poetry
The Laureate review - a romp with Robert GravesSaturday, 06 May 2023
Nowadays Robert Graves is best known for his later and least interesting works on Greek myths and Roman emperors, but at his best, in the first decade of his writing life, as a war poet (Fairies and Fusiliers) and war memoirist (Good-Bye to All That... Read more... |
Solmaz Sharif: Customs review - a poetics of exile and returnMonday, 01 May 2023
The language of poetic technique is perhaps weighted towards rupture, rather than reparation: lines end and break, we count beats and stress, experience caesurae (literally ‘cuttings’), and mark punctuation (literally ‘to prick’). Juxtaposition sets... Read more... |
Album: Dave Okumu and the Seven Generations - I Came from LoveFriday, 14 April 2023
It’s hard to think of an album that’s simultaneously as dramatic and as restrained as this. But then Dave Okumu has always put his music and ideas out into the world in the subtlest of ways.As a guitarist he’s been omnipresent for many years,... Read more... |
Colin Herd and Maria Sledmere: Cocoa and Nothing review - arts of sinkingSaturday, 01 April 2023
In his mock-poetic manual Peri-Bathos (1728), Alexander Pope opens by describing the afflictions which beset inhabitants of the lower Parnassus. The aristocracy living further up the mountain commit burglaries, and, "taking advantage of the rising... Read more... |
Will Harris: Brother Poem review - writing the poems that could have beenSaturday, 04 March 2023
You shouldn’t always judge a book by its cover, but you can get pretty far with an epigraph. The epigraph to Will Harris’s new collection, Brother Poem (following his T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted RENDANG in 2020), is a brief but telling prelude, an... Read more... |
Disbelief - 100 Russian Anti-War Poems (ed. Julia Nemirovskaya) review - writing battle-linesThursday, 23 February 2023
On 24th February 2022, when Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation”, life in Ukraine changed abruptly and in a brutal fashion. Soon the impact of the war was felt around the world – and not only in rising food and energy prices. Yet... Read more... |
'I let it emerge': an interview with Fiona Benson on the cusp of the TS Eliot Prize announcementFriday, 20 January 2023
Fiona Benson’s new collection of poems, Ephemeron (Jonathan Cape, 2022), tries to capture those things that are always moving out of grasp. It does this through four sections: the first, “Insect Love Songs”, thrums with a lyric transience, zeroing-... Read more... |
Best of 2022: BooksSaturday, 31 December 2022
From Kafka’s spry sketches to Derek Owusu’s novel-poem, and Jaan Kross’s Estonian Wolf Hall to Katherine Rundell’s spirited biography of John Donne, our reviewers take the time to share their favourite books of 2022. Before his death, Franz... Read more... |
10 Questions for Bruce Lindsay, biographer of Ivor CutlerTuesday, 13 December 2022
Ivor Cutler: A Life Outside the Sitting Room by Bruce Lindsay, is the first full-length biography of the Glasgow-born poet, author, performer and songwriter. The book will be published on the centenary of Cutler’s birth, 15 January 2023. Cutler... Read more... |
PJ Harvey - Orlam: In Conversation with Max Porter, The Old Market, HoveFriday, 11 November 2022
In an intimate evening with Polly Jean Harvey MBE, the double Mercury Prize winning artist sang an altogether different kind of tune than you might expect.Reading from her new book of poetry, Orlam, a coming of age story about a not-girl-not-boy,... Read more... |
Derek Owusu: Losing the Plot review - the finest perfumeThursday, 10 November 2022
Derek Owusu’s debut That Reminds Me won the Desmond Elliot Prize in 2020. When asked what it was that she loved most about Owusu’s semi-autobiographical 117-page book, Preti Taneja, chair of the judges (and winner of the prize herself in 2018)... Read more... |
TS Eliot: Into The Waste Land, BBC Two / Four Quartets, Starring Ralph Fiennes, BBC Four review - a great 100th birthday present to a giant of modern literatureMonday, 17 October 2022
Can you make modern poetry come to life on a TV screen? The BBC has had two stabs recently at answering this question, as part of the centennary celebrations for TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, seen by many as the greatest poem of the 20th century. One... Read more... |
