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 »

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 »

For fifty thousand US dollars you can have your dog cloned. It costs a little less for your cat and a lot more for your horse1. In the lifetime of … Continue reading »

‘Cannibalism,’ notes Rebecca Solnit in a dedicatory quote to Angela Gardner’s mesmerising verse narrative, The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette, ‘is both a terrible transgression and a strange communion.’ From … Continue reading »

Zoë Skoulding’s , A Revolutionary Calendar, is based on the French Republican Calendar which was in use from 1793-1805. Skoulding uses the scheme devised by the poet Fabre d’Églantine who … Continue reading »