I’m going to be reviewing Sasha Dugdale’s The Strongbox and a couple of other books for The North. There won’t be space for close reading in the review, so I thought I’d say a few things here.

It’s such a vividly written book, so alive with shifting images, suggestions and associations, that as I read I keep wanting to pause, to pin down the impressions it sets fizzing in my mind. For now I’ll just make a couple of brief points about how styles, scenes and resonances are interwoven on its first page.

Morning light, crazed like a delft tile.

… Continue Reading

You can read my review of Maura Dooley’s fine Five Fifty-Five in the London Grip by clicking here.

You can read my review of this excellent book on the London Grip by clicking here.

88pp, £9.99, Arc Publications, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden OL14 6DA

The idea of love is at the core of The Arrow Maker. Different poems present examples of it in very different senses – love of community or children, kindness to strangers, care for the environment, concern for the suffering. Diverse as these takes on love may seem, we’re encouraged to think about the relationship between them by others that express the idea in more general terms: “St Francis in Winter”, “The Buddha Amit?bha”, and three translations from Dante. Black’s tone is far from didactic, though. His whole approach is … Continue Reading

Pennine Tales by Peter Riley. Calder Valley Poetry. £4.50. ISBN: 978-0-9934973-2-2.

 Peter Riley was really only a name to me until I read this attractively produced booklet from Calder Valley Poetry. Knowing his links to Jeremy Prynne and the “Cambridge School”, I thought he might seem dauntingly experimental. In fact the poems of Pennine Tales are accessible and beautifully written. There are twenty-four, each twelve lines long.

From the start, I loved the polished fluency of the rhythms, with lines slipping seamlessly over line endings except where there’s a precisely calibrated hesitancy or interruption or gathering for emphasis in the flow of … Continue Reading

Maxwell is a dedicated formalist like Polley, and shares his strong sense of time’s attrition.

One poem on this theme struck me as pretty well perfect, so graceful  in expression, so complex and delicate in feeling that I’m afraid to bruise it by analysis:

NO SPECIAL DAY

It has asked to be treated like all the other days.
Not to be beamed at in assembly,
winked at, singled out for praise,
parted for or crowded round, not to be
starred or handed a badge or in obvious ways

made something of. In no uncertain terms
did it say no gifts, no cake, no … Continue Reading

In metre, language, subject matter and genre, the poems of The Havocs are deeply and consciously rooted in many centuries of tradition. One of the finest is a translation / adaptation of “The Ruin” from the Old English Exeter Manuscript. Strikingly successful poems use the techniques of the Old English riddle, while others, such as “Langley Lane” and “The Bridge”, evoke the spirit and style of the Border ballads, or, like “Following the River”, of the dream vision poems so popular in the middle ages. Throughout the book, I found myself enjoying the shapeliness of Polley’s constructions, the virtuosity with … Continue Reading

Hill of Doors is packed with fine individual poems, highly varied in form, theme and style, though continually picking up motifs familiar from Robertson’s earlier work.  Contrasts of landscape heighten the sense of imaginative range. Scottish settings full of water and mist are opposed by luminous Mediterranean scenes and by the barren desert of “Wire”, an outstanding haiku sequence set on the Mexican – US border. These settings draw the poems together, both by similarity and contrast. As different strands develop, they’re often associated with different kinds of landscape. There’s a Christian strand, starting with a lovely meditation on Fra … Continue Reading

I’d last seen Le weekend as a wide-eyed, easily overawed undergraduate soon after the 1968 Paris student riots. Before seeing it last night I was afraid it might seem to have aged badly in the way some other films that excited me at the time have.

I needn’t have worried. I found it deeply absorbing. Obviously it has dated in some ways, but these are mostly superficial, relating to things like clothes, gadgets, car styles and social manner. It’s the fate of all films to date more in this way than books do because films register the minutiae of physical appearance … Continue Reading

I agreed when Peter Hitchens said on Question Time last night that it was a wonderful thing to have beautiful poems and lines of poetry in one’s head. But it’s a big jump from feeling that to supporting the idea of forcing all primary school children to learn poetry by heart.

Hitchens followed his eloquent description of what knowing poems can give us with a surly expression of pity for those who don’t know any, because their hearts are deserts (I can’t remember his exact words but I don’t think I’m misrepresenting his essential meaning). However, comparing his restless anger with … Continue Reading