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Welcome to our reviews page, focusing on books predominantly featuring long poems or sequences.
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Leeanne Quinn’s debut collection from 2012, Before You, contained a section of poems inspired by One Art: The Letters of Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop’s influence was apparent even from the vocabulary … Continue reading
The scope offered by the long poem form brings space and time to think, and that is the reward offered by all three collections. Marvin Thompson’s Road Trip, James Byrne’s … Continue reading
J.H. Prynne’s article, ‘Huts’, was published in 2008 by Textual Practice and it opened with a quotation from William Collins’s 1746 poem ‘Ode to Evening’: Or if chill blustring … Continue reading
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s Plan B Audio deploys a variety of poetic and narrative styles, often experimental, within an overwhelming context of disease and damage. Arranged as one long poem, with no … Continue reading
Nostoc by Daragh Breen (Shearsman Books 2020)
Daragh Breen’s fourth collection leads the reader through a chain of transformations. Its three separately titled sequences, interspersed with loosely linked shorter poems, build a complex and troubling vision. The … Continue reading
A Presentment of Englishry by Liam Guilar (Shearsman Books, 2019)
The deconstructionist view of there being no single attainable truth about the past is worth bearing in mind as we become immersed in Liam Guilar’s moving reconstruction of the land … Continue reading
Portland: A Tryptych by Mark Goodwin, Norman Jope and Tim Allen KNIVES FORKS AND SPOONS PRESS (2019)
Portland : A Tryptych focuses on the outlying peninsula of Portland, renowned for its limestone quarries mining oolithic stone used in stately buildings and as a remote outpost of … Continue reading
Changing by Richard Berengarten (Shearsman Books 2016)
It might be said of Richard Berengarten’s Changing, as it might be said of the ancient work of divination known as the I Ching, that it is a long poem. … Continue reading
Cantilena – one book in four spans by John Peck (Shearsman Books, 2016)
The epigraph to John Peck’s poem, Cantilena, is a quote from Kafka’s story of capital punishment, From the Penal Colony. It describes a machine whose glass teeth take twelve hours … Continue reading
The Open Secret by Jennifer Moxley (Flood Editions, 2014)
Jennifer Moxley’s The Open Secret published in 2014 contains two long poems “Coastal” and “Evacuations” which form the core of this intelligent, complex book. In it Moxley examines the practice … Continue reading