Goblincore We knew we weren’t right under our clothes — our tiny wings, our fur. We practiced eye contact on frogspawn at the bottom of the garden. There were hens and eggs lying under bushes in their shamble nests – the bubbled panes of glaire between our fingers, the yolk a golden toad on […]
4 Poems
Greylag Get out my way out the way gaan gaan gaan get out out the way out got to get out gaan gaan get out the way get out gaan got to get out got to get out vandaag today veranderen veranderen verander veranderen veranderen […]
You Are Safe Here
You Are Safe Here We’re in a basement, walls crumbling naked onto a cracked porcelain floor and a single candle wicks into flame, throwing silent blazes on the pockmarked face of our host, Lazaro. His crooked teeth gleam white in the flickering glow and lingering shadows dance on the faces of the two sidekicks […]
Ferlinghetti in Derry
Ferlinghetti in Derry In a wooden boat, like Colm Cille, Ferlinghetti searched the depths for monsters that might eat his men – German U-Boats fed on Tory Island cod. So, you can rhyme the city, if you will, with Ferlinghetti – Lieutenant Commander US Navy; skipper in the Splinter Fleet on the open, choppy […]
3 Poems
footprint sometimes sorrow looms for years dark cloud inching closer there’s time to prepare you’re braced for the blow sometimes sorrow comes out of the blue a clear sky never-dreamed of woe – you’re unprepared yet recognize your sorrow at once as Electra recognises Orestes by his footprint be it in mud or sand or […]
3 Poems
Sapphics for Elizabeth Lilburne 1649 Where is he whose patience can suffer one more sainted devil ministering independence? Don’t you think our interest equal? Tell us, did you imagine we would be so sottish or stupid as to bide, cook, sew, mend, seeing our peace & welfare broken down, trod underfoot by one who rocks […]
Gold Diggers Come Cheap
In my second year of training to qualify as a plastic surgeon, I signed up for a research secondment in Amsterdam. Jon insisted on picking me up from the airport. My flight arrived early, and I walked around feeling irrationally annoyed. The arrival area with its high ceilings was dry and chilly, chiller than Google […]
In Praise of Fire
When you stand in front of fire, your clothes absorb the heat and there is a whisper of time, shred thin as a wafer of ham, when the heat is pure pleasure, like the anticipation of an orgasm, before skin cells send a message to brain cells shrieking “Hot, hot!” The neurons fire back a […]
Madrid
Given I’ve been allowed this very special very personal access I can say that on my travels over you on top of and under and around you I have moved more or less continuously without following the least compass direction or straight line rather I’ve been on barely plottable curves natural curves on momentary […]
Object
For a woman of her age, Sally maintains a spirited social life. She has, since her return to Dublin, been part of a group of five that she met at work. Though she is the eldest in the group by twenty years, Sally thinks she does a good job of keeping up with the […]
Blooms Galore
Anne is implicated, folded into his black mood like dry ingredients into wet. Together they make a pudding. A black pudding. Not the delicious kind. Not figgy pie. David claims that Anne has an anger problem. He mopes on the couch. Innocent, and manipulative. Anne waters the garden. She likes to watch things grow. David’s […]
2 poems
OBVIOUS DAYS for Matt Bevis We made a happy home and there we pass our obvious days. Edward Lear They still have their surprises, but there’s nothing they conceal They’re preparing us for: not the new long poem I’m going to write Eventually, or something we’re going to do that’s different From what we […]
2 Poems
Medlock She sails her beech-mast from the woods to Cairo Mill, burrows into darkness under Sun Hill, resurfaces to rock the cemetery in the crook of an oxbow. Winter floods stirred her from her bed – she turned grave-robber, coal-hauler. Ran underground. She’s the night-sweat locked in the stadium’s cellar. You walk between feverfew […]
2 Poems
