Deconstructive Wasteland

Verse Palace

2009-11-03T17:07:00.005Z

The questions and discussions surrounding why and how writers write can be as fascinating and thought-provoking as good writing itself, no? And this is particularly true of poetry, with all of its nuanced complexity and intoxicating musicality (but then I would say that, wouldn't I). Well the good news is that - my witterings aside for a moment - an excellent new online project has recently been launched, intended to offer a platform for poets to talk about an aspect of writing or reading poems which currently interests them.

It's called Verse Palace, and will feature a post a week solicited from poets, teachers and poetry readers of all opinions, interests and tastes. Some of the contributors already lined-up include David Wheatley, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Mary Jo Bang and Michael Hofmann. Well worth visiting the site over the coming months as it develops then, and getting involved in the discussions.

First up is Poetry Review editor Fiona Sampson, with her thoughts on translation and free verse. Do check it out.

Sigur Rós - Untitled 1 (Vaka)

2009-11-01T23:01:00.002Z

A great performance of a beautiful song - somehow melancholic and uplifting in equal measure, I think.

Horizon Review

2009-10-12T22:27:00.005+01:00

So the third issue of Salt Publishing's online literary journal, Horizon Review, has just been published. Edited by Jane Holland, it's a fascinating, varied, sometimes even satisfyingly infuriating read, and builds on the strengths of its previous issues, proving it can easily compete with the best of the printed mags.

Issue 3 includes new poems by David Morley, Helen Ivory, Barbara Smith, Claire Crowther and Sam Riviere; reviews of many recent collections including Hugo Williams' West End Final, Carrie Etter's The Tethers, and a particularly excellent review of Don Paterson's Rain by John McCullough; and a series of interviews, the most interesting, contentious and quotable of these being Vidyan Ravinthiran in conversation with Craig Raine. In fact, I might well post a separate discussion of some of the stuff which Raine has to say here, finding as I did some bits eminently sensible, some disagreeably caustic, and some just downright antagonistic (not entirely a bad thing). I should also add that what he has to say is on occasion pretty funny, often illuminating, and... hell, just go and read it and I'll stop blathering on.

Also, for those interested (jumping from Don Paterson's aforementioned Forward Prize-winning Rain to Emma Jones's Best First Collection-winning The Striped World) in this week's issue of the Times Literary Supplement (October 16, No 5559) my reviews of both Jones's book and fellow Australian poet Kevin Hart's Young Rain will appear. Do check them out if you can.

The XX

2009-10-03T11:17:00.004+01:00

Ones to watch.

The Shape of the Dance

2009-09-13T17:34:00.000+01:00

Q: Where is poetry heading? Is poetry that homogeneous an activity?

MD: Substitute the word 'music' for 'poetry' in those two questions and you see the kind of assumptions made about poetry. Blues musicians on the South Side of Chicago, jazz pianists in London, fiddlers in West Clare, electro-acoustic composers in Rotterdam - we wouldn't dream of measuring them by the same standard, ranking them or telling them where we think 'music' is going. Poetry is not an homogeneous activity. And art has no direction. That is spatial illusion generated by early twentieth-century ideas about 'advancement' and 'progress'. If it's hard to see this now, it's because the illusion is augmented by the demands of consumerism. Our economy depends on the notion that things and ideas become obsolete and have to be replaced. Products of art and literature can be sold more effectively if they're marketed as 'new' so that newness acquires an all-pervasive fetish value [...]

interview excerpt from The Shape of the Dance: Essays, Interviews and Digressions,
a collection of prose by the late Michael Donaghy.

