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Review: ‘The White Book’ by Han Kang (trans. Deborah Smith)
This new book in English from South Korean writer Han Kang may be hard to categorise but it does have a story, which should reassure anyone worried that a text on the colour white (or non-colour white, depending on how you look at it) will be insubstantial. As it turns out, this diary-cum-sketchbook may be…
Humphrey Astley
‘The Specular City’
The city caught me in strings of orange light. I left behind those still and airless years in which counting each slow hour of suburban dark I sat, wanting my life to take new shape. And so many silences, and the glances of strangers – cold weights on the skin I struggled beneath. Neons, night…
Swithun Cooper
Ledbury Emerging Critics: Dzifa Benson reviews ‘Natural Phenomena’ by Meryl Pugh
Meryl Pugh is the award-winning author of two previous pamphlets, Relinquish and The Bridle, but Natural Phenomena (Penned in the Margins), her eagerly anticipated first full poetry collection, opens up new ground in the poet’s oeuvre. In the blurb, Pugh is described as “both futurist and flâneuse.” The future and society’s relationship to consumerism concern…
Dzifa Benson
‘How to go home’
Drive back to the house where you were born. Open her old cookbook, press your fingers onto her pen’s scrawl. Take tweezers: tease a hair from your old doll’s clothes. Play a hymn, its melody clear as light
Rosemary Appleton
‘Being a true account of the voyage of Vincenzo Lunardi’
Fire Late September morning, and a chill in the Edinburgh air, but the gathering crowds are warm with wonder, and the ladies feverish for the hot-blooded adventurer – the man who knows how to fly. Thirty bottles of oil of vitriol into a vat of iron filings, and the limp sack of silk expands and…
Beverley Casebow
Ledbury Emerging Critics: Jennifer Lee Tsai reviews ‘Three Poems’ by Hannah Sullivan
Within the context of contemporary poetry and modern poetic form, how does one begin to describe or characterise ‘free verse’? As an academic, Hannah Sullivan’s critical exploration of this question is evident in her stated research interests. She argues that ‘the prosody of modern poetry is, to a large extent, determined by practices of lexical…
Jennifer Lee Tsai
‘Fairy Tales and Stepmonsters’
I wish I’d held your hand more often. it would have been easy. I wish I’d worried less and made a nest of my fingers for it to curl inside, it used to slip into mine anyway. Do you remember the models we made out of cardboard and paper? Rockets and market stalls and castles…
Ilse Pedler
Talking Back: Poetry, Dialogue and Voice
In her 2017 collection Stranger Baby, Emily Berry stages a dialogue between voices living and dead, a sort of haunted (and haunting) psychodrama, both intimate and fiercely private: “I wish you would put some kind of distortion on my voice,” says the speaker in ‘The End’, “so people don’t know it’s me.” This is poetry…
Kate Potts
‘Emma’s Attitudes’
“She is better than anything in Nature. In her particular way she is finer than anything that is to be found in antique art.” Sir William Hamilton Arachne Nursemaid, barmaid, perched on the Flintshire front stoop, weaving Bacchante Dancing at the Temple of Health and Hymen; atop Sir Harry’s table, deliciously displayed Circe John…
Anna Amo
Review: ‘A Watchful Astronomy’ by Paul Deaton
The title of Paul Deaton’s powerful first full collection, A Watchful Astronomy, might strike the reader initially as something of a tautology – surely all astronomy is about keeping a vigilant eye trained on the night sky? Deaton’s approach is to look down the other end of the telescope at the minutiae of our earthly…
Richie McCaffery
The Opposite House: But We Never Go In That Room!
