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Welcome to our reviews page, focusing on books predominantly featuring long poems or sequences.
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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
Reminiscence and expectation In their very different ways both Shazea Quraishi and Giles Goodland write about the central importance of particularisation and they would doubtless both express agreement with William … Continue reading
Yang Lian is one of the most highly regarded mainland Chinese poets writing today. A Tower Built Downwards is the fifth book of his verse, in English translation, to be … Continue reading
There can be few more haunting images of a lost world intruding into the present, like an emerging palimpsest, than Patrick Branwell Brontë having returned home from school to live … Continue reading
Sandeep Parmar, Faust (Shearsman, 2022): Mary Leader, The Distaff Side (Shearsman, 2022)
If the review of these two collections were to have a title, one possibility would be ‘The Shovel and the Distaff,’ referring to the tools that provide their central metaphors. … Continue reading
Agnieszka Studziñska’s Branches of a House, JL Williams’ Origin and Moniza Alvi’s Fairoz offer three different studies in the architecture of loss and belonging. The long poem form permits a … Continue reading
In 2015 David Herd set up the Refugee Tales initiative to draw attention to the plight of migrants subject to indefinite detention in the UK. The project campaigns for the … Continue reading
Pathways of language adjusting the mechanism of perception. Gary Snyder’s small volume of poems, Riprap, was published by Origin Press and printed in Kyoto in 1959 and it takes its … Continue reading
Working with ancient poetic fragments is like grappling with shadows, grasping at shady, nebulous shapes that shrink away at the touch. As the Princeton Postclassicisms Collective has concluded, in such … Continue reading
The Bridge at Uji, a collection of 117 short, spare, untitled poems by Tom Lowenstein, takes a bridge in a suburb south of Kyoto as its inspiration. Lowenstein describes in … Continue reading