This Time It's Personal
The winter issue of Poetry Review - This Time It’s Personal – is available now.
Poetry Review, now a hundred years old, is full of Christmas cheer thanks to Carol Ann Duffy and Stephen Raw’s panels from the Poet Laureate’s Manchester Carols.
Elsewhere, this issue is brimful of personalities. A remarkable collection of poems about people – from elegy to epithalamium (a lyric ode in honour of a bride and groom) – is followed by an essay and interview section entirely given over to poet-on poet portraits: Anne Stevenson discusses candidly what she feels to be the main themes of her contemporary, Anne Sexton, in an interview with Charlotte Austin. This is followed by an in-depth study of the “rationing of personality” in Don Paterson’s work by Sean O’Brien, and John Kinsella explores the cultural, poetical, musical and personal aspects of Michael Donaghy’s work in the three collections he published before his untimely death.
The section closes with a tribute to Jonathan Barker’s work at the British Council by Wendy Cope, and a chapter from Gwyneth Lewis’s Hospital Odyssey, a verse-novel which undertakes that terrifying journey which is accompanying a loved one through treatment.
As well as the usual range of reviews, from senior American figures to a cosmopolitan range of poets in translation, there is the wonderful ‘Writing Life’ strip by Peter Blegvad, and Ruth O’Callaghan’s account of literary entente in Mongolia.
The winter issue of Poetry Review is a real box of delights that will leave you inspired, informed and spoilt for choice!
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