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 […]
Books
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, […]
Sema Kaygusuz, The Well of Trapped Words (Comma Press) £9.99, reviewed by Şima Imsir
The receipent of the English Pen Translates! Award 2013, The Well of Trapped Words by Sema Kaygusuz is a collection of short stories previously published in her various short story collections in Turkish. The stories in this book have been translated by Maureen Freely, the translator of prominent Turkish writers including the nobel laurette Orhan […]
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 […]
Michelle Green, Jebel Marra (Comma Press) £9.99, reviewed by L. A. Billing
In Jebel Marra, Michelle Green’s new collection of short stories by Comma Press, we experience Darfur through the eyes of the witnesses: traumatized, broken and defiantly human. We see the desert, refugee camps and mountains of Western Sudan through translators, aid workers, journalists, archaeologists, but most poignantly of all through the displaced, often female victims […]
Selima Hill, Jutland (Bloodaxe Books) £9.95, reviewed by Lucy Winrow
Hill’s sixteenth poetry collection Jutland unites the award-winning pamphlet Advice on Wearing Animal Prints and a new sequence, Sunday Afternoons at the Gravel-Pits. The former is comprised of twenty-six short, single stanza poems, each titled and ordered alphabetically. The omniscient narrator introduces us to ‘Agatha’, a social outsider who is possibility on the autistic spectrum […]
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 […]
David Der-wei Wang, The Lyrical in Epic Time (Columbia UP) $60.00, reviewed by Emma Rhys
If one harbors ‘feeling’ throughout life, one may end up violating the societal demands of ‘actions.’– Shen Congwen The above quote from fiction writer Shen Congwen, cited by David Der-wei Wang (p.41), articulates the unique challenge facing mid-twentieth-century Chinese artists – striving to adapt themselves to the demands of the Communist Revolution while maintaining a […]
Peter Hainsworth and David Robey, Dante: A Very Short Introduction (Open UP) £7.99, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Hainsworth and Robey have to work within the limits of the Very Brief Introduction format. Their first pages rise brilliantly to the challenge. Swift-moving, decisive, sensitive and suggestive, plunging straight into a discussion of two famous encounters in the Inferno, and illustrating points with well-chosen references, this opening would have made me feel I knew why […]
Tomaž Šalamun, Soy Realidad (Dalkey Archive Press) €9.00, reviewed by Joey Frances
“La syntaxe est une faculté de l’ame.” So opens ‘The Bird Dove’, with a Paul Valéry quotation, in the French. One of my favourites of the contradictory things Walter Benjamin says about translation is: “all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of language.” This isn’t merely relevant […]
Prue Shaw, Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity (W. W. Norton) £20.00, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
If I could recommend only one book on Dante it would be this one by Prue Shaw. Her scholarship is profound and I think she must be a brilliant teacher: she shows an unusual ability to enter imaginatively into the minds of people who don’t have her knowledge. This book isn’t just “approachable”; it comes […]
Manchester Folio: Ali Smith, How to Be Both (Hamish Hamilton) £9.99, reviewed by Alicia J Rouverol
In her 2014 Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel How to be both, Ali Smith twists two narratives, that of a troubled teenager in contemporary Britain and that of a 1460s Renaissance fresco painter, into a single dazzling story. A triumph of doubling, deception and discovery, How to be both considers the twin concepts of art […]
Frank Ormsby, Goat’s Milk (Bloodaxe Books) £12.00, reviewed by David Cooke
Goat’s Milk, New and Selected Poems by Frank Ormsby, is a welcome opportunity to re-evaluate a significant Ulster poet. It brings together work from four previous collections and forty six new poems which have the thematic and stylistic coherence of a further individual collection. The volume also contains a substantial ‘Introduction’ by Michael Longley in […]
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 […]
Peter Sirr, The Rooms (The Gallery Press) €11.95, reviewed by David Cooke
The Rooms is Peter Sirr’s eighth collection. A beautifully orchestrated meditation upon the meaning of the word ‘home’, it weighs in at just over one hundred pages and is thus a substantial addition to his work. By profession, Sirr is a linguist, teacher and translator who, like Joyce, Mahon, Clifton, spent many years abroad. It […]
Togara Muzanenhamo, Gumiguru (Carcanet Press) £9.95, reviewed by James Horrocks