Forthcoming Readings

2009-09-07T07:59:00.003+01:00

Tall Reflections

Tuesday September 15th 2009 7.30pm

continuing the tall-lighthouse cambridge series

alan buckley & ben wilkinson

voluntary contributions - suggested £2

Visual Arts Centre, Christ's College, Cambridge

Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour

Old Brompton Road, London SW5

Monday 21st September, 8pm

pick of the crop with emma jones, greta stoddart, mike bartholomew-biggs, olivia cole, martha kapos, ben wilkinson, emily berry and siân hughes with music from singer/guitarist henry fajemirokun

A poetic cornucopia for autumn’s equinox featuring:

* Emma Jones (b. Sydney), first collection The Striped World (Faber, 2009), now Wordsworth Trust Poet-in-Residence;

* Greta Stoddart, Salvation Jane (Anvil, 2008), lives East Devon, teaches for Poetry School and Bath Spa Univ;

* poet & mathematician Mike Bartholomew-Biggs (b. Essex), Tradesman’s Exit (Shoestring, 2009);

* journalist and Gregory-Award winner Olivia Cole, first collection Restricted View (Salt, 2009);

* American Martha Kapos, Poetry London’s Assistant Poetry Editor, second Enitharmon collection Supreme Being;

* Ben Wilkinson (b. Stafford), pamphlet The Sparks (Tall Lighthouse, 2008);

* Emily Berry (b. London, pamphlet Stingray Fevers, Tall Lighthouse, 2008) features in Voice Recognition (Bloodaxe);

* The Missing (Salt, 2009) by Arvon-winner Siân Hughes, is shortlisted for Forward and Guardian first-book awards

* plus music from singer/guitarist Henry Fajemirokun.

Harsent, Paterson, Seidel

2009-09-02T14:51:00.003+01:00

The September issue of Poetry magazine has just been launched.

It includes, among other things, a new sequence from David Harsent, and two poems from Don Paterson's new collection Rain, published by Faber tomorrow.

It also includes a meaty review of Frederick Seidel's Poems 1959-2009 (a poet whose Faber Selected I recently bought and am currently enjoying) by Poetry regular, Michael Hofmann.

Rosemary Tonks

2009-08-26T21:42:00.005+01:00

"My foremost preoccupation at the moment is the search for an idiom which is individual, contemporary and musical. And one that has sufficient authority to bear the full weight of whatever passion I would wish to lay upon it.

"Every poet who has been confined - at the mercy of form when he has come of age emotionally - and has found half the things he wants to say well out of his poem's range, knows the immensity of the task. And I am not speaking here of metrical skills, but of absolute freshness and authenticity in handling diction.

"What I write about must develop from my life and times. I am especially conscious of the great natural forces which bring modern life up to date. My concern here is with the exact emotional proportions - proportions as they are now current for me. Ideally, whatever is heightened should be justified both by art and by life; while the poet remains vulnerable to those moments when a poem suddenly makes its own terms - and with an overwhelming force that is self-justifying. For this reason certain poetic ideas have little validity when lifted out of context. I am consequently uneasy when discussing the logic of a poem with those whose intellectual equipment is purely mathematical. If you say that the English have a love of order which is puritanical, and the French a love of order which is imaginative, that does not make one more orderly than the other. The progress of feeling in a poem may be no less logical than the development of an argument.

"Telling the truth about feeling requires prodigious integrity. Most people can describe a chest of drawers, but a state of mind is more resistant. A hackneyed metaphor is the first sign of a compromise with intention; your reader damns you instantly, and though he may read on with his senses, you have lost his heart. Some poets do manage to converge on their inner life by generating emotion from an inspired visual imagery; in this instance the images exist in their own right, but may be thought to be in a weaker position as the raw material of the emotion, in preference to a larger existence as illustration of it."

Rosemary Tonks, writing in the PBS Bulletin in 1963,
in relation to her collection Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms

Faber New Poets

2009-08-26T16:31:00.006+01:00

At the start of this year a new Arts Council-funded initiative was announced - the prestigious poetry press Faber were to release a series of pamphlets by young poets, influenced by the continuing success of tall-lighthouse's Pilot series, edited by Roddy Lumsden.

Like the Pilot series, each poet receives editorial input and a pamphlet of their poems is published, but the Faber scheme also offers some financial help for the poets.

