Christmas is coming
IN HIS FIFTH COLLECTION of poems, Chris Emery explores the nature of wonder in its various forms of awe, reflection and the marvellous. The poems range from the absurd to the historical, the comic and fantastical – dropping us into stories and places we never quite expect; often viewing the everyday through a surprising lens…...
Origins
I LIKE ORIGIN STORIES, especially how a writer came into their powers. Whose life was swept away with a memo from Personnel. How that GP’s news became a license to write stories about divorce. Filthy jobs and warehouse nights. Squats and baggies and needles. That sort of thing. Of course, for some it was all...
Beyond language
Indeterminate Inflorescence is a collection of aphorisms on poetry-writing taken from the creative writing lectures of Lee Seong-bok, one of South Korea’s most prominent living poets. These 470 meditations, collected by his students, are evocative micro-poems in their own right. Some express ideas at once familiar and breathtakingly new – truths we could sense but not put...
Vial
I was loading the dishwasher when the clinic rang.‘I don’t know how to say this,’ she said, which seemed a strange opening sentence for a medical professional,‘… but did you use a sperm donor three years ago? Vial 2360?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. I didn’t particularly like thinking about the donor. It wasn’t something I thought...
From Still City: Diary of an Invasion
Still City, Oksana Maksymchuk’s debut poetry collection in English, reflects life in the wake of extreme and unpredictable violence. Drawing on sources including social media, news coverage, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication and official documents, Maksymchuk tells the shared experience of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “By calling it...
All You Have to Do Is Care
Salena Godden’s latest poetry collection With Love, Grief and Fury gives an ample and elemental display of her deepest passions. Filled with the vulnerability, rage and dismay that define contemporary living, it also delivers a stirring dose of inspiration, hope and empathy. Personal and political, the subjects range from civil liberties, human rights, love and...
from Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit
When I started writing the poems in Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit, it had been four years since my first IVF appointment. I wrote the collection over the following two years, not knowing what the end would be; I’d aimed to finish the book by winter 2022, realising I might be pregnant by then,...
A semblance of order
Ana Sampson’s latest poetry anthology Gods and Monsters, illustrated by Chris Riddell and with a foreword by Natalie Haynes, draws together classic and brand-new mythological poems from around the world. With retellings and reimaginings of Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Norse, Celtic, Aztec, Japanese and Inuit myths, it includes poems from Neil Gaiman, W.B. Yeats, Kae Tempest,...
from The Dogs
This book came about from an encounter. Every day for over ten years, I passed a dog tethered in a yard on Low Lane near where I lived. He was guarding a pile of scrap metal. His only shelter was a corrugated sheet. He had a bowl of rainwater and his leash allowed him little...
from A Change in the Air
In Jane Clarke’s third poetry collection A Change in the Air, voices of the past and present reverberate with courage and resilience in the face of poverty, prejudice, war and exile and the everyday losses of living. Across six sequences, these intimate poems accrue power and resonance in what is essentially a book of love...
Riots, rhymes and reason
I am often asked why I started to write poetry. The answer is that my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences of the black youth of my generation, coming of age in a racist society. Some of my early work dealt with fratricidal violence and internecine warfare, not too dissimilar...
Light in a world of darkness
In 2013, Icelanders voted for the most beautiful word in their language. They chose a nine-letter one, the job title of a healthcare worker, the Icelandic term for midwife: ljósmóðir. In its reasoning, the jury stated that the word was a composite of the two most beautiful words: móðir, meaning mother, and ljós which means light. Although I had two...
