The poems in this collection are clever and funny, but I’m often suspicious of clever and funny: Funny how? I’ve been programmed to ask, and the word ‘clever’ is all too often just criticism in disguise. A lot of poems are funny and clever but there has to be more, and happily there is. This […]
Books
Laura Ellen Joyce, The Museum of Atheism (Salt Publishing), reviewed by Alex Johnson
by Alec Johnson
Two Collections from Paul Mills, reviewed by James McGrath
Paul Mills, Voting for Spring (Smith/Doorstop, £9.95) and You Should’ve Seen Us, (Smith/Doorstop) £6.95 Paul Mills, at a reading in York in the late 1990s, was the first writer I ever heard to suggest that the next major movement in poetry and also literary theory would have ‘something to do with the environment. It’s inevitable’. […]
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 […]
Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin (The Clerkenwell Press) £12.99
Lost Memory of Skin conveys the reader out of their comfort zone and into that area that all good fiction aspires to inhabit, full of challenging ideas and questions that brook no easy answers. In the opening scene, the central protagonist, the Kid, visits a Florida library and asks to use the internet. This may […]
Terry Jones, Furious Resonance, Poetry Salzburg Pamphlet Series 5
How to hold life in a language – it’s the poet’s task. This, Jones’s first short collection, is a good raid on the inarticulate, complete with buckets, boxes, bottles and sarcophagi within which to contain his finds. ‘It’s a matter of where you tread’ opens the first poem, which nicely contains read, the speaker going […]
Socrates Adams, Everything’s Fine (Transmission Print) £8.99
Charting the travails of a call-centre salesman suffering under a demented boss, Socrates Adams’ enviable debut takes its place in a line of bleak workplace satires that runs from ‘Bartleby’ through to Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, something like Douglas Coupland but far more surreal and far, far funnier. The novel begins with Ian, the hapless […]
Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding (4th Estate) £16.99
Chad Harbach’s hefty first novel is one of the major stories of this year’s literary scene: nine years in the making, sold for the kind of sum usually reserved for celebrities, and trailing laudatory quotes from luminaries such as Jonathan Franzen and Jay McInerney. It is then, something of a surprise to discover how dull […]
Ágúst Borgþór Sverrisson, Twice in a Lifetime (Comma Press)
Ágúst Borgþór Sverrisson is one of Iceland’s most practiced practitioners of short fiction, dedicating himself to the form long after his peers had moved onto writing novels. He too has now moved onto the longer form, but before he did so he published five volumes of short stories of which Twice in a Lifetime was […]
Mirja Unge, It Was Just Yesterday (Comma Press)
Mirja Unge’s debut collection of short stories achieved considerable success when it was published in Sweden. The sixteen stories that make up the collection bear striking similarities and preoccupations. Largely written as first-person narratives, they articulate the female adolescent view on life and relationships. The prose is sharp and abrupt and Unge does away with […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Carol Birch, Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate) £12.99
Carol Birch’s Booker-longlisted novel will delight anyone who’s read Dickens or Melville or any of their contemporary imitators and wants a cross between a Bildungsroman and a good old adventure yarn. Or at least it will for the first half of the book anyway. The narrator, Jaffy Brown, a mix of Oliver Twist, Ishmael and […]
Ed Reiss, Your Sort (Smith/Doorstop) £9.95
Ed Reiss’s first book-length collection, Your Sort, is a wonderful addition to a body of English humorous writing that started with Edward Lear, and Lewis Carroll and ends up in the Mighty Boosh having come via the Goon Show, but also the warm ‘Englishness’ of Men from the Ministry, and Round the Horne. And Reiss […]
Pearl, trans. by Jane Draycott (Carcanet Press) £9.95, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Jane Draycott’s Pearl is a remarkable poetic achievement and fills what has been a frustating gap in our translated literature. There is a translation by J. R. R. Tolkien, but it preserves the formal patterns of the original at the price of syntactical contortions that make it virtually unreadable as poetry, however useful as a […]
Roy Fisher, Selected Poems ed. August Kleinzahler (Flood Editions)
The first thing to say is that Fisher’s texts have never been as well served on the page as they are here. The poems are given real space and the movement of Fisher’s breath, rhythm and cadence is as clear as it possibly could be. Fisher has found a publisher who has finally done him […]
Two Collections from Don Coles
Don Coles, A Dropped Glove in Regent Street (Signal) Don Coles Where We Might Have Been (Signal) Born in 1927, Don Coles began publishing poems in 1975 and over the past 35 years has produced ten books which possess a distinctive tone, both casual and observant, while fiercely arranging and sequencing those seeming casual observations […]
Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability (Faber and Faber) £9.99, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Of Mutability is a book about death and change. Some of its poems hauntingly evoke unease, fear and loss. What is astonishing is how often the same poems, looked at from another angle, twinkle with humour, playfulness and resilient vitality. “Procedure”, the penultimate piece, is one of the most poignantly life-affirming poems I know. Here, […]
Saul Bellow, Letters ed. by Benjamin Taylor (Penguin) £30.00
Readers of Bellow’s novels will recognise the seeds of one of the twentieth century’s greatest prose writers from the very first letter, in which a callow Bellow declares ‘I am thinking, thinking, Yetta, drifting with night, with infinity, and all my thoughts are of you.’ There is in that line not just a foreshadowing of […]
Modern Canadian Poets: An anthology of Poems in English, ed. by Evan Jones and Todd Swift (Carcanet) £18.95
An anthology of Canadian poetry published by a British publisher, and edited by two Canadian ex-pats does have an in-built advantage. On this side of the great pond, at least, the readership won’t be party to the inevitable cries of foul play over the absences and inclusions, and, to a lesser extent, the editors won’t […]
Kunwar Narain, No Other World, trans. Apurva Narain (Arc Publications) £10.99, reviewed 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 position to judge […]
Lee Rourke, The Canal (Melville House) £9.99
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 […]
Elizabeth Hardwick, The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick ed. by Darryl Pinckney (NYRB) £7.99
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 of the […]
Bicycle Diaries, David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries (Faber) £8.99
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 […]
Doris Kareva, Shape of Time, trans. by Tiina Aleman (Arc Publications) £10.99, 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 well in English and […]
Two Books on Roy Fischer, reviewed by Ian Pople
Roy Fisher, Standard Midland (Bloodaxe Books) £7.95 An Unofficial Roy Fisher, ed. by Peter Robinson (Shearsman Books) £12.95 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 […]
Michael Haslam, A Cure for Woodness, (Arc Publications)
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 […]