From The Family Album: Patrick Osada, East View
Patrick Osada’s seventh collection opens with a series of poems about his upbringing in Gloucester, with homely memories of a family butcher’s shop, weekday washes in a big tub, including that marvellous mangle moment – “the fat, wet clothes were magically thinned” (‘The Oval, Gloucester’) – and the skills of French polishing, too. These are poems of warmth and affection, where moments of illumina...
17th December 2020
Staying Human: anthology edited by Neil Astley, Bloodaxe
Poetry has had one of its moments during this pandemic. It is generally agreed that more people have been writing it, reading it, turning to it. So it would seem that editor Neil Astley inadvertently picked the right year to publish his latest Bloodaxe anthology, Staying Human, the fourth in the Sta...
10th December 2020
The Estate Agent's Daughter: Rhian Edwards, Seren
This second full collection has been eagerly awaited after the success of Clueless Dogs (Seren, 2012) which won Rhian Edwards the 2013 Wales Book of the Year award and was also shortlisted for the For...
4th December 2020
Her Lost Language: Jenny Mitchell, Indigo Dreams
London-based poet and playwright Jenny Mitchell has had poems broadcast on Radio 4 and BBC2, and has conducted workshops in environments ranging from the Caribbean Women’s Writers Alliance, the NUT Bl...
25th November 2020
Hokusai's Passion: John Sewell, Offa's Press
For me, poetry becomes much more interesting when it is multi-layered, comprising a coalescence of two or more seemingly different yet related subjects in which both poet and reader are left to make t...
12th November 2020
Let battle commence: Wendy Klein, Dempsey & Windle
Wendy Klein was born in the United States but has lived in England for many years. Her great-grandfather fought in the American Civil War, and was a slave-owner “whose beliefs could not have been more...
30th October 2020
The Wednesbury Mangle Theory: Marion Cockin, Offa's Press
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of the word ‘mangle’ in English dates from 1598 when John Florio, in his dictionary A World of Words described it as “a kind of press...
24th October 2020
The Blunted Axe: David Greygoose, Dreich
Followers of David Greygoose will know him from the medieval folk tales in his novel Brunt Boggart. As David Ward he has been the power behind the Liverpool Windows Project, supporting poetry in the c...
17th October 2020
Platinum Blonde: Phoebe Stuckes, Bloodaxe
Phoebe Stuckes is an award-winning poet, four times winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year award, former Barbican Young Poet and Ledbury poetry festival’s young poet in residence in 2015. She als...
10th October 2020
Herd Queen: Di Slaney, Valley Press
Poet, publisher and animal sanctuary founder Di Slaney has an MA in creative writing from Nottingham Trent University and owns Candlestick Press. Her debut pamphlet, Dad’s Slideshow, was published by ...
3rd October 2020
The 3-D Clock: Stephen Claughton, Dempsey & Windle
This short collection of 16 poems is an often entertaining look at an otherwise extremely painful subject that has touched, or will touch, most of our lives. It is quite a feat to write amusing poems ...
26th September 2020
We Could Be Anywhere By Now: Katherine Stansfield, Seren
Novelist and poet Katherine Stansfield grew up in Cornwall and now lives in Cardiff. She teaches for the Open University and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.
The poems in We Could Be Anywhere By No...
19th September 2020
Wild Persistence: Katrina Naomi, Seren
Prize-winning poet, translator and critic Katrina Naomi is the author of two previous full-length collections of poetry and four poetry pamphlets. She has a PhD in creative writing from Goldsmiths an...
12th September 2020
Afternoon Music: Tom Harding, Palewell Press
This review copy landed on my doormat, and within a few minutes I was deep in it, reading one poem after another, unable to put it down. This doesn’t happen to me as often as perhaps it should.
Aft...
6th September 2020
Passport to Here and There: Grace Nichols, Bloodaxe
Grace Nichols was born in Guyana and has lived in Britain since 1977. Her first collection, I is a Long Memoried Woman (1983) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Since then she has had four collections...
25th August 2020
Return by Minor Road: Heidi Williamson, Bloodaxe
In her mid-20s, Heidi Williamson was part of a Scottish community that suffered an inconceivable tragedy, the Dunblane primary school shooting. On 13 March 1996 a gunman entered the school and killed ...
