From its title, INSTANT-fLEX 718, Phillipson’s collection is both familiar and strange. Photography is heavily evoked: Polaroid manufacture the archetypal instant and Rolleiflex, by contrast, are synonymous with studios. The collection too achieves casual spontaneity and cerebrality. It’s a sequence…
The biography on Daljit Nagra’s website lists several people who, through teaching and mentorship, have been influential on his work. What is clear from reading the biography is that Nagra took a long time in assembling the manuscript. This care…
In a recent anthology of essays on poetic craft, Helen Mort made the following assertion, in a short essay on the gestation of her poem ‘Beauty’: ‘I don’t write my best poems when I’m sitting at my desk, but when…
While it is clear that the poetic mode is suited to the exploration of sonic affect, what has become unclear in recent decades, perhaps because of the fragmentation of poetry into separate genres, is the place of narrative affect in…
Hannah Lowe’s Chick is a refreshing take on the elegiac mode since the poems express not just a longing for the deceased to be restored to life but also a longing to have known him better. In the book the…
In his lecture on Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Nick Mount figures the lyric poem as an attempt to ‘stop time’; to bring a moment into heightened focus that it might be better dealt with. It seems apt to begin a review…
Twenty Exciting Voices for the Future
