Come and listen to our recently published poetry! Conor Carville and James Peake will read from ‘English Martyrs’ and ‘Reaction Time of Glass’ respectively (both published this autumn) and Peter Robinson will also be reading from ‘Bonjour Mr Inshaw’ (officially published in Jan 2020 but advance copies will be available). Next Thurday – 21st November, 6.30pm in London.
This Saturday 9th November, at 4pm, Claire Dyer, Lesley Saunders and Susan Utting will be performing in the Peter Pears Gallery: a conversation on gender, its complexity, perplexity, its poetry. You can book here.
People are reading our poetry… Two more great reviews, this time in The High Window.
“Penumbra is replete with … vivid, sometimes startling imagery, unexpected linguistic shifts and carefully patterned verbal dynamics…”
Talking about ‘Aeroplane trails at dusk’, Tom Phillips says, ‘This, then, is one tiny example of how Behrens successfully engages in ‘making strange’ the apparently ordinary and in opening up ways to explore the emotional hinterlands – or indeed penumbras – surrounding often minutely observed details.’
And a less effusive but very interesting review of Precarious Lives by James Roderick Burns which makes me want to read Jean’s poems again, more carefully.
“Watkins is an effortless poet of nature, and the intimate, surprising details of the natural world suffuse every comer of the book, so the theme is fitting as well as urgent. ‘Wasps’ – ‘ton-up boys’ with ‘ hostile hum’ – demonstrate in sharp, plangent and witty ways the tragedy of our impact on the world. The poem meanders in a carefully-drunken concrete pattern around the page, as if to demonstrate the insects’ disorientation. ”
But then, he says: ‘This tendency to move away from supple, intricate verse into something more didactic seems to occur most often when the poet has a ‘big message’ to convey.’
Really? I do like a big message. I must read those poems again…
D A Prince gets to the heart of Kate Behrens’ Penumbra in his review in the recently published edition of South, 60.
In this, her third collection from Two Rivers
Press, Behrens concentrates on ‘…
the dead’s/ irreconcilable parts’ in poems
pervaded by grief and loss. This focus
shapes not only the content of the poems
but also the forms and syntax;
single-word sentences demonstrate the
sensation of thin-skinned vulnerability
and the brittle nature of pain. Her lines
are taut, tightly-held and sometimes
cryptic, as personal poems can be. There
are fragments of dreams and broken
scraps of memory, representations of
how the mind attempts to reconstruct the
past and the dead.
…
Behrens’ poems give us one way
to connect with an ever-shifting sense
of loss.
A wonderful review of Precarious Lives by Richard Woolmer in South 60, recently published.
Here is a world seen through the magic
of a poet’s eye, full of vivid description
and leaps of imagination where the “precarious”
is never far away. She can turn
objects, places, memories, art – even a
view from the kitchen sink or a motorway
car park – into a powerful visual/verbal
feast.
…..
She takes us to “the edge of the world”,
paints it with the colours of her imagination,
revels in its life, reminds us of its
uncertainty. She could build bridges out
of butterflies.
