Poetry Collection Articles
Review Essay – Half Other by Peter Wallis
Nicola Healey reads the new poetry collection by Peter Wallis: Half Other, ‘a reminder of the significance of lateral relations in our lives’ whole’. ‘I was not born alone’: Twinhood and Illness Peter Wallis’s first full collection, Half Other, takes inspiration from his life as a twin, focusing on the lengthy ill health and hospital…
Nicola Healey
Identity Poetics: A Century of Englishness
Christopher Madden reads the latest anthology edited by John Greening and Kevin Gardner, and the new poetry collection by Aaron Kent. Contraflow: Lines of Englishness 1922-2022, Ed. John Greening & Kevin Gardner Every anthology poses two fundamental questions: ‘Why this?’, and ‘Why now?’ For John Greening and Kevin Gardner, the editors of Contraflow: Lines of…
Christopher Madden
Review: Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris
Stephanie Sy-Quia reads the new poetry collection by Katie Farris and discovers a message of hope and perseverance. Katie Farris’s second collection revolves around treatment for breast cancer, with the mastectomy as the great before and after – a dividing line along which most of the collection falls. Other moments of magnitude are the Capitol…
Stephanie Sy-Quia
Review Round-up: The Body of Language
Shalini Sengupta reads three new poetry collections by Alycia Pirmohamed, Jay Gao, and Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa. On Another Way to Split Water by Alycia Pirmohamed 1. How do the words get to the page? 2. What attracts them? 3. What did you burn? 4. What did you give to the river? These lines from Bhanu…
Shalini Sengupta
Review: ‘My Darling from the Lions’ by Rachel Long
Rachel Long’s debut collection, My Darling from the Lions, interweaves accessible narrative poems with surrealist ones to explore a mixed-race speaker’s arrival into womanhood. Five nearly identical versions of the poem ‘Open’ occur in the book’s first section. Each features an ‘I’ engaged in the same dialogue with different interlocutors: This morning he told meI…
Emily Pérez
Review: ‘Saffron Jack’ by Rishi Dastidar
Rishi Dastidar’s second collection is a chimera. At once a long narrative poem, a one-man play with modest stage directions, and a DIY manual for How to Set Up and Rule a Nation, the book is also written in the format of a legislative document, with numbered clauses sub-dividing into indented elaborations: 24.2. It was…
Stephanie Sy-Quia
Review: ‘Letters Home’ by Jennifer Wong
‘Home’ is a contentious word. Both personal and political, ‘home’ implies belonging, and not belonging. In Robert Frost’s ‘Death of the Hired Man’, ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in’. But is that place where we live, where we were born, where our family…
Heidi Williamson