Blog
All of our Blog Posts
Review: ‘Spikenard’ by Yvonne Reddick
Red in tooth and claw though the setting for many of her poems are, Yvonne Reddick evades any easy categorisation in Spikenard (Smith | Doorstop). Just as she did in its two predecessors, Deerhart and Translating Mountains, Reddick writes a poetry that bucks, rears and darts, but is also defined by the steady and deep-sinking effect…
Patrick Davidson Roberts
Review: ‘Counter Reform’ by Charlotte Newman
Charlotte Newman’s Counter Reform is ostensibly a pamphlet about living with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. As Newman asserts: ‘It is not about liking things clean. It is about making a mess of human mechanisms, of trying to control metaphysics.’ For Newman, the pamphlet is a ‘not-book’. The pamphlet is split into three sections: ‘Obsession’, ‘Compulsion’, ‘Resistance’….
Jenna Clake
‘Your sister is a thousand eyes’ by Billie Manning
Your sister is a thousand eyes and she has been looking for you. In the park by the rusting swings, in the burnt grass, she is looking. She sees a thousand things. Chernobyl. Teeth and hair. A dead father. Ugliness. You’ve seen them. The burning buildings, the falling bridges. Children crying in the back of…
Billie Manning
‘The Number You Have Dialled Does Not Exist’ by Fathima Zahra
(After Hyon Gyon’s ‘We Were Ugly’) Your granddaughter – Wild fields of skeletons your Gardening books didn’t teach you about. She writes letters to your dead husband, Loves a boy in secret, But you don’t know that. You know her from a time of closeted Tongues and unaware Grandmothers loved better. There’s only so much…
Zahra
Writers, Retreat
Fall back, poets! I’ve got the supplies in; you need only bring yourselves. I’ve designed Writers, Retreat as a wild tour of the remote huts, palaces and wind baffles used by poets and artists to keep their notebooks from the elements and their writing from interruption. We’ll pay Dylan Thomas a visit in his ‘house…
Holly Corfield Carr
In Praise of Complexity
I’ve recently been reading Peter Brook’s The Shifting Point. I often go back to this book, reading about the world of theatre as a way to think about poetry. In the chapter entitled ‘Shakespearean Realism’ Brook talks about how we intuitively accept from a young age that our mind is constantly moving from one place…
Stav Poleg
Pub Chats: Bad Betty Press
Welcome to Pub Chats, our series of interviews about the nuts and bolts of publishing with some of the country’s most innovative indie presses. Joining us for a chat and a drink today is Amy Acre of Bad Betty Press. Hello there! What are you drinking? I like a bit of everything, but it’s 4pm…
Ali Lewis
Only Love
Other than being a poet, I’m also a high school and middle school English teacher. A student asked me the other day what my “writing truth” was and it stunned me. It’s a funny phrase, “writing truth”, and it was an odd question, but I knew my answer immediately: the heart. Everything I write is…
Leah Umansky
Course Quick Guide — Summer 2019
This handy quick guide to our Summer 2019 courses includes a booking link and a short description of everything we’re offering coming term! Click on a course for more information. Face-to-Face Courses London – One and Two-Day Workshops Mapping Our Lost Haunts with Jean Sprackland Rediscover the dens, playgrounds and treehouses of your childhood. Extrasensory Perceptions: Fortean Poetry with Caleb Parkin Channel poems from…
Poetry School
Pub Chats: Platypus Press
Welcome to Pub Chats, our series of interviews about the nuts and bolts of publishing with some of the country’s most innovative indie presses. Joining us today in our mystery spit-and-sawdust somewhere in Canary Wharf is Michelle Tudor of Platypus Press, an indie publisher of poetry, fiction & non-fiction based in England. Hello there! What…
Poetry School
On Finding Our Why
When the Poetry School asked if I’d like to run a course of my own choosing, I asked myself what I might have needed support with at some other time. As it turns out, commissions and residencies can be transformative ways of learning about your own practice. Having undertaken a number of these last year,…
Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Tutor Academy – April 2019
Put a spring back in your poems’ step, and see new inspiration bloom at our brand new Tutor Academy! This spring we have collaborated with Martha Sprackland, editor at Offord Road Books, to co-curate a week of exciting half-day workshops led by ten poets who are teaching for the Poetry School for the first time. We are…
Poetry School
Review: ‘Us’ by Zaffar Kunial
The most impressive thing about Zaffar Kunial’s debut collection, Us, might be its willingness not to impress; to leave as slight an impression as possible. The book’s first epigraph (of two) comes from Khalil Gibran: ‘Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it / so that the other half may reach you’…
Will Harris
Review: ‘Fondue’ by A. K. Blakemore
‘Fondue’ must be one of the more descriptive words in the language. It summons up consistency, texture, a sense of movement, taste and smell. Even the sound of the word is evocative: the onomatopoeic glooping of ue – and borrowed from French, too. It’s certainly more suggestive than ‘melt’. It’s an appropriate title for this…
Rosanna Hildyard
Family, Politics and Poetry: What Ties Them All Together?
