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Jamie McKendrick’s Drypoint – review

I reviewed this collection for London Grip and you can read my thoughts by clicking here

I discuss one poem in particular detail, the brilliant short-lined reversed sonnet ‘Alternative Anatomy’.

 
Drypoint by Jamie McKendrick
Faber & Faber Ltd
ISBN: 978-0-571-38451-8
£12.99

Kit Fan, The Ink Cloud Reader – review

 

The Ink Cloud Reader is prefaced by an anecdote which imagines a famous Fourth Century AD Chinese calligrapher as a student trying to ‘read’ the clouds of ink in the pond in which he’s made to wash his brush. So the title suggests both the book’s difficulty and its concern with finding meaning and creating beauty in the teeth of the world’s confusion and violence and the inevitability of death. Difficulty comes both from its forms and the nature of its content: straddling public and private experience, it presents both in … Continue Reading