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The Shadow of Violence
One Friday night, when I was fifteen, I got into a fight. More accurately: I bravely stood-up for a loudmouth friend and then bravely lay in the grass, while five men kicked my head in. This was nothing unusual for my mid-teens (or indeed my mid-twenties). The only difference being that this time I limped-off…
Mark Pajak
Beyond the Self and Writing What You Don’t Know
‘Write what you know’ is the advice often given to new writers, and it’s true that our stories, or versions of the stories that haunt us, are the starting point for much of our writing. If you are not Karl Ove Knausgaard, however, you may tire of your life story and yearn to transcend the limits…
Shazea Quraishi
‘Half-empty’ by Romalyn Ante – Primers Shortlist 2017
‘The Philippines must be half-empty; you’re all here running the NHS’ – Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh Drug: Migrationazoline (available in full or half-empty bottles) Indications: ____– prophylaxis of parents who nag like masonry drills, ______saying they did not send you to college ______to be a health-centre volunteer ____– ulcers on the lips for eating…
romalyn ante ‘Baby’ by Amelia Loulli – Primers Shortlist 2017
Most people drown without _______making a noise or splashing. See me here Baby, watch me _______lying out plank, below the surface, all that stillness, all that _______peace, see how long I can breathe down here alone. You must _______trust me, I am your mother after all, don’t think about the firefighter who _______lies to the…
Amelia Loulli
‘A curious, messy business, fraught with failure’: Poetry and Science
Our lives are threaded through with science – from the way our cars convert petrol into energy to how food changes form when cooked at different temperatures (runny or hard-boiled eggs, anyone?). I mean, isn’t the Great British Bake Off really a science show involving a lot of cake? Scientists often use languages and vocabularies…
Tania Hershman
Review: ‘Joy’ by Sasha Dugdale
Sometimes you read a work that is so clearly deserving of the accolades it’s received that it restores your faith in things. Sasha Dugdale’s ‘Joy’ – the title-piece of this, her fourth collection from Carcanet – is such a work, having won the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, and rightly so. A playwright…
Humphrey Astley ‘To The Wounded Among Us*’ by Sarala Estruch – Primers Shortlist 2017
But everyone is wounded a little. What are hearts but purple, pumping wounds? What are we but hearts travelling in skin suits? Today we are tired of listening. This morning we woke with our ears full, cochleae still reverberating with gunshot and the bombs we detonated yesterday in yet another failed coup to colonise…
Sarala Estruch ‘Athenian Light’ by Kostya Tsolákis – Primers Shortlist 2017
I was born into it in late September, when it’s sweet and hued at sunset like the seeded flesh of figs. Smog meddled with it at the time, hanging over Athens like bad history. And growing up, what use was lyrical light when stuck two hours every day in an airless school bus, my biggest…
Kostya Tsolákis ‘Elders of the Pot’ by Jasmine Cooray – Primers Shortlist 2017
They sit in a rainbow of re-used jam jars, watch the traffic of the kitchen, hold proverb and gossip in their gnarled shapes and powders. Every wooden spoon is yellow to the neck. Turmeric, coriander, mustard seed land on the heat of inherited pans, smoke their sour huck into the corners of the house, leak…
Jasmine Cooray
Re: Review: ‘The Emma Press Anthology of the Sea’
Avast! In scale, power and sheer unpredictability, there is nothing like the sea to inspire in both a physical and creative sense. Never homogenous, it is often astonishingly beautiful and offers up a beguiling mix of complexity and change on a micro and macro level – from the dance of exquisite plankton to the erosion…
Sarah Westcott ‘Garam Aandey’ by Aisha Hassan – Primers Shortlist 2017
Those ancient cobbles hum with heat long after sundown the shrill cry of the boy with the thermos full of hard boiled eggs for sale the donkey pulling the cart of bananas – refusing to move as the doodh wallah on his bike delivers the milk door to door And here is rain that is…
Aisha Hassan
Review: ‘The Hill’ by Angela France
Angela France’s The Hill is a book-length sequence of poems celebrating Leckhampton Hill near Cheltenham. In its commitment to explore every aspect of the area, from its history to its landscape to the people who meet there, the collection is an all-encompassing celebration of place, as well as a showcase for the versatility and range…
Jonathan Edwards ‘Old Town’ by Imogen Forster – Primers Shortlist 2017
The churches wear black hoods and on the inebriated street bars shine, all glass and varnish. Voices talk beer and whisky. A boy kicks a bottle down the stank, pigeons sip daintily in the grooves between worn granite setts. The hunchbacked street is an arête, a dry fishbone. Closes fall away from its spine, swallowing…
Imogen Forster ‘The May-Tree’ by Yvonne Reddick – Primers Shortlist 2017
Your embrace was the Shelter Stone when the ferns began ____________________to unscroll their questions. You planted a may-tree, and said the whitethorn could not match the bloom in my cheeks. By summer, you swore you’d carry me from Edale to Kielder, to show me the dens of lynx. My vows were the Ring of Steall….
