Josef Herman: Warsaw, Brussels, Glasgow, London, 1938-1944
Josef Herman's early, cathartic work should not be missed
Josef Herman: Warsaw, Brussels, Glasgow, London, 1938-1944
Josef Herman's early, cathartic work should not be missed
Red Army Faction Blues
Red Army Faction Blues persuasively blends fact and fiction in its account of Germany's turbulent times from the '60s to the '80s, writes Paul Simon
Andy Croft
The bitter heritage of broken land
Monday 28 November 2011
Two new collections with a northern and Scottish perspective
Pirates, black stockings and Russian cigarettes
Wednesday 13 October 2010
Steve Spence's first full-length collection A Curious Shipwreck (Shearsman, £8.95) is a book about pirates, real and imagined - Long John Silver, Radio Caroline, file-share piracy, Pirate Jenny, Adam and the Ants, Romeo and Ethel (the pirate's daughter) and Desert Island Discs ("Now if you had to choose only / one of these eight pirates to take / on your desert island, / which one would it be?")
A poet for our time
Friday 17 September 2010
"There are two ways in which place is known and cherished," Seamus Heaney has written. "One is lived, illiterate and unconscious, the other learned, literate and conscious.
Forward beyond the money prize
Monday 16 August 2010
It's that time of year again when anyone interested in poetry, the writers and readers, publishers and critics, is gripped by one overwhelming question - does anyone really give a toss about who wins this year's Forward Prize?
21st century verse
Monday 12 July 2010
For 1,000 years the river Danube represented the border between Hapsburg Catholicism, Orthodox Russia and Ottoman Islam. During the cold war it was part of the front-line between East and West. Today it represents the vivid clash of the traditional and the modern.
North by north eastern currents
Wednesday 05 May 2010
Basil Bunting was a major 20th-century poet, a crucial link between European and US modernism and the north-east of England.
Facebook-era poetry
Tuesday 13 April 2010
Generational anthologies have always defined themselves as the bearers of the "new."
Chilling lines on torture
Wednesday 10 March 2010
The title poem of George Szirtes's new collection The Burning Of The Books (Bloodaxe, £8.95) refers to the 1933 nazi book burnings and all those places "where barbarians gather with their torches/And rank upon rank of shelves, tongues and footnotes/Are burning as always, as is their nature, in the streets/Of the city that opens like a book and must itself always be burning."
Growing up in rural Ireland
Tuesday 16 February 2010
Michael McCarthy was born on a farm in West Cork. At the heart of his new collection At the Races (Smith/Doorstop, £8.95) is a series of touching but unsentimental poems about growing up in rural Ireland, notably Our House, To School, Knitting, English Exam and Learning.
Welcome to hell on Earth
Wednesday 13 January 2010
Hylda Sims's wonderful new book Reaching Peckham (Hearing Eye, £7 or £12 with accompanying CD) is set in a part of London where the young William Blake once saw a tree full of angels. The angels in this book, however, are a street gang whose low-level devilry eventually leads to serious tragedy.