Omnivore It was prior to the silent parts of your body becoming noticeable you were regenerating heat and skin as one bird lifted on the Lower Zab river, […]
As a child you had a recurring dream where you took our feet off the ground and flew
All night, I keep watch; breathe in on his outbreath, drawing his air into my body. He stares blankly, focussed on a point above our heads. I stroke his ear, but he doesn’t react. Maybe he sleeps with his eyes open. All of them, including the hundreds in his wings. I pad to the […]
A Merlin in the Sheeffrys
A Merlin in the Sheeffrys There is a feeling that is equal to the land, a sense of self that is the journey’s length. It changes, bright to dark, and back again, in moments such as when a hill decides to vanish, prompting the sea to appear, sun-thatched, sun-pregnant, sun-remonstrating, before another bog-dividing mile […]
The Glummest Rook
The Glummest Rook Chris Cusack i. In June 2013, I spent a miserable four weeks as a visiting scholar in Maynooth, Ireland. In an academic sense, it was pretty great, but I was quite severely depressed, even if I still didn’t want to admit it. This was my second stint at the college, after six […]
Field Studies
When, after the guns, the gas, the bodies and the blood, they ask the earth, the earth says it doesn’t understand. The earth has trouble speaking, coughs and chokes. When they return later, the earth refuses to answer anything. They look for birds but the birds are gone. They wait for squirrels, they watch […]
3 C.P. Cavafy Translations
The Bandage He said that he’d stumbled into a wall or fallen. But likely the cut on his shoulder was caused by something more serious. He stood up abruptly, reaching for some photographs on a high shelf that he wanted to hold. The bandage loosened and the cut opened. I dressed his shoulder again, but […]
2 Poems
Matchbox Today I meet her for the first time: a brunette, unlike my mother. She shows me Father’s wallet photos of him dressed as a pirate lets me smell his coat hanging in the hall. She clasps a small black bundle to her heart then hands it to me, a crumpled plastic bag […]
2 Poems
Cello Case After her cello was sold, her bows all given away, little remained of my Mother except for her cello case— That large brown case was almost the shape of a person, though it was only a shell, hard, expressionless, and always a little forbidding sitting in our living room. It was the thing […]
Messages
Messages back under the mountain nourish myself / hunter-gatherer she’ll be coming round Mont-Royal when she comes […]
8 Pamphlets from Rack and Melos Presses reviewed by Ian Pople
Michèle Roberts, Swimming Through A Painting By Bonnard, Róisín Tierney, Mock-Orange, Kate Quigley, If You Love Something, Christopher Reid, Not Funny Any More, A.C.Bevan, Field Trips In The Anthropocene Rack Press, £5.00, Michèle Roberts, Fifteen Beads, Andrew McCulloch, The Lincolnshire Rising, The Melos Press, £5.00, Nicholas Murray, The Yellow Wheelbarrow, The Melos Press, £10.00 As […]
Jan Prikryl | No Matter | reviewed by Ian Pople
Jana Prikryl | No Matter | Tim Duggan Books: $15.00 There’s often a bouncy joie de vivre, sometimes a swagger about much of Jana Prikryl’s poetry. It seems to tilt on that fulcrum between observation and perception, which is a kind of muted introspection. We are often in the presence of someone who feels on the […]
2020, by Alice Barron-Eaves
2020 We must still wake and rise as we usually do put on our best faces our best graces and look out to a world we may not wish to we must hold in our dreams and make new ones hold onto our heads and forge a new smile even bolder than our last […]
Lockdown, by Beatrice Bacon
Lockdown It’s you and the view of the lamp posts, the pressed pavements and windows, clamped cars and drains that have stopped swallowing city sewage. It’s you in the toilet taking decadent minutes to stare at soap in the cupboard of the mirror—you think of what you’re yet to examine in your bathroom. In […]
Still Changing, by Jennifer Nuttall
Still Changing When the government told us to stay in our homes I grew bricks for feet. I watched each day unfold through spyhole eyes. Outside of myself was a world seemingly slowed to only a glass-portioned sun moving shadows across empty streets, and the sound of sirens just beyond my periphery. My mind was […]
Yoga with Kassandra, Nina Reljić
Yoga with Kassandra Some thoughts weigh enough to throw a body off balance e.g. fearing life touched by death, the spit of life which carries death, the grease of life, the talk of it. Kassandra’s face on my screen is hardly real, she has the stretch of gum while I am a mesh of nerves […]
Inside, by Adrienne Elliott-Wilkinson
Inside Thumping against the wall I think it’s a washing machine the sound of life going on outside of the body, the sound of a washing machine or maybe — you couldn’t call it lovemaking — Kate Bush in the background: washing machine jumping jacks? Life is going on above the shopfronts in the empty […]
Doll Heads, by Javier Fedrick
Doll Heads To amuse ourselves during quarantine, we set to work on all your old dolls, scalping each straw-haired head and packing it with dirt. We were left with a crowd of carved grins, middle-distance eyes and open minds, which, together, we filled with thyme, and basil, and childish cress— burying the seeds like fists […]
Homecoming, by Bethany Barker
homecoming we’re back here where we started, a pair of salty whelks born by the sea. the beach is vast and quiet. we talk about our escape, about how we dreamed of drifting and washing up like debris, someplace new. we wanted to hide from mismatched lights lining the water’s edge, where dark waves […]
Without Us, by Meena Sears
Without Us The shiny wooden floor is unusually clean for a Tuesday afternoon. No dropped broccoli nor puddles of custard decorate its surface. All the folding tables are lined up along the edges of the room Like soldiers in the trenches waiting for the command. Outside the only whistle to be heard is that […]
Michael Heller Telescope: Selected Poems NYRB Poets £12.99, reviewed by Ian Pople
