The Manchester Review

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, […]

Patrick Kavanagh said that, ‘to know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience.’ In Tom French’s fourth collection from Ireland’s Gallery Press, The Way to Work, the poet homes in (I use the verb advisedly) on a way of life in rural Ireland, that seems almost familiar, to both poet and […]

Kate Tempest’s newest collection of poetry demands to be felt. Let Them Eat Chaos is a book-length poem that begins with the admission, and gentle command, that ‘this poem was written to be read aloud’. Though Let Them Eat Chaos is meant to be read aloud, its performance on the page as a written poem […]

The title of Ruby Robinson’s poetry debut is derived from a line within its pages; the notion of paying close attention to “every little sound” appears in “Internal Gain,” a poem that traverses a gamut of sounds from “the conversation downstairs” to “echoes of planets slowly creaking.” The preface provides a definition of this central […]

Roy Fisher often gives his books gently punning titles. His Collected was entitled ‘The Long and the Short of it’. And Fisher’s New and Neglect’s punning on Selected brings back into circulation a range poems that have been fugitive from the Fisher canon, right from the beginning of Fisher’s publishing; along with a group of lovely […]

The Poems of Basil Bunting edited with and introduction and commentary by Don Share. In 1952, Basil Bunting visited T. S. Eliot with a view to getting Eliot to publish his Poems 1950. This volume had been published in America by one of Pound’s acolytes, Dallam Flynn, although Bunting had little involvement with the book, […]

Amali Rodrigo, Lotus Gatherers,(Bloodaxe Books, £9.95). The blurb to Amali Rodrigo’s first collection, Lotus Gatherers, comments ‘the lotus flower embodies the promise of purity and transcendence because it rises clear out of the muddy mire of its origins. It represents both abstract realms and the concrete phenomenal world.  The lotus root is also an aphrodisiac.’  […]

Anthony Caleshu’s extraordinary book, set in polar regions, appears at first glance to riff on two other poets, T.S. Eliot and W.S. Graham:  T.S. Eliot for those lines from ‘What the Thunder said’ in which the two walking ‘up the white road’ appear to have a ghostly third walking with them.  In Eliot’s notes for […]

Rosie Jackson The Light Box Cultured Llama £10.00   The Light Box is a very handsome book. The cover features one of Stanley Spencer’s Resurrections and the print is good and clear with very little bleed over the pages.  The poems inside are equally handsome and well written and Spencer features in those. Spencer put […]

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 […]

William Wantling, In the Enemy Camp: Selected Poems 1964-1974 (Introduction by John Osborne, Foreword by Thurston Moore). “I can make good word music and rhyme,” declares the narrator of William Wantling’s “Poetry,” “and even sometimes take their breath away—but it always somehow turns out kind of phoney.” A veteran of the Korean War, a criminal and […]

Sarah Corbett, And She Was (Pavilion, £9.99), reviewed by Annie Muir   Whether it’s used as the refrain in the titular Talking Heads song or as the central narrative device of Genesis, the word ‘and’ holds the English language together like braces worn by teenagers to close the gaps in their teeth. In Genesis, as […]

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 […]

A blood-spatter or tainted x-ray? The vivid front cover of Daniel Sluman’s second collection from Nine Arches, the terrible, (even the title sounds cut from its meaning), alerts you that this volume deals with what Sluman describes as the ‘dark underbelly of our relatively comfortable lives.’ If the endlessly dividing cell that is contemporary poetry […]

Shuntarō Tanikawa’s New Selected Poems is a comprehensive, arresting and insightful survey of the Japanese poet’s career from his first collection, Ten-Billion Light Years from Solitude (1952), through to the quite recent Kokoro (2013), and many intriguing points between. In total the book covers twenty-two of Tanikawa’s immensely varied collections, with abbreviated portions from each […]

Just as Keats himself is more famous for his untimely death than the events of his life, Keats Lives is a book primarily concerned with the continuance of lives after death. Published this year, Cannon’s fifth collection of poetry begins with a sonnet: ‘Winter View from Binn Bhriocáin’. The title immediately presents a highly symbolic […]

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 […]

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 […]