New Poetry

The season is high summer, the hour is late, the place is one where roots remain deep, but at the same time it grows unrecognisable, steadily absenting itself from human memory. Love holds it all together… Otherwise is the brilliant new pamphlet collection from Sean O’Brien, winner of both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize, and shows one of our leading poets at his best.

Patricia McCarthy, winner of the National Poetry Prize, reveals the rich artistic world of a people under threat in her timely and important sequence, A Ghosting in Ukraine. ‘Anna Akhmatova is only one of the immortals who “ghost” this landscape. She wrote of “the word that causes death’s defeat”. The power of “the word”, which McCarthy’s own country Ireland has bequeathed her, is alive in the winter darkness of Ukraine – and in these poems which dare to grieve and celebrate.’ (Carol Rumens)

In Mappa Mundi, contemplation of an ancient map opens the way to an exploration of love, loss and being that are rooted in place, and intrinsically connected to season and change in the natural world.

Paul O’Prey unsettlingly parallels with today the extended metaphor of the “flat-circle earth” with its dangerous edges, where even “gravity seems suddenly uncertain”.’

Gregory Leadbetter experiments with language, and the resonance of texture and sound between Elizabethan and modern speech, to give an authentic new voice and an intriguing new life to one of Shakespeare’s most enigmatic creations, in Caliban. A sequence of extraordinary poems that are ‘magical, complex and deeply rewarding’ according to novelist Jim Crace.