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 »

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 »

A book called 1948, made of some eighty Pushkin stanzas, by Martin Rowson illustrate, riots of rhyme, extravaganzas. The cover’s ruddy bloody garish and Rowson’s drawings quite nightmarish, obsessive as the text, but still, full of telling … Continue reading »

My own introduction to Victor Hugo’s work was learning a poem by heart for discussion in an oral examination. Fortunately it was a short poem and one that made a … Continue reading »

In her note preceding the sequence ‘Haunting my Daughter’, Anne Ryland states her desire to give voice to those hard-working, working-class women of the early 19th Century who had ‘neither … Continue reading »

As I began reading ‘The Two Magicians’, the long poem that constitutes the bulk of Paul Bentley’s Largo, it brought to mind David Peace’s novel GB84 and Jon dos Passos’s … Continue reading »

I knew I was going to like Long Cuts from the moment I spotted the familiar brown cover at the 2011 inaugural Free Verse Book Fair in London’s Exmouth Market – a … Continue reading »

I first encountered Glyn Hughes’ poetry in 1979 when I read Best of Neighbours, his New and Selected Poems. I was twenty and looking for a poetry that spoke directly to my own … Continue reading »

A Compression of Distances by Daphne Gloag, one time medical journalist, and scholar of classics and philosophy, is a paean to her life with her late husband, to whose memory … Continue reading »

Reaching Peckham is a book length sequence telling the story of a group of 3 disparate Peckham citizens. It is voiced by a narrator called Lorna, who is single and … Continue reading »