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An Olympic Struggle – Brian Turner’s Phantom Noise
Buy Phantom Noise from Bloodaxe Books English: Rowing Olympic Games (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Today, the Nigerien rower, Hamadou Djibo Issaka, dubbed ‘the sculling sloth’ by the UK’s press, rowed the...
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Dancing in the Dhark – Imtiaz Dharker’s Leaving Fingerprints
Buy Leaving Fingerprints from Amazon English: Wheat field (Photo credit: Wikipedia) On Berlin’s Bernauer Straße the wheat around The Chapel of Reconciliation was tanning in the summer sun – each blade...
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Warm Leatherette: Robert Wrigley’s The Church of Omnivorous Light
St Mary Lake, Montana, USA (Photo credit: Jvstin) The Church of Omnivorous Light, Robert Wrigley’s first UK publication, spans a lifetime’s writing and nine collections. At times, I was reminded of the...
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Robert Wrigley’s Soundings on the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Blog
The Aldeburgh Poetry Festival 2013 Programme The Poetry Trust’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Blog has updated with a close reading of Robert Wrigley’s Soundings, and you can find the poem printed in full...
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Not Fade Away – Nikola Madzirov’s Remnants of Another Age
George Perkins, 1927 (Photo credit: johnfield1) My great-grandfather, who hung through my childhood at the centre of a shrine tended by my great-aunt, now hangs in my house. After eighty-six years of...
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Video Games: Vidyan Ravinthiran’s Grun-tu-molani
Domenico Ghirlandaio, Adoration of the Magi, 1485 – 88 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Lisa Jardine’s excellent Worldly Goods challenges the view that galleries are secular temples, and that we should...
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Land of Confusion: Heather Phillipson’s INSTANT-fLEX 718
Aubrey Beardsley, illustration for The Rape of the Lock (photo credit: wikiart) Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock was my first encounter zeugma. Blink and you miss it. Belinda, our flaky heroine,...
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Tracey Herd’s Not in This World and the T.S. Eliot Prize
Tracey Herd, Not in this World (Bloodaxe Books, 2015) The Poetry Book Society has posted the next of my T. S. Eliot Prize reviews on the Poetry Bookshop online. Gasoline fuelled Hollywood glamour...
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Selina Hill’s Jutland and Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade
The next two of my T S Eliot Prize reviews were posted on the Poetry Book Society’s Poetry Portal today. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been reading Selima Hill’s Jutland and Sarah Howe’s Loop...
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Rebecca Perry’s Beauty / Beauty
The Poetry Book Society have posted another of my reviews on their Poetry Portal, this time on Rebecca Perry’s Beauty / Beauty. Beauty / Beauty meditates upon some of life’s binary oppositions with...
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