‘All Cornwall Thunders at my Door: a biography of Charles Causley’ by Laurence Green

This is the only complete biography of Charles Causley even now, nearly 20 years after his death and nearly 10 years after this biography of him was published. As he is one of the greatest Cornish poets, and the best Poet Laureate we never had, the paucity of material seems a shame. Especially given the

Review: ‘Thirty Poets Go to the Gym by George Szirtes’ (Candlewick Press, 2018)

There are three reasons for getting hold of this delightful little volume. The first is to enjoy thirty completely fresh, amuse-bouche of George Szirtes’ poetry. His facility with words, rhyme, metre, cadence, assonance, consonance is masterful. This is always so with his poetry. But for this collection he is speaking with the voices of others

Poetry collection: ‘Anything in Turquoise’ by Wendy Klein, from Cinnamon Press

This is a collection in two halves. The first half is material which engages the reader vibrantly in a Jewish household which is both quintessentially American and surviving robustly in Oxford in Britain. The memories of family are put on the page in ways which spoke to me. They were of such everyday, little aspects

Poetry collection by Dorothy Yamamoto – ‘Landscape with a Hundred Bridges’ from Blinking Eye Publishing

I came across Dorothy Yamamoto earlier this year at the excellent Albion Beatnik bookshop in Oxford, where she and Wendy Klein were giving a joint reading. This joining together provided a pleasingly fresh perspective from both poets on issues of family, loss, affection and the world around them. This perspective is possible because both poets