On Tuesday 22nd October a fantastic line-up of poets will be reading at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford. The evening has been designed to appeal not only to poetry regulars but also to people who’ve never been to a poetry reading before – so if you’re even half-tempted by the opportunity to hear some of the best contemporary poets (while enjoying a drink or two), please come along. Continue reading
Author Archives: Gareth Prior
Living Myths: Jemma L King
In weaker moments it’s tempting to think of contemporary poetry in two unequal clusters: the dominant “poetry of anecdote” (praised in spite or because of its lack of magic) and the real thing. Jemma L King‘s debut collection is the real thing. Continue reading
Balance, intensity and complexity: Matthew Stewart
Wine is essentially indescribable. You don’t have to be a poet or qualified in the wine trade to realize this, but if you happen to be both then it’s unignorable. You can describe how a wine is made; you can (with training and practice) describe the structural and qualitative factors that distinguish one wine from another or allow it to command a particular price-point; you can explain how a wine makes you feel or the memories it evokes. But you can’t describe the thing itself. Continue reading
In a wingflap above me: Seamus Heaney
This weekend it’s been hard to avoid comparisons between Seamus Heaney (who sadly died on Friday) and WB Yeats. Both were Irish poets who won the Nobel Prize for Literature; both were well-known beyond the autolytic world of contemporary poetry; and both cast a long shadow over the writers who came after them. Continue reading
Future Remnants: Frances Leviston’s “Reconstruction”
Radio 4 introduced me to Frances Leviston’s work in early 2008. Over the course of a week The Today Programme were broadcasting a poem per day from each of the TS Eliot prize shortlist. After three lines of Leviston’s “I Resolve to Live Chastely” I’d resolved to buy her book. It was an extraordinary poem, and Public Dream was one of the poetic highlights of 2007/8 – a debut that could more than hold its own against a strong TS Eliot shortlist including Sean O’Brien’s The Drowned Book and Fiona Sampson’s Common Prayer. Later that year I met my wife for the first time; we both owned a copy of Public Dream and spent one of our earliest dinners together enthusing about how good it is. Continue reading
Not Translated from the Chinese
Several years ago on a work trip I got into an intense discussion about Chinese poetry with my Senior Vice President in an Italian restaurant just outside Mannheim (which is as good a place as any for a Mandarin-speaking American and an Anglo-Welsh poet to trade theories of translation). I know a grand total of five Chinese words (all of them related to spicy food) but by the end of the evening I was hooked – not just on classical Chinese poetry, but on a subversive view of translation that has implications for how we write original poetry in English. Continue reading
In Praise of Pamphlets
From one perspective, contemporary poetry in the UK revolves around a single dominant model: the 60-page slim volume. Poets spend their early careers building up to that “breakthrough” first collection, and the successful ones continue in 60-page increments for the rest of their careers (punctuated by the occasional Selected or Collected to roll-up previous books). In this model, the <30 page pamphlet is an interim step between placing single poems in magazines and achieving 60-page legitimacy. The good poems from a pamphlet will be republished in a poet’s first full collection; the bad will be quietly forgotten. Continue reading
A few days in Yeats country
I’ve had a persistent Yeats obsession since I was about sixteen. Over the past two decades I’ve come back to his poems again and again, been involved in three (varyingly successful) productions of his plays, and amassed enough books by or about him to cause a fair amount of the shelf-space problem in our flat. But in that same two decades I hadn’t visited Sligo – or even Ireland – until last week, when my wife’s extended family converged on Rosses Point for a 90-strong reunion. Continue reading
Making the Familiar Strange: Claire Trévien
It’s a rare joy to stumble across a poem by a new poet that’s so good you order their book straightaway. In this case the poem was “Whales” by Claire Trévien on Josephine Corcoran’s excellent blog And Other Poems. A few days later my copy of Trévien’s The Shipwrecked House arrived. It didn’t disappoint. Continue reading
Understanding Poetry #5: Metrics
Metrics (the language of poetic rhythm) can add rich new layers to our understanding of poetry. It’s also one of the chief reasons people believe poetry is difficult. Start talking about iambic pentameter or dactylic trimeter and you’ll often reduce a room full of enthusiastic readers to a room full of bored poetry-phobics.
At the heart of this is the mistaken belief that you need to know about metrics to appreciate poetry. Continue reading