Saturn Devouring His Son painted at Quinta del Sordo (Deaf Man’s Villa) On Saturn, it is raining diamonds. Soot falls and Goya picks up his palette. He has a choice of four blacks: bone black, lamp black, ivory black and red black. A prophecy declares war on Justice. The very thing Saturn is warned will […]
3 Poems
Gucci Mane I keep diazepam in my car the way an ocean keeps a blue whale asleep like an iceberg
2 Poems
MOSS Scraping into the silence of another empty afternoon, the dogwalker, who never stops, hovers, explores, runs through power-washes. That unknown neighbour leans on the fence, weighs up, once overs the maze of Accrington brick, confirms – it’s nothing but residue after this dry spell and reckons on the amount of silver sand needed. Together […]
Eduardo C. Corral | Guillotine | reviewed by Ian Pople
Eduardo C. Corral | Guillotine | Graywolf Press: $16.00 There is a sharp, tangy sense about Eduardo C. Corral’s poems. Sometimes that tang is almost literal; these poems are never shy about talking about the senses at their most acute. But that tangy quality is part of the Corral’s style, too. The poems are often organised in […]
Jane Hirshfield | Ledger | reviewed by Ian Pople
Jane Hirshfield | Ledger | Bloodaxe: £10.99 There is a quiet quality to much of Jane Hirshfield’s poetry which sits between the zen-like and the vatic. Hirshfield is not afraid to flirt with rhetoric, but manages to contextualise it with a neatly drawn reality. Ledger is Hirshfield’s sixth Bloodaxe volume in the UK and begins with a […]
Carolyn Forché | In the Lateness of the World | reviewed by Ian Pople
Carolyn Forché | In the Lateness of the World | Bloodaxe Books: £10.99 The blurb to Carolyn Forché’s first full collection for seventeen years suggests that the poems are ‘meditative’. That’s one way to describe them but it might not be the best. The fact that many of these poems are narratives either in the first person […]
Amy Woolard | Neck of the Woods | reviewed by Ian Pople
Amy Woolard Neck of the Woods, Alice James Books, $16.95 There’s a perky, feisty quality to the writing in Amy Woolard’s debut collection, Neck of the Woods. A glance at a few of the titles of the poems will give some of the overall flavour of the collection: ‘All Get Out’, ‘Girl Gets Sick of […]
Sarah Feldman | The Half-Life of Oracles | reviewed by Ian Pople
Sarah Feldman | The Half-Life of Oracles | Fitzhenry & Whiteside: C$15.00 The writer who takes on the oracular and the vatic is offering themselves up as a hostage to fortune. The subject matter may well take in the various versions of myth that are parts of certain types of education but not part of the education […]
London Gothic, by Nicholas Royle ( Confingo Press, £12.99), reviewed by Richard Clegg
London Gothic by Nicholas Royle ( Confingo Press, £12.99) As well as a novelist and film aficionado, Nicolas Royle is one of the foremost practitioners of the short story form. As editor and publisher of his own Nightjar publications, he has been a doughty champion of other writers, often well off the beaten track. The […]
Nikolai Leskov | Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov | reviewed by Livi Michael
Nikolai Leskov | Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov | New York Review of Books: £14.99 The New York Review Books has published a selection of the stories of one of Russia’s lesser known writers, Nikolai Leskov. This beautifully presented volume contains six lengthy stories or novellas, and an excellent introduction by Donald […]
Carrie Etter, The Shooting Gallery (Verve), reviewed by Ken Evans
In The Shooting Gallery, Carrie Etter uses a favourite form, the prose poem, to interrogate and illuminate the fatal attraction in a country with more guns than people. However, her way in is not outrage or despair, but to look through an artist’s eye, in a sequence of twelve ekphrastic poems, featuring images suggested by […]
Robert Selby, The Coming-Down Time (Shoestring Press, £10.00) | reviewed by Paul McLoughlin
A WORLD OF NOT MINDING Robert Selby’s poems are, as the blurb tells us, ‘love songs of England’: they set out to record and praise what’s good and will not allow themselves to get distracted. And what’s good is be found in its people. Even the war can come across as a matter of camaraderie […]
