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An anthology which claims to showcase the poetry of a generation, rather than poetry of a particular theme or genre, ought to show diversity. Therefore the sense of consistency within The Salt Book of Younger Poets is a double-edged sword; it ought to, an...
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Kevin Young has come to a unique prominence among his generation of poets. His versatility, innate musicality, scholarly vigor, and uncommon popularity make him a poet of quite some reach and influence. Throughout his rather large, unified collections, Yo...
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‘I wanted to see what a fortunate life would produce.’ So Kay Ryan has remarked of a poetic career which, after a slow start, has won her many garlands, including a laureateship and a Pulitzer Prize. Her deeply attractive work disproves the claim that...
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The ochre-coloured farmhouse at Gort Athaig doesn't need much enhancing; but there's a story too. 'Menagerie' It's not just that Bernard O'Donoghue doesn't like to insist on the poetic significance of his subject-matter – he's out-and-out self-depreca...
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‘No Idiocy of Quietude’:
Landscapes of the Edge In his poem ‘To the Snipe’, John Clare salutes that small brown wader’s knack of going about its business far from the haunts of men. In its secluded nests: Security pervades From year to year,Pla...
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‘What makes a person a bore in conversation?’ asks Michael Donaghy in the course of propounding his five rules for the newly enrolled poet: ‘Droning on about himself? Preaching? Telling you what to think? All these things make for boring poetry too...
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Night is David Harsent's tenth collection of poems; his first since Legion, which won the Forward Prize in 2005 for its anguished, ambiguous war poetry. The new book begins before it's expected to, a short, untitled lyric preceding the acknowledgements an...
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Taller When Prone is the second collection of poems from Les Murray since the publication of his Collected Poems by Black Inc in 2002 in Australia, and Carcanet in 2003 in the UK. As in the last book, The Biplane Houses, the quality of sprawl seems to hav...
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Corrupt to MaggotsA collage of bones, greasy feathers and florescent debris recreates the form of a dead bird on the cover of Muldoon's rich and grim new book of poems, Maggot. It's a substantial collection, which draws together the Sylph pamphlet When th...
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This is Adam O’Riordan’s first full-length collection but his name may already be familiar. A fair few of the poems printed here have previously found their way into pamphlets, anthologies and magazines, he has picked up a couple of prizes, and he co-...
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By this stage, the verdict on Seamus Heaney’s latest and now Forward-prize-winning collection Human Chain has been reached; most of the reviews are in and all of Heaney’s reviewers can be heard singing exultantly from the same hymn-sheet. In Nick Lair...
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Patrick McGuinness’s fine debut collection, The Canals of Mars (2004), was just that: a collection. Its poems explored his complex background and shifting allegiances – McGuinness was born in Tunisia to a Belgian and Newcastle Irish family, and now li...
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The modish packaging of John Stammers’ latest collection provides an excellent indication of the style of poetry that lies inside. The title Interior Night invokes the conventions of screenwriting, while the same scene-heading ‘Interior: Night’ is t...
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In this, Derek Mahon's third collection since his Collected Poems (1999), he seeks to give contemporary moments more final shapes, but there is a sense of ancient ideas being made new: it is a poetry of metempsychosis. In James Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bl...
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Like many aphorisms, the line by William Blake which gives Christopher Ricks the title of his new book, "Opposition is true Friendship", is more easily quoted than thought through, and more easily thought through than put into practice. With poets – an...
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Although she herself complains self-deprecatingly in her letters that she is merely an iambic ‘umpty-um’ poet, Elizabeth Bishop scholars like to talk about her frequent drops into ‘prose-rhythm’. Victorian literary criticism took prose-rhythm seri...
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Now that his Collected Poems 1956-1987 are in the Library of America, John Ashbery can rejoice in having become a classic author without having had to die for the privilege. For all that, much of Ashbery’s recent verse has been essential, and very...
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The delicate, at times exquisite, poems in John Glenday’s third collection, Grain, emit a kind of twilit radiance. They tend to occupy an emotional space “between the last beam of last night’s dark and the deep, grey first light of today.” While ...
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Glyn Maxwell’s comment on the blurb of Carrie Etter’s The Tethers announces that this debut collection is “sorrowing, glad, graceful”. I did not feel sorrow being induced by these poems; there was a sorrow in the content of some of th...
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Some poets are more-ish - the more of their poems you read, the more you want to read. Thus it is with the American poet Billy Collins. There’s a quiet, studied elegance to his poetry, and a wit that sneakily trips you up because you’ve forgotten to l...