Now, the first pamphlets in the series are scheduled to be published in early October of this year. And the selected poets - Fiona Benson (pamphlet cover pictured above), Heather Phillipson, Toby Martinez de las Rivas and Jack Underwood - seem to represent a fair cross-section of the type of poetry emerging from this new generation of poets; unusual, edgy, contemporary and occasionally free-wheeling... hard to say anything substantial here without going into great detail (and even that would only be based on the handful of poems I've seen by these poets in magazines). Needless to say, they promise to make for interesting reading alongside the Pilot series, and will be worth checking out.

2010 will see the next four poets in the Faber series also published - Joe Dunthorne, Annie Katchinska, Sam Riviere and Tom Warner. Of these, I'll be especially interested to see Sam Riviere's pamphlet, particularly if it includes poems as strong as his second place winner in the 2008 Poetry London competition.

Where the Pilot scheme is concerned, talented young poets Charlotte Runcie and Richard O'Brien (both editors of the fine Pomegranate magazine) are also due launch their pamphlets in October, following on from the March launch of Amy Key's instead of stars and Sarah Howe's a certain chinese encyclopaedia. In related news, I'll also be reading at a tall-lighthouse event, "tall reflections", in Cambridge on the 15th September, along with Alan Buckley and invited guest readers. Do come along if you're able.

Moon

2009-08-16T10:38:00.004+01:00

A few weeks ago I went to see Moon, the excellent debut film from director Duncan Jones (once known as 'Zowie Bowie') - an impressively eerie, cerebral and often darkly funny piece of sci-fi cinema that details the life of a man alone on the lunar surface. I highly recommend it, and briefly entertained thoughts of writing a lengthier piece about it here, but then a friend of mine has recently set up a film review blog, and has done an excellent job of writing an intelligent and incisive piece on the film. So I needn't bother waffling on - instead, you can read the review here. What's more, it doesn't completely give the game away unlike many reviews I've read of Moon, which means if you do decide to go and see it, this review won't ruin your experience of it.

The Quality of Sprawl

2009-08-12T14:20:00.003+01:00

I've come across poems by Australian poet Les Murray here and there - in anthologies, online, and in magazines like a recent issue of Poetry London (Autumn '08, above) - but haven't yet bought a collection of his work. I'm thinking of ordering his Selected from Carcanet soon though, as I was reminded of what I admire in his work reading 'The Quality of Sprawl' in Shapcott and Sweeney's excellent Faber anthology, Emergency Kit, last night: the verbal dexterity, originality and often dark humour, though the unswerving certitude of some of his poems can get a bit irritating. Still, 'The Quality of Sprawl' is a fine piece, and one which uses the conversational, narrative style to great effect, I think.

It's one of his more well-known poems, but for those unfamiliar, you can read it here.

Rik Mayall's poetry reading

2009-08-04T09:17:00.003+01:00

A lesson in how not to give a poetry reading, by comic genius Rik Mayall.

Review: The Border Kingdom by D Nurske

2009-07-27T18:31:00.002+01:00

In much the same way that D Nurkse’s seventh collection of poems, The Fall (2003), comprised of three sections of grouped poems, his ninth and latest book, The Border Kingdom, is divided into four sequences. The variety of the poems and the uneven length of the sequences, however, suggest that the book’s prevalent theme was not conceived from the outset. Poems, after all, have a useful tendency towards naturally grouping themselves together and forming a coherent whole; different poems extending into one another through recurrent images and themes, as a result of the poet’s preoccupations, interests and concerns. Where The Fall’s sections addressed childhood, married adulthood and illness in old age, then, charting the Blakean journey from innocence to experience and the consequent fraying of our thoughts, beliefs and singular identities, The Border Kingdom’s four groupings of poems approach states of limbo and ambiguity from an assortment of often unusual angles, spanning wars waged from the Biblical to the present and the fractures and fragments left behind, to the legacies of fathers and the complex heritages that they leave their children.

‘Jericho’ opens the book’s first section, ‘The Age of Crusades’, in an intense, if elliptical, burst of imagery. Describing ‘a high window’ where ‘a white curtain knotted against itself / gives a glimpse of the lovers / as they were before the war’, this deceptively simplistic poem depicts the ‘undo[ing] of a mother-of-pearl snap / while a cat perched on the sill / looks down with burning eyes’. Despite Nurkse’s tendency towards the longer, often sequential poem, then, in many ways this short, sparsely rich account of intimacy in a city dominated by conflict sets the tone for the rest of the book: tender, humane and evocative whilst at the same time darkly political and historical, Nurkse’s poetic voice combines felt emotion and level-headed thinking to impressive effect. In ‘Albi’, for instance, another poem in the collection’s opening section, the narrator’s harrowing tale of his being ‘sealed up in a wall’ is related matter-of-factly in precise, conversational lines, but with an eerie feeling that is – as good poetry should be – difficult to describe; emotional and strangely spiritual, yet also markedly impersonal: ‘Then I was the wall itself, / everything the voices long for / and cannot have – the self, / the stone inside the stone’.

It is this captivating style that lends Nurkse’s poetry its sometimes startling originality. This is especially evident in ‘Ben Adan’, an arresting poem in which a seemingly innocent prisoner is instructed by his captor to dig his own grave. Here, it is less the haunting beauty of the poem’s imagery, despite its imaginativeness (‘At thigh-depth I found / a layer of black loam / and a tiny blue snail / that seemed to give off light’) than the disconcerting yet well-pitched tone of the narrator’s voice (‘perhaps in a moment / he will lift me up / and hold me trembling, more scared than I / and more relieved’) that gives the poem its poignancy and delicate weight. This allows the poem to interrogate the reader’s notions of power and captivity (in both a psychological and physical sense) in ways that a more straightforward engagement would fail to hit upon, and Nurkse’s work with human rights organisations have no doubt helped contribute to his producing such accomplished poetry on the matter.

In the book’s second sequence, ‘The Limbo of the Fathers’, there is a continuation of this type of (im)personal political poetry; finding poignancy and wide-reaching revelation in the nuanced specifics of individual lives, rather than looking for history’s lessons on a larger, grander scale. ‘In the Hold’, for example, is an affecting account of the poet’s father leaving Nazi Germany as a stowaway in ‘the stifling void’ of a boat, depicting how he ‘counts the coins in his sack, / the stitches in the gunny weave – / takes his pulse, then having / no more real things, he counts / the members of his family, the chimneys / of his village, all the days / of his life in the old country’. Similarly, the deft specificities of the poet’s memory in ‘Practice’ – recalling his throwing ‘a white Spaldeen / shaped exactly like a baseball […] / all morning at the fence post’ as an extended metaphor for our childhood ‘practicing’ at adulthood – makes for an enjoyable and gently nostalgic, if slightly inconsequential, poem; the poet ‘relieved of a great burden / to see [his] father so clearly, / shivering, gray, stammering to himself, // mincing a clove of garlic / until it was fine and plural / as the gesture itself’.

Unfortunately, The Border Kingdom’s third sequence, ‘The Limbo of the Children’, is less engaging than these earlier poems. This is perhaps odd as the section also contains a handful of the book’s best pieces. Among these is ‘Canaan’, a short lyric on the failures inherent to language which, though bringing little new to our postmodern understanding of drifting, unpredictable signifiers, finds, in both senses, fantastic images to evoke our relationship with the spoken and written word: ‘How the mind wound up the doves / and sent them volleying / over the shepherds’ low fences’. This delight and frustration with the failings of communication is also conjured effectively in ‘The Child’, in which the young narrator describes how ‘no one calls me you. / I am addressed in the third person / as if I were sideways to the world’. It is a shame, then, that these poems sparkle among a sequence which is otherwise littered with numerous narratives reflecting on nature and mountains in particular, which, though often richly descriptive and subtly musical, are too often full of inactive lists that do little more than to describe (albeit atmospheric) landscapes (‘Hitching to Mount Hebron’, for example, or ‘At High Falls’).

This aside, however, when Nurkse hits his stride such writing can begin to evoke the Hopkins of ‘No Worst, There Is None’, and even the Wordsworth of ‘The Prelude’, in its merging of the landscape with the poet’s state of mind. In 'The Border Range’, for instance, the narrator states how: ‘Sometimes we boasted / of the waterfall, the whirlwinds, / the downy soft-pinioned owl / drifting in daylight / with a hole in his voice, / the immense cliffs’, before concluding: ‘And that is all anyone knows / of those years of marriage, / labor, voluntary poverty: / those mountains were perfectly flat / and exist only as a little rip / where the map was folded once too often’. Through taut language and economic use of imagery, this poem succeeds in adopting our relationship with nature as a metaphor for our often difficult relationships with one another, an impressive feat which Nurkse pulls off with considerable skill.

It is satisfying to find, then, that the closing sequence of The Border Kingdom, ‘The Gods’, is the best of the collection; comprising of consistently engaged and engaging poems on the difficult subject of conflict in the contemporary world. The success of these poems often rests on their approaching subject matters from oblique angles: in ‘Late Summer’, for example, an unknown terror grips the narrator who ‘ha[s] to remind [him]self: / this is darkness’, while in ‘Liberation in Winter’, the threat of a bombing is described as ‘maybe just a faux pas between lovers // who lie naked, an inch apart, / in the stepwise shadows of the blind’. Similarly, the fallout of 9/11 is addressed with care and subtlety, imagining ‘children [drawing] the plane, / sticking out their tongues, pressing / hard with crayons, never looking up / as if they’d seen it all their lives’. Here, the towers in the child’s drawing become ‘a huge box’, ‘the fire – an orange flower: / God – a face with round eyes / watching from the margin’, and ‘the fireman in his smudged hat / running with outstretched arms / up a flight of endless steps / that veered suddenly off the page’.Just as the sequence, and collection, closes with the image of ‘round pools, / […] trembl[ing] as if a child swam there’, then, the thought-provoking child’s drawing in ‘After a Bombing’ most starkly suggests an idea that recurrently surfaces throughout this deeply philosophical, deceptively simplistic, and often rewardingly discomfiting collection: namely, that our habitual handle on the world is often staunchly limited, narrow, and thus frequently inadequate, and that greater understanding, even redemption, may often lie in a freer, fuzzier, and more openly imaginative approach to the world.

It is to Nurkse’s credit that he has written a book of poems which expresses this so unprescriptively and effectively, then, and that explores a great deal more besides in diction and syntax well-pitched between ordinary speech and poetic elegance; a collection which is much more, as the narrator of ‘Canaan’ states, than mere ‘signs on the blank page’.

This review originally featured on Eyewear.

Live Poetry in Sheffield

2009-07-23T16:07:00.005+01:00

With the shop’s back room packed and excellent readings from Helen Mort, Chris Jones and Frances Leviston, last week’s poetry event at the Oxfam bookshop on West Street, Sheffield was a modest success. It was a pleasant feeling to be promoting Sheffield poets while also making money for such a worthwhile cause – through a mixture of kind donations on the door and book sales, including Helen Mort’s new tall-lighthouse pamphlet, A Pint for the Ghost.

Her performance included a number of poems from this new collection - eerie and provocative pieces on the ghosts and pubs of Sheffield and Derbyshire, past and present - and a handful from her first, the shape of every box, including an atmospheric poem about Division Street, located only a stone’s throw from the venue. Unsurprisingly, copies of her new pamphlet were quickly snapped up after the reading.

Chris Jones also performed a wide selection of his published poetry to date, from affecting vignettes about his young son from his pamphlet Miniatures, to powerful poems on his time spent as writer-in-residence at a prison, as well as pieces on the themes of family, friends and home, from his first collection The Safe House.

The evening finished with a reading by Frances Leviston, who read a selection of thought-provoking and vivid poems mainly from her first collection, Public Dream, including the meditative ‘I Resolve to Live Chastely’ and ‘Scandinavia’, an unusual love poem entitled ‘Gliss’, and ‘The Fortune Teller’, an update to, and reworking of, Richard Wilbur’s ‘The Mind Reader’. We were also treated to a few new poems, including a short, suggestive lyric, ‘Two Owls’.

I also gave a shortish reading on the night, and since it seems to have become a bit of a feature on UK poetry blogs, here’s my ‘set list’:

1. Crux
2. Sunday
3. Filter
4. Home
5. The River Don
6. Familiar
7. Wednesday
8. Gesleham-on-Stour
9. Itch
10. Hex

Given the success of the night, I hope to help arrange something similar again with Oxfam – though perhaps in a bigger venue than the shop, as that back room can get quite stuffy at times. If I do, it’ll be posted up here closer to the time of course. For now, thanks again to everyone who read, and also to all who attended – a fun night.

Tonight: Oxfam Poetry - Four Sheffield Poets

2009-07-15T08:48:00.001+01:00

Oxfam Poetry Night @ Oxfam Bookshop (West St / Glossop Rd)

featuring four Sheffield poets:
Frances Leviston, Chris Jones, Helen Mort, and Ben Wilkinson

Tonight (Wednesday 15th July), 6.30pm - 9pm

£2.50 donation on the door and free poetry CD

The Mole

2009-07-15T08:33:00.006+01:00

Over at her blog, should you fancy a look, Carrie Etter has kindly featured a poem from The Sparks, as part of a (very) brief tour of blogs I thought I'd do to promote the pamphlet.

The poem is 'The Mole' (hence the photo above), and was first published in the Times Literary Supplement early last year.

Latitude 2009

2009-07-14T14:46:00.005+01:00

Well, it's that time of year again... When those festival goers with exceptional taste head out to the Suffolk countryside to enjoy three days of great music, poetry, literature, cabaret, film and comedy at the wonderful, indefatigable Latitude festival.

Sadly though, I won't be attending this year, and am particularly gutted as the line-up for the Poetry Arena looks at least as strong - if not stronger - than when I was reviewing and blogging on the festival last year and the year before. Tim Turnbull, Tim Wells, Jackie Kay, Simon Armitage, Kathyrn Simmonds, Helen Mort, Caroline Bird, Emily Berry, Andrew Motion, Paul Farley - Latitude attracts some serious poetic talent, and unsurprisingly the tent's audience often spills into the sunshine outside: Armitage was particularly popular on both the Poetry and Literary stages last year, and Daljit Nagra drew a big, midday crowd.

This year, there's also music from the likes of The Pet Shop Boys, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Regina Spektor, Patrick Wolf, Bat for Lashes, Editors, Gossip and Spiritualised, and comedy from Stephen K. Amos, Dave Gorman, Rufus Hound, Jo Brand, Lee Mack, Marcus Brigstocke and Ed Byrne.

As I say, I'm gutted I'm not going. Maybe next year...

Poetry London - Summer 2009

2009-07-14T14:26:00.005+01:00

So I'm reliably informed that the latest issue of Poetry London has been launched, at the Ledbury festival no less, and though I haven't had chance to read a copy yet, it looks like an excellent issue.

New poems from Paul Farley, Heather Phillipson, Jacob Polley, Christopher Horton, Sam Riviere and many more besides. I'm particularly looking forward to seeing two poems in the issue by Mary Jo Bang, whose work I intend to read more of.

The issue also includes poetry reviews by Todd Swift, Helen Mort, Jack Underwood and Katy Evans-Bush, and a vignette of a poem, 'Camouflage', by yours truly. A sample of the poems and features in the issue can be read online.

Mowing

2009-07-09T14:36:00.004+01:00

For months it sits unplugged,
collecting spider webs spun and undone,
while dust complicates sunlight

through the shed’s single window
at the broken egg of dawn. Or
nursing the dregs of blackness

that settle in its gut as you haul it
out onto the lawn, plug it in
or fill it, yank at its ripcord –

the sudden hum of blades
and the patch of mown green,
now glowing. It churns

like a stomach hungry for anything:
leaves, daisies, insects, dogshit;
the sheer weight of things

bulked to a cube inside of it.
Afterwards, the lines of the garden
shimmer like wood grain,

pious tree rings unravelled and planed
down to chair legs. Or the glint
of varnish as you empty the basket

into the brown bin:
the painted toy man of a toy set
or model village, still smiling.

poem by Ben Wilkinson
first published in Brittle Star, issue 17, summer 2007

The Bloody Apprentice

2009-07-08T19:10:00.004+01:00

A friend pointed me to this the other day, and quite funny it is too - footage of the BBC's popular reality show The Apprentice, painstakingly edited so as to make a monkey out of Sugar and its contestants (though they often do a fair job of that themselves). Contains some strong language though, so don't watch if you're easily offended.

And while we're on the subject of The Apprentice - does anyone actually know what job it is that the winner gets? Organising the stationery at Amstrad HQ? Or perhaps researching new areas for Sugar's businesses to expand into - as in Harry Hill's gag about 'Amsstairs' ("No, we don't sell 'amsters, we sell Amsstairs")? Any suggestions welcome.

Maurice Riordan

2009-07-07T09:01:00.003+01:00

Just a quick heads up to those interested - I notice that Faber poet Maurice Riordan's entry on the PoetCasting audio site is now online, including readings of his poems 'Fish', 'Silenus' and the excellent 'Southpaw'. Well worth checking out.

The recording was made on the same afternoon as my own, and along with another Sheffield poet, Chris Jones, whose readings are also now on the site - of the four poems featured, I'd recommend 'Work' in particular. Jones will also be reading at the Oxfam Poetry Night taking place at the Oxfam Bookshop on West St, Sheffield, alongside myself, Helen Mort and Frances Leviston.

Magma 44

2009-06-28T12:06:00.003+01:00

The latest issue of Magma (No. 44, Summer 2009) includes my reviews of Mark Doty's eighth book of poems, Theories and Apparitions, John Agard's Darwin-inspired Clever Backbone, and Rob A Mackenzie's debut collection, The Opposite of Cabbage.

The issue also contains new poems by Alan Buckley, Alison Brackenbury and Sheenagh Pugh, among many other features, including an interview with Jackie Kay (pictured on the issue's cover, above). Find out more here.

Lily Allen Shocks Glastonbury Crowds Dressed As Hyperactive Girl From Hit Children's TV Series Lazy Town

2009-06-28T11:46:00.006+01:00

Above (left): Lily Allen pictured with guitarist and bassist at this year's Glastonbury Festival
Above (right): Lazy Town star Stephanie sporting her trademark garish hair

Five Houses Down

2009-06-25T12:23:00.005+01:00

Praise be to The New Yorker, that most revered of American cultural magazines, and to Paul Muldoon, it's poetry editor, who recently appeared on The Colbert Report, reading his poem 'Tea' and indulging Colbert's gently mocking, wry brand of humour.

Why? Because I've just found a brilliant poem by Christian Wiman on the publication's website, which conjured that instant, wonderful sensation of lifting the top of my head clean off and smashing the frozen sea of daily routine, as Emily Dickinson and Kafka would have it. I seriously encourage you to read it.

And while you're there, take a look at Don Paterson's excellent poem 'Rain', the title piece from his new Faber collection due later this year. That's another which transports you somewhere else in its cinematic sweep - a welcome detour and distraction from whatever work deadlines are looming over you this afternoon. Humorous and seriously thought-provoking - you can't ask for much more than that.

Oxfam Poetry Night - Four Sheffield Poets

2009-06-23T16:10:00.007+01:00

Oxfam Poetry Night @ Oxfam Bookshop (West St / Glossop Rd)

featuring four Sheffield poets:
Frances Leviston, Chris Jones, Helen Mort, and Ben Wilkinson

Wednesday 15th July, 6.30pm - 9pm

£2.50 donation on the door and free poetry CD