Chris Beckett welcomes the arrival of a new collection from Julia Bird
books
Carla Scarano D’Antonio considers Jean Harrison’s reflective poetic reminiscences about her life and work in Ghana
James Roderick Burns has no doubts about the importance of Mayakovsky’s epic poem about Lenin in a new Smokestack edition by Rosy Carrick
Merryn Williams is doubly impressed – both by Andy Croft’s finely crafted poetry and by its subject, the unfairly neglected writer and activist, Randall Swingler
Richie McCaffery enjoys a poetry festschrift put together for the 80th birthday of poet, critic and publisher John Lucas
Emma Lee savours new poetry from Matthew Stewart.
Alex Josephy finds Maria McCarthy’s poetic description of the vanishing Kent orchards to be more hopeful than might be imagined
Peter Daniels finds that Philip Fried’s new collection displays wit, inventiveness and erudition to a degree that becomes almost daunting.
Kathryn Daszkiewicz’s new collection has a carefully worked structure and D A Prince enjoys spending time in the company of its closely-linked poems
Transforming Things Into Other Things: Paul McLoughlin examines closely what Matthew Francis has done with a Mediaeval Welsh epic
Wendy Klein admires the craft with which John Mole makes poetry out of the deepest of feelings.
Motherhood is one of the themes in Clare Pollard’s new collection; but the book also broadens out into forceful and compassionate poems about the sorrows of the world into which our children are born.
By Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, poetry reviews, year 2017 1 • Tags: books, Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, poetry