This review first appeared in Acumen Poetry Magazine in the autumn of 2025. Many thanks to the reviews editor, Andrew Geary, for commissioning it. Vanishing Points, by Lucija Stupica, is a translation from the Slovene (by Andrej Peric, published by Arc Publications in 2024) of the poet’s fourth collection, published in 2019, and is her first book to appear in English.

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond.

This review first appeared in Acumen Poetry Magazine in the autumn of 2025. Many thanks to the reviews editor, Andrew Geary, for commissioning it. As a female writer, talented in a variety of genres, living in a difficult political climate, Hungarian born Krisztina Tóth shares a good deal with Huch (my review of Tim Adès translation of Huch's final book was posted here).

I will be giving a reading for the Fire River Poets based in Taunton, UK, on Thursday 6th November from 19:15 - 22:00. I will be reading in two 15/20 minute slots and there is an opportunity for floor readers if you sign up in advance. More details as they have been given to me are here.... Zoom Link: …

Walking Away, the new poetry pamphlet by Martyn Crucefix, is a tender, heart-breaking farewell to the poet’s mother and father.

This review is an extended version of the one which first appeared in Acumen Poetry Magazine in the autumn of 2025. Many thanks to the reviews editor, Andrew Geary, for commissioning it. Considered by Thomas Mann as ‘the first lady of German letters’ and as the first woman to receive the prestigious Goethe Award (1931), Ricarda Huch (1864-1947) was a literary superstar of her time, yet remains little known in English.

With the sad news of the passing of Tony Harrison, who as a working class poet had a great impact on me during my formative years of writing in the 1980s, I went back to a piece I was commissioned to write for an OUP collection of essays on his writing - both poetic and dramatic - in 1997. The book, …

A little flock of reading dates - replacing the swifts that have left our skies recently - have gathered themselves into something that almost resembles a brief Autumn Reading Tour. Admittedly, not going too far beyond the Greater London area - but to Maidstone and (briefly) Winchester - but of course I'm very happy to be granted these opportunities to read my work.

An edited (shorter) version of this review first appeared in Poetry Salzberg Review in June 2025. Many thanks to the editor, Wolfgang Görtschacher, for commissioning the writing of it. It is as a poet writing in Gaelic that MacNeacail – who died in 2022 – is most well-known, though he would himself provide translations of his work into English, what, in the poem ‘last night’, he refers to as Gaelic’s ‘sister tongue’.

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond.

I was recently tagged in a social media post by someone doing the Sealey Challenge - one poetry book a day for the month of August! I do admire people's stamina. I was tagged because the book of the day for this person - and a mercifully short one at that - turned out to be my own chapbook, published by Hercules Editions back in 2019 under the title…

The shortlist for the eco-poetry/nature poetry Laurel Prize 2025 has just been announced. The finalists – judged this year by the poets Kathleen Jamie (Chair), Daljit Nagra, and the former leader & co-leader, Green Party of England and Wales Caroline Lucas – are (in alphabetical order): Judith Beveridge Tintinnabulum (Giramondo Publishing)JR Carpenter Measures of Weather (Shearsman Books)Carol Watts…

The shortlist for the eco-poetry/nature poetry Laurel Prize 2025 has just been announced. The finalists – judged this year by the poets Kathleen Jamie (Chair), Daljit Nagra, and the former leader & co-leader, Green Party of England and Wales Caroline Lucas – are (in alphabetical order): Judith Beveridge Tintinnabulum (Giramondo Publishing)JR Carpenter Measures of Weather (Shearsman Books)Carol Watts…

An edited (shorter) version of this review first appeared in Poetry Salzberg Review in June 2025. Many thanks to the editor, Wolfgang Görtschacher, for commissioning the writing of it. Tennessee Williams once wrote that ‘memory takes a lot of poetic licence’, but Helen Farish’s memory poems in The Penny Dropping (Bloodaxe Books, 2024) declare from the outset that their intention is to set things (here quoting TS Eliot) ‘in order’, by settling ‘life accounts bravely in the face of now and then, and settle them honestly’ (here quoting Charlotte Bronte’s…

An edited (shorter) version of this review first appeared in Poetry Salzberg Review in June 2025. Many thanks to the editor, Wolfgang Görtschacher, for commissioning the writing of it. As the editor, Grevel Lindop, says in his Introduction to Collusive Strangers: New Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2024), the literary world has not taken enough notice of the remarkable oeuvre of Jeremy Reed.

An edited (shorter) version of this review first appeared in Poetry Salzberg Review in June 2025. Many thanks to the editor, Wolfgang Görtschacher, for commissioning the writing of it. The collection, Rhizodont, was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in 2024. The ‘rhizodont’ which provides the title for Katrina Porteous’ fourth collection (Bloodaxe Books, 2024) is not some niche root-canal dental work, but a large predatory species of fish, which became extinct 310 million years ago.

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond.

The Atlantic recently posted a link to a site which can be used by authors of any stripe to check to see what, if any, of their works have (already) been used by Meta to train AI. For the last few weeks, social media have been full of understandably irate authors who discover this is exactly what has (already) happened. It looks to me as if prose works (fiction and non-fiction) as well as critical writing of all kinds – perhaps more than that ‘difficult’ genre poetry – have particularly fallen victim to the process.

A couple of recent experiences with my own poems being posted/published on-line and kind readers then commenting on them has made me think again about the use of the first-person singular in poems – the use of ‘I’. Perhaps ‘think again’ is the wrong phrase as I have never – or at least not since my far distant teen years – really thought of the ‘I’ appearing in my poems as identical to the biographical, historical, personal ‘me’ tapping this out on a keyboard on a sunny Tuesday morning after the Easter weekend.

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond.