If this is your first visit to Poor Rude Lines, then welcome.
The blog has been in operation since 2012, so there’s plenty of content to dig into.
Listed below, you’ll find:
- My favourite poetry reviews
- The most popular reviews
- Other popular articles.
Personal favourites
Camille Ralphs – After You Were, I Am
It’s exquisitely wrought and breathtakingly beautiful but, like George Herbert’s The Temple, there are no cheap sideshow stunts here. Form and function reanimate the dead and in their fragility and mortality we see ourselves.
Matthew Stewart – Whatever you do, just don’t
There’s such humanity here. Stewart drinks it all in: the political, the familial — and there are no trite little answers. The collection exists in tension, but the tenderness with which Stewart observes life is always affirming. Like Galeano’s Uruguayan footballers, we’re all a motley crew of bookblacks and grocers, but that makes none of us less extraordinary.
Fiona Moore – The Distal Point
Moore’s is a rare gift. We occasionally encounter artists, gatekeepers, who work at the limits of the known, of the utterable. Their work is shamanistic – rooted to experience, woven from the fabric of the universe. Moore would, doubtless contend this quasi-spiritual claptrap but her work achieves this.
Popular reviews
Simon Armitage – The Not Dead
Armitage’s distilled interviews retain the best of the soldiers’ testimony whilst lending their voices a power and gravitas which will, I hope, have us memorializing their sacrifices on the battlefield and their quiet, painful unblooming at home.
Leontia Flynn – Profit and Loss
These poems are a brilliant, true, understated exploration of modern life with a haunting, playful gothic edge. If you’ve ever heard a troubling swish in the night, or discovered the unexpected gifts left by the outgoing tenants, then there is something here for you.
Kae Tempest – Brand New Ancients
[Tempest looks] back, celebrating the values which make the Ancients our brothers and sisters, celebrating the heroism seen everyday in the districts of her beloved south-east London and, thankfully, everywhere.
The trouble with poetry – how we get teaching it wrong
In our secular age people are increasingly turning to poems and song lyrics to mark ritual occasions like weddings and funerals and, viewed like this, it’s possible to argue that poetry has never been more valuable or more relevant to our society. If this is true, then why aren’t teachers and pupils enjoying it more?