Easter morning. After descending through nine circles of Hell in Inferno, the first canticle of The Divine Comedy, Dante, together with Virgil, his guide and mentor, emerges on the shores … Continue reading »

Superficially, these two beautiful and substantially researched book-length sequences are alike. Both use full-page, open-form structures. Both engage with buried histories in specific landscapes. Both also address issues of nationality … Continue reading »

Reminiscence and expectation In their very different ways both Shazea Quraishi and Giles Goodland write about the central importance of particularisation and they would doubtless both express agreement with William … Continue reading »

Yang Lian is one of the most highly regarded mainland Chinese poets writing today. A Tower Built Downwards is the fifth book of his verse, in English translation, to be … Continue reading »

There can be few more haunting images of a lost world intruding into the present, like an emerging palimpsest, than Patrick Branwell Brontë having returned home from school to live … Continue reading »

If the review of these two collections were to have a title, one possibility would be ‘The Shovel and the Distaff,’ referring to the tools that provide their central metaphors. … Continue reading »

Agnieszka Studziñska’s Branches of a House, JL Williams’ Origin and Moniza Alvi’s Fairoz offer three different studies in the architecture of loss and belonging. The long poem form permits a … Continue reading »

In 2015 David Herd set up the Refugee Tales initiative to draw attention to the plight of migrants subject to indefinite detention in the UK. The project campaigns for the … Continue reading »

Pathways of language adjusting the mechanism of perception. Gary Snyder’s small volume of poems, Riprap, was published by Origin Press and printed in Kyoto in 1959 and it takes its … Continue reading »

Working with ancient poetic fragments is like grappling with shadows, grasping at shady, nebulous shapes that shrink away at the touch. As the Princeton Postclassicisms Collective has concluded, in such … Continue reading »