18th August 2020
Fledge: Jonathan Humble, Maytree Press
Jonathan Humble lives in Cumbria, and is an observant cheerleader for the natural world. This meticulously crafted collection is suffused with a love of nature, and of birds in particular. A number of...
31st July 2020
Lure: Alison Lock, Calder Valley Poetry
This collection of poems has been salvaged from the depths of a dramatic, near-fatal accident suffered by the poet Alison Lock three years ago, when she almost drowned and broke her back in seven plac...
24th July 2020
Negotiating Caponata: Carla Scarano D'Antonio, Dempsey & Windle
Carla Scarano D’Antonio grew up and studied in Rome, before moving to England and gaining an MA in creative writing at Lancaster University. She now lives in Surrey, contributing poetry and reviews to...
17th July 2020
Magnetic Field: Simon Armitage, Faber
As a poet reviewing someone else’s poetry, I am acutely aware of how interpretation can be a massively subjective undertaking and as such, possibly at odds with the intentions and motivations driving ...
10th July 2020
Visiting the Minotaur: Claire Williamson, Seren
Processing bereavement and progressing along the difficult path of recovering trauma are the excruciating steps that delineate Clare Williamson’s poetry. Her mother and brother committed suicide and s...
30th June 2020
'Just like a chat down the pub': Luke Wright takes a break - after 100 consecutive online shows
There were times during his 100 consecutive online shows when leading performance poet Luke Wright felt that he “desperately wanted it to end, that it’s all been too much”. Whether he meant lockdown i...
27th June 2020
Poems for the Planet: Mervyn Linford, Littoral Press
Mervyn Linford has been writing poetry and prose for nearly 50 years. He has had work broadcast on local and national radio and has been a featured poet at festivals in Essex and Suffolk. His publicat...
27th June 2020
CoronaVerses: ed. by Janine Booth, Attila the Stockbroker, Roundhead
Remember the start of this pandemic? The panic buying, the looting of toilet rolls? Seems a long time ago. Almost historic. On 18 March activist poet Janine Booth set up a Facebook group called Corona...
20th June 2020
192 Miles with Carla: Robbie Frazer, Dempsey & Windle
An intriguing poetic journey is delineated in 192 Miles with Carla, the debut pamphlet by Robbie Frazer. The 18 poems are unique and diverse and never banal in their imageries and structures. Skilful ...
9th June 2020
Haggards: Elizabeth Rimmer, Red Squirrel Press
Elizabeth Rimmer is the author of two previous collections of poetry from Red Squirrel Press, Wherever We Live Now (2011) and The Territory of Rain (2015). In 2016 she was the Makar for the Federation...
6th June 2020
The Healing Next Time: 'This is poetry about an issue that should concern us all'
Last year Write Out Loud reviewed a collection by Midlands poet Roy McFarlane that we described as "a serious and determined attempt to document in poetry institutional and everyday racism in Britain"...
6th June 2020
Grenade Genie: Thomas McColl, Fly on the Wall Press
Thomas McColl is engaging to meet, a quality that fully comes across in this collection of 25 poems that is deeply sceptical about the internet, kicks against the pricks of bureaucracy, and is laced w...
26th May 2020
Blood Rain: André Mangeot, Seren
I wonder how many of us can remember being taught about oxbow lakes in Geography? Reading the opening poem in this collection brought it all back to me. I can even recall the drawing that our teacher ...
19th May 2020
Litany of a Cardiologist: Denise Bundred, Against The Grain
This pamphlet of 23 poems represents the remarkable poetic distillation of a lifetime’s medical experiences and insights. Denise Bundred trained as a paediatrician in Cape Town and worked as a consult...
12th May 2020
Taking Flight: Aileen Ballantyne, Luath Press
The opening poem in this collection, ‘Full Moon’, should be regarded as an augury for a sequence later in the book. The poet is travelling on a Boeing 777:
I touched my leather rucksack,
...5th May 2020
thirty-one small acts of love and resistance: Steve Pottinger, Ignite Books
Steve Pottinger’s latest collection covers familiar territory for me. Three of the poems are centred on an incident at Wolverhampton Baths which is where I learned to swim and thereby gain sufficient ...