Michael Heller Telescope: Selected Poems NYRB Poets £12.99 Although Michael Heller’s work tends to be associated with the Objectivism of Reznikoff and Oppen, that is not the first thing that strikes a reader coming to this nearly 300-page Selected. Not only is this an ample selection from Heller’s career, but it shows a wide sweep […]
Paul Valéry, Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody (tr.)¦The Idea of Perfection The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry: a Bilingual Edition¦(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)¦ reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Paul Valéry, Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody (translator)¦The Idea of Perfection The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry: a Bilingual Edition¦Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardback $54.50¦ reviewed by Edmund Prestwich Paul Valéry occupies an ambiguous position in modern literary culture. In later life – after he’d stopped writing poetry – he bestrode the French cultural scene like a […]
John Gurney | Meister Eckhart and the Predicate of Light | reviewed by Ian Pople
John Gurney | Meister Eckhart and the Predicate of Light | Poetry Salzburg: £6.00 John Gurney was one of those writers, present in any culture, who become rather niche figures, rack up a small, focused succés d’estime, and then quietly disappear. So it’s greatly to the credit of Poetry Salzburg who’ve published much else of […]
The Book of Tehran | edited by Fereshteh Ahmadi | reviewed by Kathryn Tann
The Book of Tehran | Comma Press: £9.00 Comma Press’ ‘Reading the City’ title series is rapidly filling up with quality collections, each more intriguing than the last. As they venture abroad to cities so often overlooked as creative hotbeds, these collections are not only an impressive logistical feat, nor merely an exercise in the […]
David Cooke | Staring at a Hoopoe | reviewed by Ken Evans
David Cooke | Staring at a Hoopoe | Dempsey & Windle Publishing: £10 It’s a confident poetry practitioner who opens a collection with a villanelle. The challenging form divides opinion in contemporary poetry, of course, with some saying the last word was had long ago by Thomas and Bishop (with perhaps, an almost grudging acceptance […]
Natalie Scenters-Zapico | Lima::Limόn | reviewed by Ian Pople
Natalie Scenters-Zapico | Lima::Limόn | Copper Canyon Press: $16.00
Dunya Mikhail | In Her Feminine Sign | reviewed by Ian Pople
Dunya Mikhail | In Her Feminine Sign | Carcanet: £10.99 The word ‘luminous’ is used on the back cover blurb to Dunya Mikhail’s new collection, In Her Feminine Sign. And ‘luminous’ seems apposite; there is a clarity and directness to the poems here which does seem luminous. There is also the sense that the poems […]
Manchester International Film Festival (MANIFF) – Days 6, 7 & 8 | reviewed by Peter Wild
Manchester International Film Festival (MANIFF) – Days 6, 7 & 8 In the last of our short series of reviews from this year’s Manchester International Film Festival, we skip merrily from Japan to China, then head on to France and Brazil, before finally ending up in New Orleans. We begin with a late night showing […]
Manchester International Film Festival – Days 3, 4, & 5 | reviewed by Peter Wild
Manchester International Film Festival (MANIFF) – Days 3, 4 & 5 In the second of a short series of reviews from this year’s Manchester International Film Festival, we hopscotch our way through Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Roy’s World, a documentary about the author Barry Gifford, a pair of directorial debuts separated by a couple of decades: […]
Manchester International Film Festival – Day 1 & 2 | reviewed by Peter Wild
Manchester International Film Festival – Day 1 & 2 In the first of a short series of reviews from this year’s Manchester International Film Festival, we cover days 1 and 2 of the festival… The festival opens with an opening night gala premiere for Traumfabrik, a romantic drama set in Berlin in 1961 (and France […]
Tony Hoagland | Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God | reviewed by Ian Pople
Tony Hoagland | Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God | Bloodaxe Books: £9.95 Tony Hoagland once commented that he would position his writing between that of Sharon Olds and Frank O’Hara, between the confessional and the social. For a poet, who’s most lauded book was called What Narcissism Means to Me, that yoking doesn’t […]
David Baker | Swift: New and Selected Poems | reviewed by Ian Pople
David Baker | Swift: New and Selected Poems | Norton $26.95 David Baker’s first Selected Poems, Treatise on Touch, was published by Arc in the UK in 2007. Treatise on Touch introduced the British poetry public to that rarer American poet, the formalist. If there is an obvious lineage into which David Baker fits, it […]
Devin Johnston | Mosses and Lichens | reviewed by Ian Pople
Devin Johnston | Mosses and Lichens | FSG: $23.00 Over six volumes, Devin Johnston has built up a quiet body of poetry which contains astonishing power. If Johnston has concentrated his careful gaze on the natural world, that has never been to the exclusion of the human presence in that world. Nor has his writing […]
The Next Wave and The Suicide’s Son | reviewed by Ian Pople
The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry | edited by Jim Johnstone | Palimpsest Press: £13.99 The Suicide’s Son | James Arthur | Signal Editions: £10.00 In the introduction to their 2010 anthology, Modern Canadian Poets (Carcanet), the editors, Evan Jones and Todd Swift give a fairly exhaustive list of anthologies of […]
Morgan Parker | Magical Negro | reviewed by Ian Pople
Morgan Parker | Magical Negro | Corsair: £10.99 Danez Smith is quoted on the front of Morgan Parker’s new collection as declaring that Parker as ‘on of this generation’s finest minds.’ One reason for concentrating on Parker’s intellect might be that Parker’s writing, for all its often unconstrained, emotional vehemence, is actually a study in […]