A long line runs through Togara Muzanenhamo’s Gumiguru. It is not just the “experiences of a decade” that makes the narratives of this book, it is the lines of the poems on the page, reaching across from margin to margin. The focus of this book is certainly the stories which are largely based in or […]
Owen Lowery, Rego Retold (Carcanet Press) £12.99, reviewed by Charlotte Rowland
If Paula Rego’s art is, first and foremost, about the body, Rego Retold, containing Owen Lowery’s poetic responses to this idea, are themselves separate nods to portraiture. Romance, though somewhat of a distilled notion for Rego, whose subjects are often portrayed as brawny, animalistic, or openly distressed, is utilised by Lowery to draw out the […]
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 […]
Austin Smith and Robin Robertson, reviewed by Lucy Burns
Austin Smith, Almanac (Princeton UP, $12.95) Robin Robertson, Hill of Doors (Picador, £14.99). Austin Smith’s debut collection with the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets is an impressive testament to rural life in north-western Illinois. Almanac is arranged concentrically around the family dairy farm and its surrounding landscape, reaching as far as Virginia, South Dakota and […]
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 […]
The Best British Short Stories 2014, ed. by Nicholas Royle (Salt Publishing) £9.99, reviewed by Sarah-Clare Conlon
The fourth in this now popular annual anthology series, just out from 15-year-old independent publishing house Salt, rounds up 20 stories by different authors, offering an insight into how varied the short fiction landscape in Britain is right now. The task of editor Nicholas Royle (author of the critically acclaimed First Novel, about a lecturer […]
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 […]
Thomas A. Clark, Yellow & Blue (Carcanet Press) £9.95, reviewed by Charlotte Rowland
Thomas A. Clark’s Yellow & Blue, placing two distinct primary colours side by side, might, by its title, suggest the need to synthesise and equate is the most pronounced focus of his newest collection. The poems themselves are unpunctuated, and versed in lower-case small blocks, without titles, in order, it seems, to play with this […]
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 […]
EDA Collective, Why Are Animals Funny? (Zero Books) £9.99, reviewed by Allison Norris
I’ll be one of the first to admit, I love “Grumpy Cat” (fun aside though, the 2-year old American shorthair cat is actually named Tardar Sauce, and looks the way she does thanks to feline dwarfism and an under bite . . . and is apparently quite the loving little animal). I love pop-cultural tropes […]
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 […]
Anne Compton, Alongside (Fitzhenry and Whiteside) $14.95
When I first saw this book, with the ghost-like figures on its cover, and that slightly nervy title, I was inevitably reminded of Eliot’s lines from The Waste Land ‘Who is the third who walks always beside you?/ When I count, there are only you and I together./ But when I look ahead up the […]
New collections from Anne Fitzgerald and David Troupes, reviewed by John North
David Troupes, The Simple Men (Two Ravens Press) £7.99 Anne Fitzgerald, Beyond the Sea (Salmon Poetry) £10.00 The Simple Men. ‘The Simple Man […]’, a sequence interspersed throughout, forms a backbone. One does not feel it to be heaved up from the Everyman, or Wordsworth’s ballads. Do we still ‘choose incidents and situations from common […]
New collections from John Whale and Tara Bergin, reviewed by John North
John Whale, Frieze (Carcanet Press) £9.95 Tara Bergin, This is Yarrow (Carcanet Press) £9.95 I don’t know what to say about poetry any more. Lives and deaths. ‘Fallen warriors, a conquistador, a cat […]’ in John Whale’s superb Frieze. Yes, I’d noticed that cat. I loved it. I don’t know why. “Not my thing”. I […]
Dore Kiesselbach, Salt Pier, (Pittsburgh UP) $15.95 reviewed by James Reith.
With a title that simultaneously evokes the seaside, industry and a condiment, Salt Pier isn’t a volume trying to launch fireworks on its title page; something which its beige and seemingly rusting cover doesn’t help to dispel. A quick search of the title on Google, however, almost solely returns a popular diving spot on the […]
New Pamphlets from Rosalind Hudis and Susan Grindley
Rosalind Hudis Terra Ignota (Rack Press) £5.00 Susan Grindley New Reader (Rack Press) £5.00 It is a cliché of contemporary criticism to say that art treats the liminal, that which sits on the edge. Often the liminal is treated as just that; a thing which simply sits at the edge, representing a kind of boundary, […]
Caleb Klaces, Bottled Air (Eyewear Publishing) £12.99, reviewed by Janet Rogerson
At the core of this collection there is a preoccupation with the elements, of air, water and fire as both unreliable and constant. The scattered arrangement of the first poem ‘Parachute’ belies its opening line, ‘… So now we are in charge’. There is a breathless quality to this poem which works extremely well. Formal […]