Category Archives: Uncategorized

Buy the floating man from Picador Buy the Tallis Scholars’ recording of Allegri’s Miserere Even plumbed through a car radio cassette player, the top C of Allegri’s Miserere stopped me dead. Some music has weight and gravity, sucking you in and, for its duration, it is the world. In ‘Miserere’ from Katharine Towers’ first collectionContinue reading “Katharine Towers – the floating man”

Buy Farmers Cross from Faber The Divine Office, The Breviary, is a book endowed with magical powers. Take a friend of mine, watching his suitcase being turned over in the green channel at Dublin airport: ‘Terribly sorry, father’, said the official, clocking the breviary zipped into the leather covers favoured by the habitual reader, andContinue reading “Bernard O’Donoghue – Farmers Cross”

Buy How Snow Falls from Atlantic Books ‘I Remember My Mother Dying’, the second poem in this collection, is forensic and unflinching. Raine’s couplets, levelled at death and relationships, echo Pope’s gentle ironies but intensified until they possess sledgehammer force. Raine’s presentation of the living (his brother) unsettles the reader: drunkard, braggadocio, prodigal son. AtContinue reading “Craig Raine – How Snow Falls”

No collections of poetry are being given out on World Book Night 2012 – I guess that, once Heaney and Duffy were expended in 2011, nothing was left for this year. In the nation’s psyche, a biography or a novel constitutes a book. World Book Night is designed to promote the industry, like giving ciggiesContinue reading “World Book Night”

Buy Restricted View from Salt Publishing Olivia Cole’s Restricted View explores, amongst other things, the pleasures and frustrations of perspective. ‘Breaking the Ice’, the first poem in the collection, suggests an awkward encounter, where the ice is slipped upon rather than broken, where the barrier between people remains. The collection opens with a quotation fromContinue reading “Olivia Cole – Restricted View”

The plan had been to present a poem, followed by a couple of paragraphs of thoughts. Yes, I confess that I’m an English teacher, but the point of the blog was to respond as a reader, as someone who read this stuff for fun, rather than offering the sort of autopsy that has some studentsContinue reading “Copyright”