[T]he borders of our minds are ever shifting, and…many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy. from ‘On Magic’ by W. B. Yeats. Childhood is a time when our brains are, as Yeats states, ‘ever shifting’. We are laying the…
Sarah Byrne
Ledbury Emerging Critics: Srishti Krishnamoorthy-Cavell reviews ‘Don’t Call Us Dead’ by Danez Smith
Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead (Chatto & Windus) interrogates the present, exhumes histories and dares to imagine a future poised in anger, grace and freedom. It is unapologetic in its scope and tender in its pain. The politics is searing and the language hauntingly beautiful; Smith’s is a craft of lacerating precision. This collection is…
Srishti Krishnamoorthy-Cavell
Ledbury Emerging Critics: Mary Jean Chan reviews ‘Shrines of Upper Austria’ by Phoebe Power
As one of the four Poetry Book Society Spring 2018 Recommendations, Phoebe Power’s debut collection Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet Press, 2018) sings with a variety of different notes, ranging from the gruesome details of an Austrian murder case to a moving sequence written in the voice of Power’s Austrian grandmother, Christl, who left for…
Mary Jean Chan
Fully Automated Radical Pessimism
Some of my favorite books to teach are dystopian, like George Orwell’s 1984, M.T Anderson’s Feed, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. All of these books inform my work, but especially Station Eleven. In the book, Mandel asks the question: what would survive in the end of the world? Shakespeare…
Leah Umansky
Ledbury Emerging Critics: Jade Cuttle Reviews ‘Asylum’ by Sean Borodale
A landscape of stone has never been so alive as in Sean Borodale’s Asylum (Penguin): freckled with bones that refute their own burial, and feed off ‘the flesh of the shade’ as though trying to grow back their bodies, these poems are brimming with life in unexpected places. The inspiration for this book was mined…
Jade Cuttle
NaPoWriMo 2018 with the Poetry School
Get writing with The Poetry School for National Poetry Writing Month 2018. Join our free Campus group for NaPoWriMo and receive a writing prompt every morning, share your poems, and swap feedback with fellow poets. Last year, nearly 600 poets took part, and thousands of new poems were brought into the world. All you have to do to is join the group. Invite your friends!
Poetry School
Ledbury Emerging Critics: Maryam Hessavi Reviews ‘Spoils’ by James Brookes
Get Google ready – you’ll need it… James Brookes has published his second collection of poetry, Spoils (Offord Road Books): a geographical and linguistic excavation of historical and present-day England. These are poems which find their land most fervently on a linguistic plane, in a passionate engagement with the language through which the material reality of…
Maryam Hessavi
How I Did It – Ted Hughes Award: Inua Ellams on #Afterhours
This year we’ve once again asked the poets shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award to explain the creative process behind their award-nominated work as part of our ongoing ‘How I Did It‘ series. In this final instalment, Inua Ellams discusses #Afterhours, a collection comprising response poems, memoir, diary and artwork. In 2014 I turned 30 and…
Inua Ellams
Review: ‘Rope’ by Khairani Barokka
Khairani Barokka’s first book of poetry, Rope, is published at a time in which the lyric poem is being reexamined and reoriented, the form newly charged with political meaning in the hard light of its hitherto unacknowledged ideologies. 2017 was, and 2018 will be, an intense reworking of our poetics in response to previous failures…
Joey Connolly
Naming the Hill: A Conversation with the Non-Human
Ahead of her new online course, Die Like a Wolf: Writing the Non-Human, Suzannah Evans discusses the non-human in her poem ‘Naming the Hill’, published for the first time here. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man…
Suzannah Evans
How I Did It – Ted Hughes Award: Antony Owen on ‘The Nagasaki Elder’
This year we’ve once again asked the poets shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award to explain the creative process behind their award-nominated work as part of our ongoing ‘How I Did It‘ series. In this third instalment, Antony Owen talks about writing The Nagasaki Elder (V. Press), a journey through the bombed cities of Japan, drawing on accounts of…
Antony Owen
How I Did It – Ted Hughes Award: Matthew Francis on ‘The Mabinogi’
This year we’ve once again asked the poets shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award to explain the creative process behind their award-nominated work as part of our ongoing ‘How I Did It‘ series. In this second instalment, Matthew Francis discusses the writing of The Mabinogi (Faber and Faber), a poetic adaptation of the 14th Century Welsh epic…
Matthew Francis
Ledbury Emerging Critics: Sarala Estruch Reviews ‘Malak’ by Jenny Sadre-Orafai
You don’t have to be a believer in palmistry or divination to enjoy Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s second collection, but openness to alternative ways of seeing and knowing is an advantage. The book is titled after the poet’s late grandmother who was a chirologist and diviner, well respected in her community. In ‘Company’ we are told: ‘Families…
Sarala Estruch
How I Did It – Ted Hughes Award: Greta Stoddart on ‘Who’s There?’
This year we’ve once again asked the poets shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award to explain the creative process behind their award-nominated work as part of our ongoing ‘How I Did It‘ series. In this first instalment, Greta Stoddart talks about the genesis of Who’s There?, a radio piece tackling the topic of dementia through an interweaving of…
Greta Stoddart
Ledbury Emerging Critics: Nasser Hussain reviews ‘Calling a Wolf a Wolf’ by Kaveh Akbar
John Ebersole’s late 2017 Tourniquet review of Calling a Wolf a Wolf is harsh. Even when he’s trying to compliment Akbar’s work, it’s backhanded – as in the opening of his review where we read: Dumbfoundedly imaginative and self-absorbed, [Akbar’s] poetry engulfs the reader with so much turbulent rhetoric you’re surprised he’s capable of writing…
Nasser Hussain