If his “Selected Poems” (Ed. Peter Porter) is anything to go by, Lawrence Durrell’s poetry has not travelled well through time. Whilst they may have been stylistically appropriate for the 30s and 40s, I fear that do not sit well in the twenty-first century. Many seem contrived and clumsy, with (sometimes inconsistent) rhyming schemes shoe-horned… Read More “Selected Poems” – Lawrence Durrell
Why is it that so many of us live our lives – subconsciously or otherwise – as if there is a secret rewind button always available? A button that gifts us the opportunity to revisit past triumphs, to avoid horrible defeats; a button which permits us to take different decisions and make alternate choices. And… Read More The rewind button’s broken…
Andrew Motion’s “Randomly Moving Particles” is, in many ways, a quite remarkable tour de force of free verse; indeed, it is so ‘free’ that I am reminded of the narrative qualities of Robin Robertson’s award-winning “The Long Take”. Nowhere is the power of his work more in evidence than in ‘How Do the Dead Walk’,… Read More “Randomly Moving Particles”
As a writer and Indie Publisher I am always grateful that my distributor and the Nielsen book registration service have direct feeds into major on-line retailers. This facility means that, as soon as a book is published, it usually appears on global websites within 24-48 hours. However, what appears is only as good as the… Read More Why you shouldn’t believe everything an Amazon page says about a book…
John Birtwhistle’s latest collection of poetry, “in the event”, is an intriguing and eclectic mix; a real pic’n’mix of the traditional and modern, the poetic and the prosaic. It is a ‘something for everyone’ kind of book. Which, in a way, is both a strength and a weakness. There are ‘statement’ pieces – the more… Read More “in the event”
A few weeks ago, I attended – virtually, of course! – the Carcanet launch of John Birtwhistle’s latest poetry collection, “in the event”, with John himself reading. I met John just over forty years ago at the University of Southampton where I was studying English and John was ‘writer-in-residence’, or some such. There were writing… Read More A short memory of Jacques Berthoud
As my first real foray into the work of Simon Armitage, our Poet Laureate, I had expected fireworks from “Paper Aeroplane”… Unfortunately I found it more ‘Sparkler’ than giant ‘Roman Candle’. Several things struck me about this volume, a collection culled from twenty-one of Armitage’s other books: There didn’t seem to be any consistent ‘voice’… Read More “Paper Aeroplane”
In her poem ‘Dark Looks’, Riley says “So, take me or leave me … or don’t flick and skim to the foot of the page and then get up to go -” – which is precisely what I did do. After all, most of the time I had pretty much no idea what was going… Read More “Selected Poems” – Denise Riley
OK. Let’s get a couple of things clear up front… This post isn’t about speed-dating Actually I’ve never had any experience of speed-dating, so if you hear anything to the contrary they are just vile rumours So, speed-dating. The ‘topic’ – or at least the title of the topic – comes from a recent post… Read More Speed-dating
There can be few writers more generally inaccessible than e.e.cummings. By breaking so many conventions – both in the language and structure of poetry – perhaps the primary thing cummings’ achieved was to release the traditional shackles and taboos which may have been constraining poetry in the first part of the twentieth century. You could… Read More “e.e.cummings: selected poems 1923-1958”
Forgive me, but to my mind Robert Frost is no great time-traveller, his verse is stylistically too anchored in the past. I find it amazing that some of this vast collection was actually written in the Sixties, especially when you think about what had been going on in poetry (and literature in general) since the… Read More “The Collected Poems: Robert Frost”
Yesterday evening I, along with at least a couple of hundred others, sat in on the Zoom launch of the Autumn 2020 edition of The Poetry Society’s quarterly tome, the Poetry Review. For some time now there has been a consistent refrain among members of the poetry groups to which I belong that an unreasonable… Read More So maybe poetry isn’t about the language any more…
I am currently working my way through two-hundred-and-seven submissions for an anthology of poetry and prose I plan to publish early in 2021. It’s an interesting experience. As a first stage I’ve taken to dividing pieces into three groups: Shortlist – those that are clearly good and likely to make the final cut; Longlist –… Read More Searching for good writing…
I confess to have been prompted to this mini self-assessment by Andrea Badgley’s post Writing More Means Doomscrolling Less, and as a follow-up to my own Missing Work Already? It’s not the kind of thing I normally do; I’m not a natural “look at me” kind of person – though I am belatedly realising that… Read More “So how’s the not working / writing more thing going…?”
Sometimes you can do nothing about it. Unbidden a phrase or a sentence will pop into your head and not let go. It could be something new, or the need to change something old – but let’s hope not borrowed!! Today gifted me one of those mornings. Reeling a little from a writers’ group the… Read More The 4 a.m. alarm call…
Today is the first ‘new Monday’; the first whole week where I can decide what I do with my time, how much I write. Staggeringly it is a month since I wrote The Daunting Prospect of Reinvention – and what’s more bizarre is that it feels as if I have been footloose and fancy-free for more… Read More Missing work already..?
From its earliest origins in aural tradition, poetry has inevitably tracked the metamorphosis of language through time. You only have to reflect on the differences between Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Larkin to see how poetry maps not only the journey of a civilisation but its language and mores too. Perhaps poetry takes a little while… Read More “Homie”
At the end of this month I’m giving up work. More or less by choice. It is a step that has been labelled in various ways by various people, me included: ‘retirement’ seems the most common, with the upcoming period a ‘glide-path to retirement’ – after all, I’m not officially qualified to be there yet…!… Read More The Daunting Prospect of Reinvention
According to the trade publication, The Bookseller, in the UK today – Thursday 3rd September 2020 – some 600 books are going to be published. Yes, 600! On one day! Books from ‘big’ publishing houses as well as the myriad of independent and Indie publishers. The suggestion is that this figure represents a catch-up from… Read More Did you know this? Stunning…
Carolyn Forché’s “In the Lateness of the World” is a collection of poetry about which it’s very easy to be ambivalent. Not because the work is insipid or dull – far from it! – but because for me it veers toward both extremes on the good-bad poetry continuum. If I start with the more negative… Read More “In the Lateness of the World”
