You can read my review of Peter Hainsworth and David Robey’s Dante: A Very Short Introduction, OUP, £7.99, pbk, 144pp. by clicking here .

Prue Shaw, Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity; W. W. Norton, 398pp, hbk, £20.00

You can link to this review on the Manchester Review website here.

My feeling is that overall the imaginative pressure of The Stairwell isn’t quite as high as that of earlier books by Longley, including his last, A Hundred Doors. It’s still a remarkable collection that rewards close and repeated attention. The poems grow in the mind both by their own internal resonances and by the way they resonate with the rest of Longley’s work. Immaculate timing and perfect attunement of language make the best of them extraordinarily sensitive registers and transmitters of imaginative experience. Take the start of “Ashes”:

The first creature I meet when I arrive
Is a stoat slipping … Continue Reading