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

Barbara Smith reviews Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam Edited by Todd Swift and Kim Lockwood Cinnamon Press/Eyewear Publishing, 2012 & The Hallelujah Chorus Kingston University MA Poetry Various poets, 2012 Back in autumn of 2008, seventeen young British Poets were selected for inclusion in The Manhattan Review (Fall/Winter 2008-9), as part of a feature on young British poets. Indeed, I went over to London the following March of 2009 and witnessed some of the selected poets read from their work at Oxfam, Marylebone, to a large, very receptive audience. In introducing his selection in The Manhattan Review , Todd Swift described poetry’s “British Empirical tradition” as still having a sense of the “neo-classical, or Romantic, mode”; that language had become the battleground; and that the British avant-garde tended to “disrupt or reconsider the lyric stance, and investigate language from a philosophical position.” He went on to assert that the poets ...

Barbara Smith reviews Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007 - 2010 by Adrienne Rich Adrienne Rich is a poet whose work has had a profound influence on many poets emerging through the 60s, 70s and beyond to the present day. The Irish poet, Eavan Boland , has referred to Rich’s Diving into the Wreck (1971-1972), as ‘a cornerstone volume’ in her own development, and indeed both poets have been described as having ‘similar trajectories’ in terms of poetic growth: they both shared an early facility with form and a feminist perspective that questioned the perceived ‘normal’ patriarchal influences of their day, as well as an ambition to push the boundaries of ‘self-scrutiny’. It is hard to believe that Rich was born in 1929, making her contemporary with Levertov, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Ashberry, Sexton – even stretching it slightly forward to Plath . Rich’s poems in her new volume Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007 – 2010 are fresh and challenging with that expected/u...

Bravo to Barbara Smith , whose poem has been immortalised in Dundalk (which happens to be close to where I was married).

Eyewear has read on the Irish poet Barbara Smith's blog that she has recently had surgery following pneumonia and a collapsed lung. I wish her a full and speedy recovery.