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

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to tha...

Jackself by Jacob Polley REVIEWED BY ROSANNA HILDYARD Jackself is a scarecrow made up of lean meat and fat, frost, daws, lanterns, digestive biscuits, roundabouts and cow parsley. Jackself is Polley’s alter ego in this series of narrative poems, which work equally well individually as they do patchworked into a collection. Jackself is a wild pagan figure, a wodwo from ancient England, Jackself follows a snotty teenager growing up around the crumbling farms of Lamanby, in Cumbria. Although Jackself is a hodgepodge of tones and references, it forms a remarkably coherent collection when read end to end. It is structured as a poetic bildungsroman , charting Jackself’s loss of innocence as he comes to terms with grief. Jackself is the love story of two friends: Jackself of Lamanby and Jeremy Wren, who bully and wrangle with each other, go fishing in Lamanby’s deserted tarns, and stay out at night to drink white cider and Malibu together ‘way out among the hedgerows’. ...

THE ROMANCE OF THE NEW? I enjoyed Chrissy Williams ' review of Andrew Shields ' collection from Eyewear. I was surprised though to see quatrains viewed as a traditional form. Well they are but it is also 50 years or more since Olson gave us his projective verse. Poetry cannot be judged by how it looks on the page. I call that the fallacy of form: that somehow some poetic options are more or less quaint. We are post-experiment now. Conceptual poetics has opened the door to every kind of option. For a poet to return to a stately older form to work in is no less bold or noble than for a person to wear gloves in winter. Sometimes it is cold and the gloves serve well in their chosen task. Poetry reviewers do not understand it seems to me the paradox their instrumental task boxes them into: to describe something heretofore unfamiliar and new. The critic enters into a rhetorical maze that is a trap: however they wander they aim either to the exit that says original or old h...

A LADY LOOKING FOR NOSFERATU IN CHAPMAN'S POETRY I have been a fan of Patrick Chapman's poetry for the whole of the 21st century at least, and remember first coming across his unusual work in his book The New Pornography (1996) - which was at the time a radical departure for Irish poetry - and 20 years later still seems to be.  Chapman should be celebrated as one of the most idiosyncratic, strange, disturbing, and imaginative Irish writers now at work - and his gothic, atheistic, scientific sensibilities chime equally with Stoker 's and Cronenberg 's. We often forget the Romantics loved science and the bizarre, and mistrusted god, and are more modern than even we sometimes appear to be.  Chapman is that sort of Romantic poet. His new collection is his best by far.  Slow Clocks of Decay (Salmon, 2016) has much that appeals to that part of me which loves Hitchcock films and sexy vampires; that enjoys bleak descriptions of life's futility, and the doomed nosta...

This picture has nothing to do with the reviewer or reviewee.  Apologies. This will not be a review, because that would be boring and mean I have to talk about someone else.  Actually, reviews are little machines for pretending to be interested in someone else.  The longer they are, the more they are about the writer.  This review is about Luke Kennard .  Luke Kennard is two things we all want to be: tall and funny.  He is, thirdly, young, and fourthly, British, and fifthly, smart about poetry.  So that's six things, really, if you count famous.  I am not sure about rich.  Luke Kennard did not use my blurb on his new pamphlet.  This hurt until I realised it was an oversight.  Life is bearable again.  I like the title: Planet-shaped Horse .  Notice this is not Pluto-shaped Hearse .  Or Plant-shaped House .  Those will come.  Give him time.  Kennard is funnier than every other poet writing in Ireland ...

Todd Swift reviews in verse Maggot by Paul Muldoon Toggam Seeing as pastiche Is just spray-painting a pebble to put on a beach so that Homage to Paul Klee ends up clobbering Cassius Clay before he altered his moniker to Mohammed Which is a bit like moving the mountain To Moy or a mole hill; or saying a fountain Can’t give youth because it is Floridian, when it can – Because Obama made miracles happen; Or like being Irish in Japan, or a GI in Kyoto, Mr Moto in a Honda Civic, Privy to a music that makes critics swoon, As if life on Mars was no microbial squirt But gravel from the sod that Patrick flung when sick And tired of local squabbles – In short, if copying a king-cat lays up big baubles In the court of St James (or is that St Paul?) – Then plagiarism is what comes before the pride That tips off that Satanic fall, that bedevilled Milton, Who also had his blind side and his traditions And the way he copied Tasso to go for baroque, Which is a sort of jewel-encrusted squa...

Poetry Review Volume 100: 2 Summer 2010 is out, with poems from Alfred Corn, Ruth Fainlight, Alan Jenkins, John Kinsella, Sarah Maguire , Chris McCabe, Daljit Nagra , myself, and others.  Also, a few good articles on slam poetry.  Having been involved with bringing slam poetry to Canada fifteen years ago (in the summer of 1994 I believe) via the nationally-infamous cabaret nights of Vox Hunt, that led to YAWP! and the emergence of an entire slam domination in Montreal of the art form, for a few years, I then anthologised slam poets and poems alongside major page poets like Glyn Maxwell , Michael Donaghy , and others, calling the new wave of poets that read well on and off the page Fusion Poets, with co-editor Regie Cabico , when we put out the 1998 anthology Poetry Nation .  Good to see the British finally taking to their own indigenous slam artists, and welcoming them in, off the stage, onto the page.  Meanwhile, my own working practice has moved on, and I collabo...

My review of Luke Kennard and Frederick Seidel's collections is now online , having been published and posted by Poetry London .

I've been reading the debut collection from Robert Earl Stewart , Something Burned Along The Southern Border . It is from Mansfield Press and is a handsome book. It's an excellent first collection. I'd published his work over the years at Nthposition and in anthologies and so am pleased to see this finally out. As Emily Schulz says, it maps "a seldom-recorded region of Canada, the joint of Windsor-Detroit". From such a potential bleakness the poet has rescued surreal and darkly witty poems. This is one for last-minute Amazon shopping.

Eyewear was sent this press release last night. Congratulations to the winners. It's good to see so many hungry poets dining so well... --- TORONTO – June 6, 2007 – Charles Wright’s (pictured) Scar Tissue and Don McKay’s Strike/Slip are the International and Canadian winners of the seventh annual Griffin Poetry Prize . The C$100,000 Griffin Poetry Prize, the richest poetry prize in the world for a single volume of poetry, is divided between the two winners. The prize is for first edition books of poetry published in 2006, and submitted from anywhere in the world. The awards event was hosted by Scott Griffin , founder of the prize. Renowned poet Matthew Rohrer was the featured speaker. Judge Karen Solie announced the International winner and John Burnside announced the Canadian winner of the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize. Hundreds of guests celebrated the awards, including Canada’s former Governor General, the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson ; The Honourable Caroline di Cocco...

The Best Man That Ever Was (Picador, 2007) is the debut collection from London-based "teacher and embroiderer" Annie Freud , launched last week in London. This reviewer has long (well, relatively) followed Freud's poetry career, and been pleased to take some of her first published poems, for the Oxfam anthology in 2004, and then again, the Future Welcome anthology in 2005, from DC Books, in Montreal. She was also invited to appear on the Oxfam CD Life Lines , in 2006, where she read poems now collected here. In short, I know some of these poems already, but was still not fully prepared for the shock of recognition, reading the collection as a whole - a satisfying shock, really, the tumblers clicking into place that opens a locked door. Freud's work, as befits a Picador poet, is within the British mainstream - and recognizably in the tradition of other poets from the press, like the great American poet Michael Donaghy (who died several years ago at the age of 50), ...

I have before me The Selected Poems of Irving Layton - the classic New Directions "paperbook" from 1977, introduced by respected critic Hugh Kenner , who knew a little something about Modern Poetry. I've long been an advocate of Layton's work - and indeed met him on a few occasions. He was a "father" of modern verse in Canada, and a kind man: he telephoned me once to say the poems I'd sent him (as a young man) had promise. That being said, a revaluation is in order, one that begins to seriously read and reconsider the actual value of the poems left to us by such major forefathers, for these are Canadian poetry's common wealth, and they form our meagre canon, such as it is, or may be said to be. I realize that Layton (pictured) came to write later poems, but his reputation - as a poet - surely rests on the 50 poems presented here, to an American audience. It is these poems (or some of them at least) which led William Carlos Williams to (famously - i...

Eyewear is pleased to start a new occasional series of reviews by poets, of new poetry collections. Yvonne Blomer a broken mirror, fallen leaf 78 pages Ekstasis Editions Review by Michael Kavanagh Yvonne Blomer's first collection documents, in quiet, imagistic poems, two years of life on the island of Kyushu, Japan, with the JET programme. For those who don't know, JET is a cultural exchange started in 1987 with the goal of internationalizing Japan through language teaching and cultural programmes. In her collection, we see the Blomer's vision of Japan shift from nostalgia, to a darker world of real experience and alienation. In returning home she finds herself a stranger in her native country. The book is in four sections, which trace this thematic journey. It opens with 'Four Seasons,' a sequence of poems celebrating the familiar 'cherry blossoms' picture of Japan. Here, Blomer is in full poetic mode, with traditional observations of nature in haiku: A th...

The Winter 2006/07 issue (volume 96:4) of Poetry Review , edited by poet Fiona Sampson , is now out, with the theme "A la recherche". North American (and other non-UK) readers wishing to follow the contemporary poetry world as it unfolds on these isles should subscribe to PR - it is, to paraphrase Ms. Turner, simply the best. That being said, I am honoured to have a review published in this issue, on the new collection by Paul Farley , Tramp in Flames . Other contributors include Michael Longley (specially featured), Eavan Boland, John Fuller, Ruth Padel, Alan Brownjohn, Jackie Kay, Glyn Maxwell, Jay Parini, Patrick Crotty and Frank Dullaghan . Order from www.poetrysociety.org.uk