph Fiennes
It’s difficult, unfortunately, to sit through the first twenty minutes of Ralph Fiennes’ modern rendering of Coriolanus without distraction. And these distractions do rather shake the whole project. The first distraction is that the shaven headed Fiennes’ looks uncomfortably like his recent portrayal of Voldemort in the Harry Potter films; a look that tends to […]
Two Pamphlets from C. J. Allen and Adrian Buckner, reviewed by Ian Pople
C. J. Allen, Violets (Templar Poetry) £4.50 Adrian Buckner, Bed Time Reading (Five Leaves) £3.00 There is a breed of Englishman writing today whose work is very easily reviled; much like the ‘cowpat’ school of English composers of the 40s and 50s. In fact, the sound track to their poems is indubitably the andante second […]
Dreams of a Life (2011), dir. Carol Morley
Dreams of a Life is a mesmerising film. It’s beautiful photography seems almost to belong to a different film, and it’s exquisite pacing and narrative arc show Carol Morley to have an iron control over her film. In part, the film comprises a series of talking heads of the ‘friends’ of Joyce Vincent, whose body […]
Marcelijus Martinaitus, The Ballads of Kukutis (Arc Publications)
Sometimes a set of poems seem to emerge with an almost all-consuming inevitability. One such was and is Crow. Another must have been The Ballads of Kukutis on its first appearance in Lituania in 1977; or that’s how it might seem seen though Laima Vincé’s new translation and published by Arc. Both Crow and Kukutis […]
Soweto Kinch, Submotion Orchestra: Marsden Jazz Festival
When Soweto Kinch moved into his ‘free-styling’ rap, he elicited words from the audience that came from the letters of ‘Marsden’. The Marsden audience, part of the arc of Pennine post hippydom that runs from Hebden Bridge, through Todmorden, and Marsden to Mossley, initially gave him ‘melifluous’, ‘artisanal’, ‘sheep’, ‘dung’, ‘energy’ and, finally, ‘Northern’. Kinch, […]
Stephanie Bolster, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth (Brick Books)
There is a tension at the heart of Stephanie Bolster’s wonderful new book. That tension is between the title with its huge inclusiveness and the contents of the book which is often, though not exclusively confined to zoos and their analogues. Bolster’s new collection is based around a central conceit of the zoo as a […]