January Reading Roundup
Better late than never! Here’s my reading roundup for January. It was a month in which I did a lot of travelling, driving from Greece to Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine and now Croatia (via Romania again and a brief stop in…
New Poetry Project Explores Mental Health With Tarot Cards
A Q&A with poet Sascha Aurora Akhtar and illustrator John Alexander Arnold about Only Dying Sparkles, a new project combining poetry, illustration and tarot cards.
Review: Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing
"This book is about my life and maybe also your life. And it is about the places we invent. Every story in it is absolutely true."
Bottled Air by Caleb Klaces
I read this book twice in quick succession. It’s only a short collection, 70 pages of generously-spaced poems and a few pages of notes, so it didn’t take long. Interestingly, the two readings were very different. The first time, I…
Test of stamina at Bim Literary Festival, day two
Wow. That was intense. Three hours on a hard bench listening to poetry readings with no break and no refreshments. That’s a real test. Luckily it was an open-air event, on the boardwalk at Hastings (the Barbados one, not the…
Giveaway: “The World’s Wife” by Carol Ann Duffy
I picked up a free copy of this in New Beacon Books – there was a stack of them left over from World Book Night earlier this year. It says inside the back cover that I’m supposed to pass it…
“Crow” by Ted Hughes
I rarely read poetry, but I enjoyed this strange little book by Ted Hughes. It’s full of dark imagery, violence and unexpected humour. The poems read like myths of the origins of the world, except that at the middle of…
“T.S. Eliot” by Peter Ackroyd
I hardly ever read poetry, but for some reason T.S. Eliot’s poetry speaks to me. Perhaps it’s because, like Eliot, I used to work at a bank in the City of London, and the feeling of his poems is the…
Wislawa Szymborska
Just discovered the work of Wislawa Szymborska through a poem reprinted in an old edition of New Internationalist from last year. It was called Psalm and I thought it was a beautiful and humorous poem, perfectly illustrating the absurdity of…