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

I've just received my review copy of Dear World & Everyone In it: New Poetry In The UK , edited by Nathan Hamilton .  I'll briefly comment on it, here, in weeks to come, but my main review on the collection will appear in The Wolf magazine.  What I will say now, and here, is that, surely, anyone interested in following the development of the young British poets generation of the last 15 years will want to own a copy of this collection, or at least read it, as it forms a part of the ongoing discussion.

Steven Johannes Fowler reviews New Collected Poems translated by Robin Fulton Tomas Tranströmer There is little doubt that Tomas Tranströmer will be remembered as one of the last great figures of 20 th century European poetry, and by many, the last of a dying breed – that is a poet whose work and whose persona genuinely and thoroughly resonate in the consciousness of their nation. All the more remarkable perhaps, because he has come to stand for an image of the poet we might perceive as tailored and quaint – a deeply private and modest man, whose output of poetry over the last sixty years has been sparse though clearly momentous enough to command a world audience. This important volume from Bloodaxe, the second of its kind in under a decade, may not build any new structures for the reception of Tranströmer ’s poetry, but in its simple reconstitution of works past, embellished by the short, poignant works Tranströmer has undertaken in the 21 st century, the book becom...

Catherine Woodward reviews Pure Hustle By Kate Potts Pure Hustle is Kate Potts’ first full length book of poetry.  It is a collection about imagination, a theme which she explores from multiple angles, but her predominant theme would appear to be the role that imagination plays in the process of memory making and understanding human experience. Making memories and understanding events involves some creative effort on our part, we use imagination to transform experience into recognisable, meaningful narrative sequences; in Pure Hustle  Potts tunes in to that portion of the mind that creates as it thinks and explores miscellaneous events in terms of how they are imagined. The findings are quite exciting. Reading Pure Hustle is a strange, Through the Looking Glass sort of experience, the imagined landscapes of many poems are metaphorised versions of our own world, the world turned image to greater or lesser degrees, the same but different. Potts has us looking at...

Sarah Westcott reviews Electric Shadow by Heidi Williamson The blurb on the back cover of Heidi Williamson’s first collection focuses on the poet’s “fascination” with science and the exploration of what her publisher Bloodaxe calls “less usual territories” for poetry, including maths, computer programming and space travel.  But Electric Shadow is written from a more integrated, subtle area than the traditionally diametrically opposed cultures of poetry and science and their ‘territories’. While Williamson does indeed write about sciency subjects, this collection is less notable for its scientific substance and content - and more for its clear-eyed approach to the world and its mysteries, with poems often written in the spirit of Keat’s negative capability. Williamson’s writing has an openness to ‘not-knowing’, a spirit of exploration tempered with quiet rationality, a drive to convey the ‘astonishing state of possibilities’ in the world.  It also stems, like scie...

Tony Judt , who has died, would have had something to say about the new Bloodaxe anthology, Ten , edited by Daljit Nagra and Bernardine Evaristo - since it is an "identity" anthology - a selection of "multicultural" (in the UK case, Black and Asian) poets.  I haven't seen it yet, and want to.  It is, as all will agree, high time such poets were more widely published and celebrated. The question remains, for the mainstream British poetry community, why such voices, such poets, tend to be marginal, special cases, requiring such a showcase - their own stage.  Of course, both Voice Recognition and Identity Parade included Black and Asian poets from Britain - and this book offers a satisfying trilogy for any shelf.  The woeful lack of interest in "multicultural" poets in the UK by many larger publishers has something to do with the conservative bent, the careful career-pruning, of some.  Tone and diction and intent are so important for English poetry, ...

John Muckle reviews Tell Me Lies: Poems 2005-2008 by Adrian Mitchell You’d have go be a real bastard to sneer at a poem about ‘Peace and Pancakes’ written for a picnic organised by The Woodcraft Folk – so I won’t be doing that. Nor will I be rehearsing Adrian Mitchell’s role in the famous Albert Hall ‘Wholly Communion’ gig in 1965, where, on film at least, a ramblingly prophetic Allen Ginsberg is upstaged by the singing ringing tones of ‘To Whom It May Concern’, his powerful anti-Vietnam poem: ‘So fill my ears with silver/Stick my legs in plaster/Tell me lies about Vietnam’. It’s a bitterly ironic nursery rhyme, about being both privileged and misinformed. This final book, completed shortly before his death in late 2008, duly repeats that poem in a ‘Remix’ version, showing his poetry and its agitprop concerns to have changed not a jot in the intervening forty years. Prince Harry is home from Afghanistan. He flew out a Twerp, but he flies back a Man. Do you feel safer now he is back...

Jeet Thayil , the Indian poet, has edited an important new anthology of Indian poetry (in the English tradition), just out from Bloodaxe, a book Eyewear will review in time. Before then, it needs to be said that The Guardian ran a hugely blundering (and borderline offensive) review of the book - a dismissal by other means - on Saturday, an odd act since the UK has been in need of such a collection for more than a decade. I have long believed that the best of Indian English-language contemporary poetry, from the likes of Ranjit Hoskote , Vivek Narayanan , and Sudeep Sen , is among the best of contemporary poetry from anywhere - and its lack of availability, until now, was almost silly, if not sad. So, Thayil should have been thanked first, criticised, if at all, later. Anyway, he's responded .