was born in Drogheda in 1966. He studied science and holds an MA in Creative Writing (Lancaster University). Widely published, he has read as far afield as Russia and India. In 2000 he won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. His first collection, Sailing to Hokkaido was published by Worple Press (2001). He has been Director of [...]
lives in Paris. She is the translator of works by Apollinaire, Ponge, Jacques Roubaud and Hélène Cixous, whose Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saintwas published by Columbia University Press in 2004. The recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts Emerging Writer Grant, her poems have appeared in Ambit, Canadian Literature, Poetry(Chicago), [...]
John Ruskin, author, art critic, architect, social commentator and eminent Victorian died 100 years ago this year. A nationwide programme of events marking this centenary is well underway including a major exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London. RUSKIN ALPHABET provides a unique insight into Ruskin’s life, works and loves. Entries range from Art to [...]
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One of the obvious pleasures of reading translations is the discovery of unfamiliar poets. Another is an encounter with modes and manners of poetry dfferent from your own and most of your contemporaries. For example, many of the poets in Peter Robinson’s The Great Friend are simply quieter and more inclined to the [...]
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Clive Wilmer’s first book since his selected Poems of 1995 is as seamlessly constructed as the poems themselves. It includes the sonnet “A Baroque Concerto”: which could be a subtitle for the entire collection: DOl only is Wilmer’s style: cool, formal, crisp and energetic, but he divides the volume into three eonl lasting [...]
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More substantial than the average pamphlet but slighter, at thirty-two poems, than most books, Peter Carpenter’s first publication has an exploratory feel that both intrigues and rewards. This derives partly from the range of tones and styles:
Carpenter can adopt a voice of curious, metaphysical inquiry akin to John Burnside’s, or a subdued, elegiac [...]
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Blake, summoning Milton to Felpham’s Vale, envisioned ‘Realms! Of terror &- mild moony lustre in soft sexual delusions’. Starlight on that ancient ditch, the English Channel. A new place humours a shifty glaze. Eyes bruised by life in the city watch the waves. News from elsewhere is too loud, in the drag of [...]
NEEDS SORTING OUT
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The opening poem of Joseph Woods’s Bearings suggests the heartland of his new book will be “the middle country [ ... ] alternative routes -/ Athy, Stradbally and Abbeyleix … ” (Su rv eying the Midlands). But this is a poetry of transition rather than place: o~ “ig¬nition and the shudder [...]
