Tag: poetry
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Dancing the night away: Joelle Taylor’s ‘C+nto & Othered Poems’
Joelle Taylor’s C+nto & Othered Poems (The Westbourne Press, 2021) won the 2022 T.S. Eliot Prize. It offers a searing history of butch culture in the 1980s and after, with both tragedy, epiphany, and liberation tracking across its 121 pages. It is a collection that stores tragedy at its core, especially in the magisterial scene…
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Top 5 blogs of 2020
The new year will soon be heralded by new blogs from me. But for now, here’s a list of my Top 5 blogs of 2020 according to views. Apart from anything else, the list provides an interesting snapshot of last year’s popular and thought-provoking books … Enjoy, and thanks for reading this blog in 2020!…
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‘Judge for Yourself: Reading Hyper-contemporary literature and book prize shortlists’
‘Judge for Yourself’ is published on 5 October 2020.
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Pre-reading and re-reading Michael Longley’s ‘The Candlelight Master’
As I read the contents of Michael Longley’s ‘The Candlelight Master’, two things struck me. First, that I was pre-reading the poems by virtue of their mapping in the contents. Second, that I was pre-reading the contents by virtue of my prior knowledge of Longley’s poetry. This blog is about the first of these.
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Two families, alike in dignity: Christina Thatcher’s ‘How to Carry Fire’
Christina Thatcher’s How to Carry Fire (Parthian, 2020) is her second collection of poetry. It’s a fierce, impassioned, and (at times) scary collection that details the persona’s two families: her US family (mother, father, brother) beset by a range of tragedies, and her newly-forming Welsh family consisting of the persona and her husband. The literary…
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(Post-)postmodernist elegy: Stephen Sexton’s ‘If All the World and Love Were Young’
Stephen Sexton’s If All The World and Love Were Young (Penguin, 2019) has proven phenomenally successful, having won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and being shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. And yet, it is not an easy poetry collection, proving both difficult in terms of its style and allusive references, and…