With the holidays been and gone, family is on my mind. I haven’t been ‘home’ for Christmas – that is back to America – for nine years. When I was a kid, my brother and I were given rules on the day – things we should and shouldn’t say. My Dad knew not to drink…
Christina Thatcher
Poetry School Books of the Year 2018
It’s been a superb year for ‘little shapelets’ and their ‘sprinkling of white space’. Funny, painful, complex, adventurous, elegiac, innovative, insightful and enduring, the books we have chosen to celebrate here represent just a small selection of the marvellous work we have read and loved over the past twelve months. Below, in alphabetical order, you…
Poetry School
Why the sonnet?
Why the sonnet? Because it is one thing. Because it is many. First of all, the many. Petrarch in the late Middle Ages, Terrance Hayes in Trump’s America, Camões, Shakespeare, Goethe, Baudelaire, Lorca and thousands of other poets across the centuries in their different cultures and languages: who would pretend that their poems are anything…
William Wootten
Review: ‘Their Lunar Language’ by Charlotte Eichler
Charlotte Eichler’s debut pamphlet Their Lunar Language opens on a wryly prophetic note: ‘We knew everything, playing oracle on the carpet. / Saturdays crawled with our ladybird circus – ’ – lines which capture something of humanity’s uneasy assumptions of power over the natural world. Vahni Capildeo has described Eichler’s poems as ‘modern pastoral’ and…
Sarah Westcott
Interview with Mark Waldron
Maria Lewandowska interviews poet Mark Waldron, author of The Brand New Dark (2008), The Itchy Sea (2011), and Meanwhile, Trees (2016), who will be teaching the Advanced Poetry Course at Poetry School next term. Maria Lewandowska: What are your plans for the workshop, and what do you want to focus on with your students?…
Maria Lewandowska
The Poet’s Bookshelf
What book can no poet do without? That’s the question we ask every poet who teaches or writes for us. The Poet’s Bookshelf is a fantasy library containing one title – poetry or prose – recommended by each and every poet who comes through our doors. If you’re stuck for inspiration, why not have a…
Poetry School
Pub Chats: Verve Poetry Press
In the latest interview in our Pub Chats series, we sat down for an imaginary 8am pint with Stuart Bartholomew of Birmingham’s Verve Poetry Press, sister press of the successful Verve Poetry Festival. Hello there! What are you drinking? I am scarily varied on drinks (a bit like I am with poetry). White Wine, Guinness,…
Poetry School
Review: ‘Insistence’ by Ailbhe Darcy
The most incisive critical response I’ve encountered to Ailbhe Darcy’s recent work was when I posted a link to the first poem from Insistence on Twitter and Dominic Leonard replied saying ‘wow holy fuck’. That seems about right. It’s not that that poem, ‘Ansel Adams’ Aspens’ (which refers to Ansel Adams’ photos of, yes, aspens,…
Joey Connolly
Review: ‘Working Class Voodoo’ by Bobby Parker
While Working Class Voodoo knowingly writes into and through traditions passed down from Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell and other ‘confessional’ writers, Bobby Parker is, emphatically, a poet of his own, disrupting what we expect from the lyric ‘I’. Working Class Voodoo provides the uncomfortable yet absolutely indispensable vantage of being a moth in the carpet…
Jake Morris-Campbell
Poetry in Aldeburgh Weekend Round-Up
‘Magical’ is not a word I often use to describe an experience, but my first visit to Poetry in Aldeburgh was certainly that. The town’s location on a gorgeous shingly beach, the soft, early November light we were blessed with for most of the weekend, the cosy pubs we’d head to in the evening for…
Kostya Tsolákis
Review: ‘Waitress in Fall’ by Kristín Ómarsdóttir, trans. Vala Thorodds
Waitress in Fall is a career-spanning collection of Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s work, comprising 30 years’ worth of poems, selected and translated by Vala Thorodds and published by Carcanet & Partus. These poems by Kristín†, taken from her seven collections and presented chronologically, follow the likes of Selima Hill and Eileen Myles in conveying the quieted desires,…
Maria Sledmere