As a word destiny is borrowed from the Old French destinée and from the Latin dēstinātus both suggestive of something ordained by fate or intended to take place. The word … Continue reading »

In his 2007 notes on ‘Some Aspects of Poems and Translations’ Jeremy Prynne had suggested that ‘if you can read and understand poems written in a foreign language, then you … Continue reading »

‘Don’t ask what a work is. See what it does’. The reader of Mimic Pond, Carol Watts’s latest collection, is thus advised by this quotation from Eva Hesse’s An Ear … Continue reading »

Trapped in language   What makes Robert Browning’s 1852 poem ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ particularly disturbing is not simply the horrors which confront the hero but that … Continue reading »

Sometimes the structure of a poetry book may present itself as an image, one that is as intrinsic to the work as a whole as an image may be to … Continue reading »

Just as words recalled can make us think of fragments shored against the ruins so in a letter from 1977 to Milton Hindus, the editor of Charles Reznikoff’s poems, the … Continue reading »

Alasdair Paterson published a collection of poetry in the 1980s – The Floating World – but almost twenty five years were to pass before his next collection was published by Shearsman.  … Continue reading »

Although these are strikingly different books, they not only share a concern with new ways of looking at the world but they all bring a visual poetics or sense of … Continue reading »

These are two of the most absorbing poetry books I have come across for some while. Much of their material is very dark, and as both rely heavily on collage … Continue reading »

‘The gift of tongues’, writes Eli Payne Mandel in his exhilarating first collection, The Grid, ‘is as fickle as lightning.’ In a series of eclectic verse – prose poems, concrete … Continue reading »