Yvonne Reddick ‘The House’ by Aviva Dautch – Primers Shortlist 2017
Aviva Dautch is on the ten-person shortlist for Primers Volume III. ‘The House’ is from her shortlisted manuscript When The World Was Rotting. We’ll be showcasing the work of all the shortlisted writers over the next two weeks, so check back to read more poems. Aviva Dautch teaches at the British Library and Bethlem Museum of the Mind (the…
Aviva Dautch ‘Second-hand’ by L Kiew – Primers Shortlist 2017
___(Penang, 1932) _________(i) Lao ma believes the dead cling to their possessions. My dress is red shantung; its last occupant is heart-broken and tugging on my hem as I step onto the polished floor. My partner is her ex- husband. He holds me out at arms’ length, cold and stiff. I waltz around, around. When…
L Kiew
Review: ‘Terms and Conditions’ by Tania Hershman
In Stephen Pinker’s book, The Blank State, he took aim at the notion of nurture being all powerful; that we are born in compliance with the environment we inhabit. Pinker argued that the new cognitive sciences showed we are determined by what we inherit. In Tania Hershman’s debut collection: Terms and Conditions (Nine Arches), the…
Peter Raynard
Queer Poetics: Beyond the White, Straight, (Cis-)Male Literary Canon
In recent years, I’ve been increasingly keen on the word ‘queer’ as a descriptive tool for self-identifying as LGBTQ+, but also as a way of negotiating and understanding the society we find ourselves in. Despite its former derogatory connotations, ‘queer’ has since been reclaimed by many as a powerful lens through which to better depict…
Mary Jean Chan
‘Limpet’ by Anna Bindoff – Resurgence Prize, Highly Commended
You told me after all these years, in one Of those sweet, unexpected, piercing lines That we’ve become like limpet and a stone Whose borders can be nowhere else aligned. I wondered if you knew the home’s a scar, Abraded by rotation at the brim And strange exchanges keep them there, shell stars In constellation,…
Poetry School ‘So’ by Roy Woolley – Resurgence Prize, Highly Commended
On the dirt road that night, a broken thing with the new patterns leached from its wings – but no clearer signs, hence no way of knowing the destination this rough road might become if I followed the scents these greyish flowers had already lost guiding me. Scanning the thorn-fields and with hours before reset,…
Poetry School ‘The flaw in the pattern’ by Rachael Mead – Resurgence Prize, Highly Commended
13 thoughts on wilderness 1. It is a word for something imaginary. 2. The deep blue bowl of sky, the microbial cities in the folds of my skin. 3. Web, palimpsest, machine – nothing can capture it. All we can say is what it is not. 4. Warping the laws of physics, time drifts with…
Poetry School ‘What the trees do’ by Laura Scott – Resurgence Prize, Highly Commended
They play with us they want to be us they once were us a long time ago one of them caught the heel of a girl in the crook of its branch, snagged it like a bird caught in a bush flicked her up into its leaves. She cried and the birds scattered so no-one…
Laura Scott ‘Walking with Rilke’ by Linda France – Resurgence Prize, Highly Commended
When, after a day of rain, evening light plucks us out of the four-square house to rinse our screen-bleached faces and it takes a while to adjust then notice grass heads leaning into each other like our shadows far off to the south intent on their own attenuated adventure woven between sheep, recently shorn and…
Linda France ‘River, post-spate’ by Joanna Guthrie – Resurgence Prize, Highly Commended
………..‘…one broad presence that proceeds by craft and gratitude’ – John Burnside The river reassembles after being in spate. It is small water moving in shining self-interrupting wrinkled glyphs and dimples, a body of thought in movement. It flows severally in adjacent clear layers and overlays takes circular spinning journeys within itself. Having got itself…
Poetry School ‘Dawn of a New Age’ by Sue Norton – Resurgence Prize, Highly Commended
Of ten green bottles, two are glass and make music, ringing the bell of the bottle bank. Eight are plastic: two are scrunched, recycled by the council; one floats in the canal, one rolls in a ditch tossed from a car; one embarks on a sea voyage. Three truck to landfill. It’s a new beginning,…
Poetry School