Leontia Flynn & Zoë Skoulding

My critical perspectives of Leontia Flynn and Zoë Skoulding are now up on the British Council's Contemporary Writers website, and having recently completed reviews of Glyn Maxwell's Hide Now and Colette Bryce's new collection, Self-Portrait in the Dark, these will appear in Stand magazine soon - current issue features new poems by Katy Evans-Bush and Ian Duhig.

Pomegranate meets PoetCasting

There's a new feature on the PoetCasting website today, which, for those not in the know, is a varied, interesting and always-growing collection of poets reading their work, put together by the enterprising Alex Pryce.

The new feature includes 18 poets who've previously been published in Pomegranate, an online poetry mag which publishes work by poets under 30, edited by a dedicated team of previous Foyles' Young Poet of the Year winners. For each poet there are two recordings - one of a poem which previously appeared in the mag, one of a new piece - and among the contributors (as chosen by Pryce and the mag's editors) are talented young poets including Claire Askew, James Midgley, George Ttoouli and Martha Sprackland. I'm also featured with the latter, reading a short sonnet and one of the poems from my tall-lighthouse pamphlet, The Sparks. Handily, there are also pdf docs of the recorded poems so you can enjoy them on the page while you listen to them, should you be so inclined.

Worth checking out, anyhow. And while you're there, have a browse of the other poets that've appeared reading on PoetCasting - plenty of interesting writers, established and new, including Alison Brackenbury, Tom Chivers, Matt Merritt, Joe Dunthorne, Leontia Flynn, Andrew Philip, Fiona Sampson and Roddy Lumsden, to name but a few.

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Emil Cioran

'This is how I recognise an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. Valéry and Stefan George leave us where we picked them up, or else make us more demanding on the formal level of the mind: they are geniuses we have no need of, they are merely artists. But a Shelley, a Baudelaire, but a Rilke intervene in the deepest part of our organism which annexes them as it would a vice. In their vicinity, a body is fortified, then weakens and disintegrates. For the poet is an agent of destruction, a virus, a disguised disease and the gravest danger, though a wonderfully vague one, for our red corpuscles. To live around him is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears ...'

- from 'The Parasite of Poets',

in A Short History of Decay

by Emil Cioran

Magma 44

The latest issue of Magma (No. 44, Summer 2009) includes my reviews of Mark Doty's eighth book of poems, Theories and Apparitions, John Agard's Darwin-inspired Clever Backbone, and Rob A Mackenzie's debut collection, The Opposite of Cabbage.

The issue also contains new poems by Alan Buckley, Alison Brackenbury and Sheenagh Pugh, among many other features, including an interview with Jackie Kay (pictured on the issue's cover, above). Find out more here.

Nick Laird wins Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize

Good to see that Northern Irish poet and novelist Nick Laird has won the 2008 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his second collection of poems, On Purpose, published by Faber in 2007.

The award - given alternately each year to a work of prose or verse - was judged by poets Jo Shapcott and Michael Longley, and Sam Leith, literary editor of the Daily Telegraph.

It puts Laird on a distinguished list of previous winners, including Seamus Heaney, Hugo Williams, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, Don Paterson and Michael Hofmann.

Having enjoyed and reviewed the collection for the Winter 2007/08 edition of Irish literary journal The Stinging Fly, I recommend it to readers unfamiliar with Laird's work, as well as his first collection, To a Fault. Here's an excerpt from my review of On Purpose:

What is most impressive about On Purpose, however, is Laird’s charting of the loose and difficult territory of the existential crisis between our desire to control our lives and act with certainty and conviction, as set against the possibilities and inherent unpredictability of the world we actually encounter. As Don Paterson rightly urged in his T.S. Eliot lecture in 2003: ‘It’s important that poets remember that our first perception of the world is already a misinterpretation’ (though one, it must be noted, that is no less valuable than every other). Laird often succeeds within these poems, then, in exploring that which is – both personally and universally – so often beyond our grasp and understanding, be it in the narrator’s failure to describe a beautiful vista in ‘Use of Spies’, the attempt to break habits of a lifetime and escape blinkered perspectives in ‘Variation in Tactics’, or the dedicated hunter’s speculation and failing faith in some higher power in the sombre tones of ‘Hunting is a Holy Occupation’. Laird’s poetic voice has gained an added maturity and distinctiveness since his first collection, too; gone is the unconvincing ‘newladspeak’ that knocked the shine off some of his earlier work, honed into a style that allows for poems of greater brevity, rhythmical execution, and despite a deliberate variance in seriousness of tone, real feeling. Like Armitage, he is an impressive and distinctly male writer of love poems: the expression of masculine emotion and its awkwardness measured and balanced with an economy of sentiment, as in the narrator’s stating ‘Love, I’d turn for you clean-living, / relinquish drinking, fighting, singing’ in ‘The Present Writer’. And the more I read those poems of Laird’s that explore the rural and urban landscapes of Ireland, Britain, and beyond, the more I think it not an overstatement to compare his rich descriptive powers, during their finer moments, to Heaney’s. Take the following glittering stanzas from ‘On Leaving the Scene of an Accident’:

In the eastern suburbs deer appear.
Brushed by waist-high silver steppe grass
and the lighter strokes of barley stalks,

elegant as one might half-expect
the grazing self to be, except her grace
is one complicit in departure.

For those interested, the Guardian coverage is here.

Is That Really A Computer Screen In Front of You?

Only just noticed that it's World Philosophy Day today - though quite what that entails, I'm not sure. I would've found out sooner, too, but there doesn't look to me much media coverage (in this country at least), and Google haven't bothered to alter their iconic logo in honour of the event, as they usually seem to do for other, often much lesser, events. Mind you, as a friend of mine pointed out, how would Google pictorially interpret 'Philosophy' even if they decided they were going to? Answers on an e-postcard, please.

Little coverage aside, however, there's an interesting article by philosopher David Bain in the BBC online magazine, titled 'Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt' (certainly one way to sell it). Reading through them, it was a pleasure to be reminded of some of the fundamental philosophical debates that've fascinated philosophers since the beginnings of ancient Greek civilisation (Ethics, Theory of Mind, Scepticism, Free Will vs Determinism); those which I enjoyed - and was occasionally infuriated by - when studying the subject during my years as an undergrad.

On the whole, it's obviously an article aimed at those who haven't approached philosophy in earnest before, but definitely worth a look for those who have, too. I think philosophy's an often underrated subject and it would be good to see a wider interest in it - especially in a time when rigorous, clear-headed and rational thinking is as important, and needed, as ever.

Oh, and for those who would accuse philosophers of lacking a sense of humour (as if Derrida weren't proof enough by himself), the caption that accompanies the article's image is a good 'un...