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

Eyewear's blog is very pleased to be able to feature, this Sunday, four poems by the recent Eric Gregory winner, Chloe Stopa-Hunt . She grew up in Oxfordshire, Dorset, and Hampshire, and was educated at New College, Oxford. She was twice a Foyle Young Poet of the Year, subsequently winning the University of Oxford’s English Poem on a Sacred Subject Prize and the University of Cambridge’s Winchester Reading Prize. In 2014, Stopa-Hunt won an Eric Gregory Award. Her poems have appeared in a range of journals, including POEM , Oxford Poetry, Envoi , Magma , and Ambit , and I she has also contributed reviews or review-essays to Asymptote , Poetry Matters, The Oxonian Review, Mslexia , and Poetry Review . Some recent poems can be read online at Ink Sweat & Tears and Visual Verse , and her poems have also appeared in several anthologies, including Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam and Best British Poetry 2013 . Ms. Stopa-Hunt is currently doing graduate research into R...

  Fletcher in black Eyewear has recently encountered the work of the young London-based poet, Sarah Fletcher , and is glad to feature a poem of hers here today.  Fletcher was born in America but grew up in the UK, where she is currently studying English at Durham University. She's been writing professionally for many years, making her debut at 14 in The London Magazine , and has since been published in a variety of places. She is a twice-time recipient of The Christopher Tower Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2013 (placing first, and then second). In 2012, she was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year and commended for The Times Stephen Spender Prize of Poetry in Translation. She has read at Royal Festival Hall, The Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Trafalgar Square. During the 2012 Olympics, she and 10 other poets worked with Jacob Sam-La Rose to construct a poem that was displayed at Olympic Park. She is a Poetry Editor for The Adroit Journal , where she runs The Adroi...

Eyewear is pleased to offer its readers a poem by the very worthwhile younger British poet and critic, Andrew McMillan , who just a few days ago gave us such a good review of the debut from Emily Berry .  Now here he is with a cento poem for Thom Gunn , incidentally one of the most under-rated British poets of his time and one of Eyewear's favourites. s aturday night a broke Cento for Thom Gunn bedless and hungry    the nights pull drags me to a street it seems I only half knew and now paid up    stripped off    and towelled I prowl the labyrinthine corridors and think that everything I read in Gunn or watched in porn was true    bodies of men line the walls and I feel the ceiling drip and have a sense of being underground no air that doesn’t smell of someone on the breath of someone else    and when I call your name to slow you it comes out strangled as in a mine…...

  The poet as critic Andrew McMillan reviews Dear Boy by Emily Berry There’s an interview with the wonderful American poet Matthew Dickman for the Scottish Poetry Library in which he says (and I’m paraphrasing badly here, apologies Matthew) that irony “isn’t horrible” but that it can “only get you so far”. I found this a really interesting idea. Much modern poetry seems too hip, too ironic, too tricksy for its own good- accomplished poems rest on their own surface intrigue rather on their ability to say anything real.   Love is fine but only if we don’t really mean it, only if we’re making fun of it, only if we love ironically. When I was first starting out in poetry, my first pamphlet got reviewed by someone who we won’t name who said, amongst other things, that the tone of the poems seemed too angsty; he was right, but what I took this to mean at the time was that writing love poems to a departed lover wasn’t enough, there needed to be an angle, somet...