Poetry review – MATE ARIAS: Peter Daniels appreciates Lewis Buxton’s poems exploring some aspects of masculinity
books
Poetry review – ARRIVING BAREFOOTED: Stuart Henson enjoys a collection by Gwen Williams which deals with 19th century attempts to establish a new homeland for the Welsh in Patagonia
Poetry review – THE LIVES WE HAD BEFORE: Rachel Jeffcoat is impressed by the imagery and emotion in Vanessa Napolitano’s third collection
Poetry review – TRAVELLING LIGHT: Roger Elkin admires a rich collection of travel-inspired poems by Alwyn Marriage
Leon Spilliaert. Review by Barbara Lewis. Insomniac and largely self-taught artist Leon Spilliaert is the master of absence, silence and solitude. His best-known evocations of emptiness are coastal scenes in his native Ostend informed by nocturnal wandering through the deserted port.
Poetry review – INTIMATE ARCHITECTURE: Jennifer Johnson admires Tess Jolly’s adroit use of language in poems that explore memory and imagination
Poetry review – DEAD LETTERS: Rosie Johnston admires a collection of elegant and generous poems by Carole Coates
Poetry review – SUBLIME LUNGS: Paul McDonald is impressed by the powerful imagery and inventive language in this collection by Kate Noakes, which deals honestly with chronc illness
Poetry review – THE BAY: Charles Rammelkamp discovers perceptive insights and observations in David Dodd Lee’s new collection
Refik Anadol. Review by Barbara Lewis. Bruges has no need of more tourists and its art hall BRUSK, which opened in May, does not share the ambition of Bilbao’s Guggenheim to put a city on the map.
Poetry review – THE 50, VOLUME 2: Charles Rammelkamp relishes some broad and pretty unsubtle humor in an anthology edited by J.T. Whitehead
BODY AND SOUL : Michael Paul Hogan reviews an impressive and surprising dystopian novel by Andrew Hook
By Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • added recently on London Grip, books, fiction, year 2026