E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

June is coming soon... and so are more poets to be featured, and many reviews.  But for now, I am off to the Poetry London summer launch tonight - and then to enjoy some sun for a few days.  Be well - and buy British indie poetry!

ON THE JOYS AND SORROWS They say that blessings pour down on your head when they do. Blessings, I’ve had a few.   I feel thrilled with being less than dead, which is here-I-am collaborating with the physical agents on the wild run of things, slip-sliding away.   Days go, sunrise. This is the document in which I will nailgun your heart to my heart and together we’ll slide like yippies all the way into toy town, rioting in joyousness. This is the loudest testament I can afford to jolt you with using script.   Now twist and shout too – you’re embroiled in my love, as the poem relies on your recognition.   Canonise me, love, glorify the shiver of decoration overcoming my soul qua soul, and all the raw feels that decipher themselves as codes. Break, dash, dot and squall – fling off your nakedness and dress like a dashing guard in a prison of Godliness, perhaps a naval officer with ...

The growing realisation that the key figures of our Online-Digital Age - Google, Amazon, and Apple - have made hundreds of billions of dollars in profit from us little people - and not bothered to pay more than a tiny fraction of that back in taxes to help our societies reminds all of us, I think, of the unsustainable nature of commercial greed, when unfettered.  Beyond all the talk of ethics, and regulation, lies the humanity of the issue - are we or are we not all in the same boat?  Apparently, according to top bankers and CEOs, not.  I do not know where these people live - in havens? - but if they enjoy the safety of the public roads, the security of the armed forces - then they should pay their income tax like everyone else.  As a small businessman trying to make ends meet, I am not in favour of very high taxation for companies at a time of a sagging economy - 20% or so seems about right to me - but surely, .05% or .005%, is criminally absurd.  In the meanti...

Andrew McMillan reviews The Yellow Table by Alicia Stubbersfield It’s a rare pleasure to settle down with a book that cuts the crap, cuts the pretention and is smart enough to wear its learning lightly. With Alicia Stubbersfield’s fourth collection you feel immediately in the presence of someone at the top of their game; someone who understands the true power of poetry lies within the confident layering of poetic image with plain, direct, arresting statement.   The first poem in the collection, ‘Stone’ ends with the stanza                         Stone- not shell. No faraway tide sound,                         no ocean-memory or lost sea creature.           ...

Steve Van-Hagen reviews Regeneration by Meirion Jordan Meirion Jordan, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection for Regeneration ’s preceding volume, Moonrise , is from an intellectually eclectic background – he won the Newdigate Prize while studying for his first degree in Mathematics at Somerville College, Oxford, before moving to UEA to complete a Masters, and then a PhD, in Creative Writing. It is unsurprising, therefore, that he has produced an eclectic, undeniably unusual and rewarding second collection of poetry. Regeneration (2012) is immediately striking for its material appearance and organisation. As one reviewer (Jacqui Kenton at New Welsh Review – see http://www.newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=292) has already observed, Regeneration is ‘tête-bêche, with the White Book and Red Book at each end and upside down.’ These two-collections-in-one which meet in the middle reference two medieval (fourteenth-century) manusc...