2nd May 2020
From Surrey to Sale, via Wales and Belfast: online open-mic accesses all areas
Hands up who’s missing live, “real” poetry open-mics? How many have taken part in their online equivalents? I dipped my toe in the water last night, joining the fun at Sale Write Out Loud’s second onl...
30th April 2020
These are the Hands: ed. by Deborah Alma and Dr Katie Amiel, Fair Acre Press
This anthology should be read at some time by all those who stand outside their homes on Thursday evenings clapping in support of NHS workers. Which is a lot of us. It wasn’t planned that way, but thi...
21st April 2020
A Second Whisper: Lynne Hjelmgaard, Seren
Poetry can surprise us in many different ways. Reading parts of this collection took me back just short of 50 years. When I was a student, I lived in a part of north London that was close to Golders G...
14th April 2020
No Far Shore: Anne-Marie Fyfe, Seren
The secondary heading of this literary-travel memoir - a combination of prose and poetry - is ‘Charting Unknown Waters’. And although Anne-Marie Fyfe had no thought of viruses when putting together th...
13th April 2020
Luke Wright live in his living room ... but not in front of the children!
Every night since the lockdown leading performance poet Luke Wright has been appearing on Twitter in his living room at 8pm – and last night was his 13th show. And what a treat for those confined to t...
7th April 2020
Pigeon Songs: Eoghan Walls, Seren
Born in Derry, Northern Ireland, Eoghan Walls has lived and taught in Germany, Rwanda and England, where he now lectures in creative writing at Lancaster University. He won an Eric Gregory award in 20...
6th April 2020
Penn Fields: Neil Leadbeater, Littoral Press
This collection contains a number of poems about what you might call unfashionable subjects – Midlands industrialism, a flight of locks through Wolverhampton, other kinds of locks at a museum, half-in...
30th March 2020
Crawling Out and Falling Up: Dónall Dempsey, Vole Books
Dónall Dempsey’s exuberant personality and imagination unfold throughout his latest collection. His poetry is inspired not just by romantic views or existential themes; clocks, baking, songs, animals,...
17th March 2020
Doing the Rounds: Audrey Ardern-Jones, Indigo Dreams
The title of this debut collection refers in one sense to the poet’s career as a nurse specialising in cancer genetics. However, the cover of the book portrays a globe, and Audrey Ardern-Jones’s poems...
15th March 2020
Instead, Let Us Say: Dawn Gorman, Dempsey & Windle
Award-winning poet, arts practitioner and freelance editor Dawn Gorman strongly believes in poetry as a participatory and collaborative medium and devises and runs community poetry events that include...
9th March 2020
Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God: Tony Hoagland, Bloodaxe
The American poet Tony Hoagland died in 2018 aged 64. This Bloodaxe collection can serve as an introduction for those previously unaware of him, and should leave them wanting to read more of his work....
28th February 2020
Anthology of Prose Poetry: eds. Anne Caldwell, Oz Hardwick, Valley Press
Despite what it says on the back cover, prose poetry is hardly at the cutting edge of contemporary writing. As the editors point out in their helpful introduction, it has a history that goes back to t...
18th February 2020
The Shadow Factory: Deborah Harvey, Indigo Dreams
Deborah Harvey’s fourth collection is very readable and accessible, augmented by notes at the back of the book. She has taken a range of themes, from ‘The Good Dogs of Chernobyl’, the first poem, to g...
26th January 2020
The Last Parent: Anne Stewart, Second Light
Bereavement, loss and love interweave in Anne Stewart’s latest collection. Her sequence ‘The Last Parent’, 31 poems that make half of the collection, stands out for its insights into the process of m...
16th January 2020
Sodium 136: Carole Bromley, Calder Valley Poetry
Carole Bromley’s Sodium 136 is her account of being diagnosed and treated for ‘A Benign Cyst Pressing on Optic Nerve’. This is the title of the first poem in this collection, in which we’re thrown str...
10th January 2020
Reel to Reel: David Cooke, Dempsey & Windle
A sequence of poems about the Grimsby fishing industry, from its boom years to its washed-up present, forms the admirable centrepiece of this collection. David Cooke, who lived and worked in Grimsby f...
2nd January 2020
