The poetic voice in this collection is restless, urgent, sad, and knowing. The knowing is a felt knowing, made in what Glissant calls the ‘Poetics of Relation’. We move through the collection across continents and camps, looking into the eyes of despair and consequences of war, insisting that even the lives wasted are not wasted. Insisting of the grief that is life.
Alison Phipps is UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Languages and Arts at the University of Glasgow.
(Pre-order. Available from April 24th 2024)
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Donna Campbell’s first collection may be called ‘Mongrel’ but it is purebred poetry. Her use of words, especially in the Glaswegian vernacular, combine with images to form brutally beautiful poems about aspects of life that less fearless poets might shun. (Lesley Benzie, poet)
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Charles Bukowski is a master at writing in a similar fashion about the underclasses but Graham Fulton’s work is better by miles. Not a wasted word and each phrase as carefully balanced as a swaying drunk on a bus.
(Des Dillon, writer)
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This anthology has poetry that considers a Cause in its Time, the time of Covid 19 and what time itself may mean NOW.
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In this superb collection, a pair of Jackdaws build a nest and hatch their young in a ‘gash in one of the window panels’. Fulton unfolds events with deadpan humour, some visceral descriptions, and an unerring eye for concrete detail in this series of short lyrics. He expertly weaves in detail from everyday life, and uncanny observations from the streets of Paisley (‘a sparkly unicorn in a high window’) and beyond (‘a flattened dragonfly/in the centre of a road’) and never once assumes the affection that emerges for ‘Jack and Jill’ is reciprocated. (‘they don’t give a toss/if I’m here or not’). Indeed, Jack’s voice is not one to be messed with. These poems explore the relationship between humankind and nature in an urban environment with wit, craft, profundity, and warmth in an immensely satisfying and positive evocation of nature and new life.
(Andy Breckenridge, poet)
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