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Collected Poems (€20.00 (pb), The Gallery Press)
The publication of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Collected Poems, encompassing some half a century’s work, is a welcome opportunity to appreciate the full extent of her achievement and leaves one in little doubt that her poetry, by virtue of its emotional depth and imaginative élan, places her in the front rank of poets currently writing in […]
Keith S. Wilson | Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love | reviewed by Ian Pople
Keith S. Wilson | Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love | Copper Canyon Press: $16.00 The back-cover blurb for this, Keith S. Wilson’s first collection, notes, ‘these are poems that speak in layers, bridging the interstitial spaces between the personal and societal longing.’ This sense of layers suggests that there is a horizontal ‘flow’ to Wilson’s poems. There is […]
Christian Wiman | Survival is a Style | reviewed by Ian Pople
Christian Wiman | Survival is a Style | FSG: $24.00 In his essay ‘God’s Truth is Life’, Christian Wiman writes, ‘What might it mean to be drawn into meanings that, in some profound and necessary sense, shatter us? This is what it means to love. This is what it should mean to write one more poem. The […]
Arthur Sze | Sight Lines | reviewed by Ian Pople
Arthur Sze Sight Lines Copper Canyon Press $16.00 I had not encountered Arthur Sze’s poetry before and his approach is one of the most interesting and surprising that I’ve come across in a long time. It is almost as if Sze is a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet with images. The images roll out and around in Sze’s […]
Natural Selection | an essay on Carmine Starnino’s Dirty Words: Selected Poems by Jim Johnstone
For those who are interested in Canadian poetry but have yet to investigate it seriously, Carmine Starnino’s Dirty Words offers a portal into the career of one of Canada’s finest craftsmen. Natural Selection Carmine Starnino, Dirty Words: Gaspereau Press, 2020 Volumes of selected poetry are double-edged propositions. On one hand, they’ve been known to consolidate reputations, […]
Ed Seaward | Fair | reviewed by Phoebe Walker
Ed Seaward | Fair | The Porcupine’s Quill Fair, the first published novel from Canadian author Ed Seaward, offers the reader a warped pilgrimage into the underbelly of Los Angeles, trailing in the footsteps of lost soul, Eyan, as he flies low under the uneasy influences of pint-pot street tyrant Paul, and a wandering, dishevelled […]
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay | Cynical Theories | reviewed by Ryan Whittaker
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay | Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody | Pitchstone Publishing Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s new book, Cynical Theories, argues that much of modern scholarship has been ideologically compromised, endangering education and progress. With identity politics rising in global prominence, […]
Aria Aber | Hard Damage | reviewed by Ian Pople
Aria Aber | Hard Damage | University of Nebraska Press: $17.95 Not so long ago, I reviewed Patricia Smith’s Incendiary Art on this page. The title of Aria Aber’s first volume, Hard Damage, points in a similar rhetorical direction. The title is a gesture, a performative, which throws down a gauntlet to the reader. It is […]
Pablo Neruda | The Unknown Neruda | reviewed by Ian Pople
Pablo Neruda | The Unknown Neruda edited and translated by Adam Feinstein | Arc Publications: £11.99. Described by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who might be considered just a little parti pris, as ‘the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language’, Pablo Neruda has had a multitude of translators. Such a great poet will always […]
Miklόs Radnόti | Camp Notebook trans. Francis R. Jones | reviewed by Ian Pople
Miklόs Radnόti | Camp Notebook trans. Francis R. Jones | Arc Publications: £9.99 In 1944, the Hungarian poet Miklόs Radnóti was shot while being force-marched from the copper mine in Bor in Serbia towards Germany. His body, exhumed from a ditch after the war, was identified from the notebook in his pocket. That notebook is […]