Sweet Shop: New and Selected Poems, 1985 – 2023, by Amit Chaudhuri
Review by Rob Spence In recent years, when reading a book of poems by some acclaimed contemporary poet, I’ve often thought, “wait a minute, this poem is almost exactly the…
Woman Much Missed by Mark Ford
Reviewed by Harriet If you studied poetry at school or university, or just read it for pleasure, you may well recognise this book’s title as a quotation from one of…
The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis
Review by Terence Jagger T S Eliot, when I read The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, was my introduction to modernism as a reluctant and noisily sceptical schoolboy, and…
Jungle Nama: A story of the Sundarban & The Living Mountain: A fable for our times, by Amitav Ghosh
Reviews by Peter Reason On Christmas day my elder son gave me a copy of The Living Mountain, while my younger son a copy of Jungle Nama. They both know…
Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
Review by Anna Hollingsworth War, identity, cultural outsiderness, exploitation, love, family and belonging (or more often not) were at the core of Ocean Vuong’s previous works, his debut poetry collection…
Garden Physic by Sylvia Legris
Review by Anna Hollingsworth Imagine all the life crawling in the undergrowth of a garden. In Garden Physic, Sylvia Legris digs it all up and exposes sediments of emotion, science…
Ephemeron by Fiona Benson
Review by Anna Hollingsworth On the cover of Fiona Benson’s Ephemeron, there is a butterfly trapped in a spider’s web. It’s a melancholy image, where beauty and death come together…
All the Names Given by Raymond Antrobus
Review by Anna Hollingsworth ”your 2am text / lit / like a dog panting / on her screen / hot rattling engine / pile / of oily pity / sticky…
A Vertical Art – Oxford Lectures by Simon Armitage
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth According to a recent Ipsos MORI poll, 90 per cent of people said that they’d read a novel in the last six months. For poetry, however,…
Broken Lights, by Basil Ramsay Anderson
Reviewed by Rob Spence Years ago, I was teaching an undergraduate class on the topic of the poetry of the bard of Orkney, George Mackay Brown. I made a passing…
Anthony Burgess, Collected Poems, edited by Jonathan Mann
Reviewed by Rob Spence Inevitably, when Anthony Burgess is mentioned, people who have heard of him will associate him with the notorious novel and then film A Clockwork Orange. Often…
The Craft of Poetry by Lucy Newlyn
Reviewed by Rob Spence Lucy Newlyn is a intriguing literary figure. She had a career as an Oxford don, publishing well-regarded studies of Romantic poets as well as collections of…
The Stone Age by Jen Hadfield
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton It’s seven years since Jen Hadfield’s last collection, Byssus, came out. This was the point when I really became aware of her work although it was…
Keats by Lucasta Miller
Reviewed by Harriet It may not have escaped your attention that 2021 is the 200th anniversary of the death of John Keats. Yes, on 23 February 1821, the 25-year-old poet…
Dearly by Margaret Atwood & other poetry highlights of 2020
By Rebecca Foster Dearly by Margaret Atwood In her career of more than five decades, Margaret Atwood has produced work in an astounding range of genres: literary fiction, children’s books,…
My Summer Reading: Gawain and The Green Knight – Michael Smith
Members of the Shiny reviewing team share previously published books from their shelves that they’re reading now… Review by Rob Spence Readers of Shiny New Books will be aware of…
Victory For The Slain by Hugh Lofting
Review by Rob Spence When we think of First World War poets, it’s safe to say that Hugh Lofting will not be the first name that springs to mind. The creator…
Rendang by Will Harris
Review by Anna Hollingsworth Will Harris has been described as one of the most important young poets in the UK, and his debut collection more than justifies that epithet. In…
Moder Dy by Roseanne Watt
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton I’ve been following Roseanne Watt for a while via twitter and Instagram with the sense that this was somebody worth keeping an eye on. With that…
The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin, by Geoffrey Hill
Edited by Kenneth Haynes Reviewed by Rob Spence When Geoffrey Hill died in 2016, his monumental Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952 -2012 was still fresh, its astonishing range and scope providing ample testimony…
Under the Rock: The Poetry of a Place by Benjamin Myers
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Benjamin Myers has been having a bit of a moment. In 2017 Bluemoose Books published his fifth novel, The Gallows Pole, which went on to win…
The Flame by Leonard Cohen
Edited by Robert Faggen & Alexandra Pleshoyano Review by Rob Spence For a while in the mid sixties to the early seventies, the singer-songwriter reigned supreme in popular music. Dylan,…
Deaths of the Poets by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts
Review by Harriet The deaths of poets matter to us because they become a lens through which to look at the poems. So say the authors, both poets themselves, in…
William and Dorothy Wordsworth: All in Each Other by Lucy Newlyn
Reviewed by Harriet She who dwells with me, with whom I’ve livedWith such communion, that no place on earthCan ever seem a solitude to me. So wrote William Wordsworth in…
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