‘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 »

Easter morning. After descending through nine circles of Hell in Inferno, the first canticle of The Divine Comedy, Dante, together with Virgil, his guide and mentor, emerges on the shores … Continue reading »

Superficially, these two beautiful and substantially researched book-length sequences are alike. Both use full-page, open-form structures. Both engage with buried histories in specific landscapes. Both also address issues of nationality … Continue reading »