Hannah Lowe’s The Kids and Gerard Woodward’s The Vulture represent strikingly different approaches to poetry and offer complementary pleasures. Their very titles hint at the way in which in one the world is a fundamentally familiar place, felt as such by both poet and reader, and in the other it becomes rather frighteningly and chillingly strange.

The Kids focuses on what are presented as the poet’s own experiences as a teacher in an inner London sixth form college, as a schoolgirl, as a bereaved daughter and as a mother. Addressing us intimately and confidingly, with apparent trust in our ability to … Continue Reading