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

The London Underground Is Mine I'll keep this short.   The Swift Report is my looking back on the highs and lows of my personal life - not the great perturbations of the times.  As news retrospectives will attest, 2011 was an extraordinary year of deaths, collapses, uprisings, and economic shifts. This was the year I completed my PhD at the University of East Anglia; published my 7th collection, England Is Mine ; and edited, with Kim Lockwood , an anthology for Oxfam of young British poets, due out spring 2012.  I also launched a small press, Eyewear Publishing. I hosted some wonderful visiting poets, including David Lehman, Don Share, Jacquelyn Pope ,  and Ilya Kaminsky .  I saw my old friend Fabio Bagnara again, after several decades.  I hosted several readings for the Oxfam series.  And, at the end of the year, my brother, his wife, and my wee Godson, Alex , came to stay for Christmas.  We had a wonderful time. This was also the y...

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Nikki Dekker  (pictured)  this last Friday of 2011.  Dekker  is a bilingual poet from the Netherlands. She has studied Literary Theory and Gender Studies in Amsterdam and Utrecht, and is currently undertaking a Creative Writing MA at Kingston University. Her poetry will be featured in the upcoming winter podcast of Cursive Script . New York City artist reads the cards Her room is draped with shawls. The magic any 24yearold24hourpartyperson emits brightens a staircase room and cupboard bed. Grown up drinks like whisky without cola, and tonic with gin, she thins out every day, adjusting the alignments. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, the other end of a question, ‘She goes to bed at     eleven.’ Classified under          early. E: a rake pushing sideward stands single on the divide, stuck on that prole vertical line. If it bites, it’s only because t...

Katherine Lockton reviews Grace By Esther Morgan Sometimes it is the simplest of words in the simplest of orders that allows the subject of the poem “to become itself.” This is particularly true of Esther Morgan’s Grace , where the poetry is deceptively simple on the first reading. It is only after subsequent readings that a maze of hidden links between the poems is uncovered. These links come together to create alternative meanings to Morgan’s words. Morgan successfully conceals the seams in her tapestry of images, which if shown would break the spell that engulfs us as we read. One of Morgan’s main preoccupations in her third collection is to look at what Wordsworth called “spots of time.” It is in this way that different moments are distilled to reveal the essence behind them. In the opening poem, ‘Grace’ it is the “the moment the house empties like a city in August/so completely/it forgets you exist” that is explored through simple yet amazing images:   ...

A little Christmas Eve cheer - I'd like to recommend to all you Boxing day shoppers David McGimpsey 's book of hilarious, pop-savvy, literate yet modestly-colloquial chubby sonnets (his term), Li'l Bastard .  This is one of the key directions Canadian poetry and poetics has taken, thanks to Dr McGimpsey, in the last decade - and if you want to hear what Canada sounds like now when it is being smartly funny, here you go.

Wonderful.

Morgan Harlow reviews The City with Horns by Tamar Yoseloff We must embrace the gift of the street, The glare of chaos, of things being various. The frail instant needs us to record it; The mute made audible, still life animated.                     (‘Mannequins on 7 th Street’ for Robert Vas Dias, after Anthony Eyton)                  Tamar Yoseloff’s The City with Horns is a timely collection, communicating “The mute made audible, still life animated” of the abstract expressionist avant-garde art movement during the last century alongside the buildup to the current global economic crisis which has brought the world as we know it to the brink of chaos. With its echo of George Oppen ’s ‘Of Being Numerous’, the poem ‘Mannequins on 7 th Street’ rings with particular acuity at a time when peo...