-
Patrick McGuinness’s fine debut collection, The Canals of Mars (2004), was just that: a collection. Its poems explored his complex background and shifting allegiances – McGuinness was born in Tunisia to a Belgian and Newcastle Irish family, and now li...
-
The modish packaging of John Stammers’ latest collection provides an excellent indication of the style of poetry that lies inside. The title Interior Night invokes the conventions of screenwriting, while the same scene-heading ‘Interior: Night’ is t...
-
In this, Derek Mahon's third collection since his Collected Poems (1999), he seeks to give contemporary moments more final shapes, but there is a sense of ancient ideas being made new: it is a poetry of metempsychosis. In James Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bl...
-
Like many aphorisms, the line by William Blake which gives Christopher Ricks the title of his new book, "Opposition is true Friendship", is more easily quoted than thought through, and more easily thought through than put into practice. With poets – an...
-
Although she herself complains self-deprecatingly in her letters that she is merely an iambic ‘umpty-um’ poet, Elizabeth Bishop scholars like to talk about her frequent drops into ‘prose-rhythm’. Victorian literary criticism took prose-rhythm seri...
-
Now that his Collected Poems 1956-1987 are in the Library of America, John Ashbery can rejoice in having become a classic author without having had to die for the privilege. For all that, much of Ashbery’s recent verse has been essential, and very...
-
The delicate, at times exquisite, poems in John Glenday’s third collection, Grain, emit a kind of twilit radiance. They tend to occupy an emotional space “between the last beam of last night’s dark and the deep, grey first light of today.” While ...
-
Glyn Maxwell’s comment on the blurb of Carrie Etter’s The Tethers announces that this debut collection is “sorrowing, glad, graceful”. I did not feel sorrow being induced by these poems; there was a sorrow in the content of some of th...
-
Some poets are more-ish - the more of their poems you read, the more you want to read. Thus it is with the American poet Billy Collins. There’s a quiet, studied elegance to his poetry, and a wit that sneakily trips you up because you’ve forgotten to l...
-
The ‘in-between space’ has been trodden to exhaustion in contemporary poetry; it has also, though once entrepreneurial, descended into easy game. Having multiple identities, a foot in every camp, poets need not commit to anything; they need not even s...
-
Alice Oswald’s previous books have demonstrated her ability to craft poems which focus intently on the rural landscape. She works in the shadow of precursors such as Hughes and Heaney, yet with an almost dogged aversion to any direct play with the...
-
In a touching interview published in The Guardian, Peter Porter admits that his interest in contemporary poetry has diminished: ‘I admire much of what’s being published now, but I don’t feel part of that world anymore; I’m left over’. This is i...
-
The dedication in Paul Muldoon’s first collection, New Weather (1973) reads: ‘for my Fathers and Mothers’. It’s a typically mischievous phrase which acknowledges not only his real father and mother, but also those literary forebears, precursors, ...
-
How language affects perception is an eternally urgent subject; while Wallace Stevens wrote that ‘poetry is the supreme fiction’ through which imagination transforms reality, at the other extreme is the hypnotising spectacle of ‘tatworld’ and toda...
-
Not in These Shoes, the second collection from Welsh poet Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, charts a variety of issues, from the imminent disappearance of a beloved local community to the empowerment of (Manolo Blahnik wearing) ‘modern woman.’ Wynne-Rhydderch...
-
Colette Bryce’s new collection begins with a short lyric about a spider trapped beneath a wineglass – an image of entrapment which reflects the cramped poem itself, and re-appears, either in form or content, throughout Self-Portrait in the Dark. The ...
-
In The Lost Leader Mick Imlah has produced an extraordinary full volume of exuberant poems, where the technicalities of verse – poetic forms, rhythm and rhyme – are handled with a seemingly casual effortlessness which signals a poetic talent rare, tr...
-
Adam Foulds’ poetry debut, The Broken Word, is described by Cape as ‘a poetic sequence’, following a young British colonialist’s experience of the Mau Mau uprising in 1950s Kenya. It reads more like a poem-novel than a sequence, however, and is c...
-
As Michael Symmonds Roberts noted when judging last year’s Forward Prize, contemporary UK poetry is drenched. This is perhaps unsurprising given the floods of last summer, as well as increasing concerns regarding global warming and our ecological impact...
-
Drawn from four books, and including seven new pieces, the Selected Poems of Michael Hofmann are an affront to the reader. From the beginning of his career he has sought to write poetry with 'the shape and texture of bricks'. In 1999, the same year as his...
Promises: