by Kate Birch | Sep 11, 2026 | Reviews
This is a book about noticing. All poems are about noticing, of course, but Andrew McDonnell takes it to a whole new level. He really sees. Whether it’s trained on the field mouse disturbed by a farmworker’s boot, the patio behind a bar, or the schoolmate...
by Kate Birch | Aug 31, 2026 | Reviews
With a collection titled Memento Mori, you’d expect poems that dwell solemnly on death. Gareth Writer-Davies certainly keeps mortality in view, but this collection is distinguished by its insistence that death is encountered, not as an abstraction, but through...
by Kate Birch | Aug 21, 2026 | Reviews
The poems in Jennie E. Owen’s The Horses Still Run (Dragon Fly Eleven, 2024) were imbued with an ambient fear – a low, persistent hum beneath the surface, an unease with a world out of step, both ecologically and socially. Fear remains central in...
by Kate Birch | Aug 12, 2026 | Reviews
Maybe it is happiness / mistranslated. This book quietly rearranged what I thought poetry was for. What I initially mistook for simplicity in Sluman’s clear and rhythmic verse I later realised was an embodiment of endurance. Pain Songs (Nine Arches Press) is a...
by Kate Birch | Jul 6, 2026 | Reviews
A poem by Graeme Ryan Artwork by Georgina King This is such a generous book – the very first things the reader notices are its large square size, and its glowing colours. There is a palpable sense of successful collaboration between poet and artist going on here. The...
by Zakia Carpenter-Hall | Jun 17, 2026 | Reviews, Uncategorized
When Karen McCarthy Woolf begins Unsafe with an epigraph from Romantic poet John Clare, the son of a farmer who witnessed the rights to the countryside transfer from common people to private landowners, we are promised a grapple with the...
