Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Jaguar: Selected Poems is a very substantial volume bringing together work from her three collections published in Australia. Its sumptuous production chimes happily with the style of her writing: culturally sophisticated and highly intelligent as she clearly is, it’s above all the seemingly effortless sensuous evocativeness of her work that makes an impression from the beginning. Bloodaxe’s generous spacing and the poet’s fine rhythmic sense allow these impressions to flower in the mind.

‘Exhaustion’, from Aria, the first collection represented here, can illustrate the physicality of Holland-Batt’s writing at the basic level of literal description:

One afternoon … Continue Reading

I’ve been dipping into Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells’s All the Sonnets of Shakespeare. As ever, I find this one particularly gripping:

……….How like a winter hath my absence been
……….From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
……….What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
……….What old December’s bareness everywhere!
……….And yet this time remov’d was summer’s time,
……….The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
……….Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
……….Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:
……….Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me
……….But hope … Continue Reading

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

The poems in Hasan Alizadeh’s House Arrest are translated and introduced by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould. What I got out of them was above all streams of vivid and expressive images. Like Fan in The Ink Cloud Reader, Alizadeh weaves together strands from different cultural traditions. Some of his poems relate to Iranian public life, some to the Old and New Testaments or Greek and Roman mythology, some apparently to the personal experience of the poet himself. The introduction tells us that he started as a short story writer. His poems usually do involve story but their … Continue Reading

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

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

I’ve written several poems in an English approximation to Sapphic stanzas. I think the most successful so far is an ecological poem published in Acumen. You can read it by clicking here https://acumen-poetry.co.uk/edmund-prestwich/

For those who don’t know what the Sapphic stanza is, it’s a form strongly associated with and perhaps invented by the Archaic Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos. Greek poets composed in long and short syllables. English poets writing Sapphics almost invariably replace these longs and shorts with stressed and unstressed syllables. The Sapphic stanza then consists of four lines, three of eleven syllables and one of five. … Continue Reading

A Meditation in Time of War

For one throb of the artery,
While on that old grey stone I sat
Under the old wind-broken tree,
I knew that One is animate,
Mankind inanimate phantasy.

These thoughts may be too trivial or obvious to bother putting down, but on my morning walk I was thinking about the strange way this poem clings to the memory and imagination. Perhaps interestingly, when I got home I found I’d misremembered it – I’d left out line three. Now, I wouldn’t swear that it wouldn’t be a better poem without it, old wind-broken trees being something of … Continue Reading

The first stanza of Yeats’ ‘To a Shade’ ran round my head on my walk this morning (I’d mentioned it in an email to a friend yesterday). Here are the lines I was thinking of:

If you have revisited the town, thin Shade,
Whether to look upon your monument
(I wonder if the builder has been paid)
Or happier-thoughted when the day is spent
To drink of that salt breath out of the sea
When grey gulls flit about instead of men,
And the gaunt houses put on majesty …

It came to mind in the email as just one example of Yeats’ wonderful gift for … Continue Reading

You can link to my London Grip review of Martha Kapos’s book with its brilliant and startlingly original images by clicking here.