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Welcome to our reviews page, focusing on books predominantly featuring long poems or sequences.
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For fifty thousand US dollars you can have your dog cloned. It costs a little less for your cat and a lot more for your horse1. In the lifetime of … Continue reading
‘Cannibalism,’ notes Rebecca Solnit in a dedicatory quote to Angela Gardner’s mesmerising verse narrative, The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette, ‘is both a terrible transgression and a strange communion.’ From … Continue reading
Zoë Skoulding’s , A Revolutionary Calendar, is based on the French Republican Calendar which was in use from 1793-1805. Skoulding uses the scheme devised by the poet Fabre d’Églantine who … Continue reading
Integral to our imagination In the eleventh section of Carol Watts’s new poem we are presented with a suggestion as to the roots of poetic art ‘rebinding speech from / … Continue reading
In her illuminating account of his early life, The Songs We Know Best (2017), Karin Hoffman dates the start of John Ashbery’s poetry writing life to 1943 when he was … Continue reading
It might be interesting to speculate what answer in the spring of 1956 Charles Tomlinson might have given to the question concerning where poetry came from. He might well have … Continue reading
War of the Beasts and The Animals, Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale, Bloodaxe, 2021
This is the first translation of the prominent and popular Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s poetry into English, by the poet Sasha Dugdale, for Bloodaxe, and also coincides with the publication … Continue reading
These three very different books explore the scope and capacity of the long poem form using subtly different techniques and approaches. The connections between the books and between the phrases, … Continue reading
‘One day, back in Cookham, he will turn this into pattern and meaning’ writes Rosie Jackson in ‘Macedonia, 1918’ from the collection Two Girls and a Beehive by Jackson and … Continue reading
Robert Vas Dias, Poetics of Still Life: A Collage, Permanent Press, 2020.
According to a recent article in the Guardian (‘A picture of domestic bliss’, 7 Feb 2021) interest in still lifes has surged during the Covid-19 pandemic. This claim is based … Continue reading