Many, even most of the poems in Imtiaz Dharker’s Shadow Reader present some form of suffering, cruelty, oppression or abuse. However, they don’t cloud our impressions of these things by pushing the poet’s own emotions at us; presenting scenes and situations in a gently understanding way, with a polished musicality of sound, they let the beauty or cruelty of what they show speak for itself, in all its subtlety of nuance and overtone. In other ways, they’re highly varied in style and imaginative mode. Some offer what appear to be direct accounts of literal events, letting broader metaphorical or representative … Continue Reading

Even on a quick initial reading, The Strongbox by Sasha Dugdale will take the reader’s imagination in many different directions and offer immediate pleasures of many kinds.

First, it works on a remarkably broad canvas. Drawing on the myth of Troy and related ancient Greek material, it’s epic in scale and effect in a way that develops from the work of Ezra Pound and other Modernist poets. Fragmenting the ancient Troy story, Dugdale rewrites incidents from it in anachronistic ways and mashes them up with incidents from other stories in a range of scenarios. Already in the first section – ‘Anatomy … Continue Reading