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Buy Here, Bullet from Amazon.co.uk It was the embedded reporters who grabbed my attention during Operation Iraqi Freedom and its aftermath. Evan Wright’s Generation Kill, an insight into equipment shortages and poor leadership at every level was compelling but polemical, with former members of 1st Recon distancing themselves from his presentation of their officers inContinue reading “Songs of Innocence and Experience – Brian Turner’s Here Bullet”

Buy Nocturne in Chrome and Sunset Yellow from Salt Forget Eliot’s crowd of commuters flowing over London Bridge. Today’s city can provide an intense rush hour experience at any time of day or night and especially in this Olympic summer, when the people on London’s streets and in her tube network will cease to beContinue reading “The smell of the underground – Tobias Hill’s Nocturne in Chrome and Sunset Yellow”

Buy Memorial from Faber and Faber Names assume epic proportions when listed. The Roman Catholic church’s First Eucharistic Prayer seduces with its exotic incantations, the priest intoning the names of the saints through a haze of incense: Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus. In the opening pages of Memorial, Oswald presents her reader withContinue reading “Alice Oswald’s Memorial”

Buy The Other Side of Glass from the Cinnamon Press The heft of the fountain pen really does deliver the tactile pleasures Seamus Heaney refers to in Digging. Idealistically, naïvely, I had presumed that this thing of beauty, coupled with paper and ink worthy of Albus Dumbledore, would coax a few friends out of the twenty-firstContinue reading “Through a glass, darkly – Gail Ashton’s The Other Side of Glass”

Buy Logic and the Heart from Two Rivers Press Being There, the second poem in the collection, is a horrifying remix of The Twits crossed with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The dastardly villains of Roald Dahl‘s revenge fantasy are duped into standing on their heads, where they are glued to the floor. There theyContinue reading “A terrible case of the shrinks – AF Harrold’s Logic and the Heart”

  Buy Profit and Loss from Cape Poetry There is something uncanny about houses. Especially other people’s and especially shared ones. A few years ago I stayed with a friend, the curate in a Roman Catholic parish. The priests were accommodated in a large communal house, and my bedroom adjoined the Parish Priest’s. The firstContinue reading “The vibrator in the drawer – Leontia Flynn’s Profit and Loss”

Buy Of Mutability from Faber and Faber Even buildings built on the solid rock of the Eternal City sink with time. Hike up the Lateran hill and you’ll pass St Clement’s, where steps sunk into the cobbles deliver you to its door. Below the floor is the original church and, below this, you hit Roman streetContinue reading “Shifting Sands: Jo Shapcott’s Of Mutability”

Buy Family Values from Faber and Faber I’ve seen someone recoil from Wendy Cope’s Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis as if it were Harry Potter’s The Monster Book of Monsters. The poem responsible was Tich Miller, a tragic exploration of being picked last for PE and wearing pebble-lensed glasses. Cope has an undeserved reputation asContinue reading “Wendy Cope – Family Values”

Buy The Sonnets for iPad I’ve been tidying the bookshelves today, flicking through my collection and finding enclosures that raise a smile and prick the memory. Even something as ephemeral as a receipt can help you to remember who and where you were when you bought a book. Annotations and highlighting are persistent. Okay, theyContinue reading “Shakespeare’s Sonnets – Faber and Faber – Arden – Touch Press”

I selected this post to be featured on my blog’s page at Poetry Blogs. Buy Love’s Bonfire direct from Faber ‘It all depends on your point of view / but from mine – and I know that men / can mistake colours and shades / – from mine the new suspen- / sion bridge atContinue reading “Tom Paulin – Love’s Bonfire”