Hyper-contemporary literature: brand-new writing
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To poem: dynamic memory in Anthony Joseph’s ‘Sonnets for Albert’
Anthony Joseph’s “Sonnets for Albert” won the 2022 T.S. Eliot Prize, featuring fifty love-themed sonnets with a focus on memory and familial relationships. The poems are evocative rather than elegiac, intertwining personal and cultural memory, creating dynamic “poem-memories” that generate new meaning and understanding.
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The forest of discovery in Jon Fosse’s ‘A Shining’
The 2023 Nobel laureate Jon Fosse inverts Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in his book ‘A Shining’, portraying a journey of confusion and ghostly visions within a dark forest. Unlike Plato’s enlightenment through external light, Fosse suggests a discovery of truth within darkness, paralleling certainty with confusion and using the forest as a metaphorical space…
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Cellular vulnerability in ‘The Magic Border’ by Arlo Parks
Arlo Parks won the Mercury Prize in 2021 for her debut LP and then went on to release another album and a debut book of poetry in 2023. She doesn’t necessarily separate her poetry from her song lyrics. Parks suggests that her writing process is an exploration of self, referring to it as ‘cellular’. Some…
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‘The Outsider’ redux: Nadifa Mohamed’s ‘The Fortune Men
Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men (Viking, 2021) won the Wales Book of the Year in 2022. It is a fictional retelling of the tragic miscarriage of justice of Somali Mahmood Mattan in 1950s Cardiff. In the book, Mattan is executed for the murder of British Jew Violet Volacki, a crime he strenuously denied. While the…
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What’s in a review?: Ruth Ozeki’s ‘The Book of Form and Emptiness’
Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness (Canongate, 2021) won the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction. It tells the story of Benny Oh, a teenager who is negotiating the untimely death of his father, Kenji, and Annabelle, Benny’s mother, who is additionally struggling with her own health and hoarding habits. Benji also hears voices,…
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Mirror mirror: the ‘reverso’ poem in Kim Moore’s ‘All the Men I Never Married’
All night a bird beats its wingsbehind the wall. In the space between roomsit has the quietest scream. (I realise I cannot livewithout desire.) At first I think it’s trappedbehind the wall. Is it another birdthat moves, that seems to fall and rise again?I am hiding somethingin the mirror. In the morningI am searching for…
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