Model City answers its own inaugural question 'What was it like?' in 288 different ways. The accumulation of these answers offers a form of sustained and refined negative capability, which by turns is wry, profound and abundant with an unspecified longing for the passing ghost of European idealism. In the various enquiries and explorations of Model City this is also the mapping of a lived condition and its relationships not readily found on every street corner, nor in the broken ideologies from the populist bargain basement proffered by our political cadres. ...

Kandinsky’s poetry is little known in the English-speaking world, even amongst lovers of his art. Klaenge appeared from Piper Verlag in Munich in 1912 or 1913 – the exact date is uncertain – in a splendid volume, 29 cms square – this translated edition is, by contrast, 20 cms square). Many of the poems dated back a few years, but they were very much of their time and were prized both in the artist’s native Russia (where some pirated translations appeared) and in the German-speaking world. In fact, the Dada group gave readings ...

The earliest poem in this book ('The Sleeper's Blue Shirt') is from 1972. The most recent poems are from 2022. Ken Bolton edited this selection, drawing from five books and one chapbook. "John Levy has a magical deftness that makes world upon world appear out of nowhere. He marvels at the most ordinary circumstances and things (waiting for a bus, wrong numbers, accordion straps, a hammer, the letter K) and when he does so, there is nothing else in the universe. The work is meticulous, precise yet always unlabored. The poems come from Paris, Kyoto ...

In later life, while living in London, George Claessen returned to poetry, often interrogating the same metaphysical themes he explored in his abstracts. The fruits of these endeavours resulted in a number of volumes, including, Poems of a Painter published in 1967, Poems about Nothing (1981), Collected Poems , (1995) and subsequent inclusion in various poetry anthologies.   Describing his desire to use poetry as a creative alternative to his visual artistic work, he memorably said that it was, '...the outcome of an urge for expression in ...

In her debut collection The Lost Book of Barkynge , Ruth Wiggins recovers the forgotten voices of the nuns, abbesses and local women of the medieval abbey at Barking. Against a backdrop of famine, plague, war and spiritual upheaval, these poems explore the strange, uncertain days of the early abbey: mysterious visions, politics, violence and sisterhood, and end with the final abbess mourning the eradication of her home as the Dissolution unhouses her, her sisters, and countless others across Europe. Barking was one of the most significant abbeys in Britain ...

"Whether Alice Kavounas is walking the bounds of her home in Cornwall, speaking across time to her brother, or wryly contemplating two funerary caskets, one containing a dog's ashes, the other those of a family member, her poems are distinguished by clarity of observation, by wit, and by individual grace. We go from Cornwall to San Francisco to New York; to Minsk, London, and Palm Springs; always her voice is measured, searching. She is interested in scale; in minutiae, as in her beautiful study of a painting of a finch, or in finding herself a holidaying ...

The first double issue of Shearsman magazine for 2023 features poetry by Martin Anderson, Nora Blascsok, Melissa Buckheit, Stuart Cooke, Carrie Etter, Amy Evans Bauer, Alec Finlay, Amlanjyoti Goswami, Daniel Hinds, Emily Tristan Jones, Norman Jope, Kenny Knight, Mary Leader, Rob Mackenzie, James McLaughlin, Eliza O'Toole, Michelle Penn, Sophia Nugent-Siegal, Peter Robinson, Jaime Robles, Maurice Scully, Aidan Semmens, Nathan Shepherdson, Maria Stasiak, Cole Swensen, G.C. Waldrep, Carl Walsh and Petra White, plus translations of Anna Akhmatova (by Stephen ...

In his new book of poems, Anthony Caleshu writes after the visual art of Julie Curtiss, Jadé Fadojutimi, Shara Hughes, Shio Kusaka, Henry Taylor, Emma Webster, and Jonas Wood (also included, a musical interlude after the music of Pixies). Poems move in and out of interiors, portraits, landscapes, abstractions, and the concept of xenia - Greek for 'hospitality', later adopted by the Romans as a category of 'still-life' painting featuring welcoming platters of fruit and the like. If ekphrastic in tradition, the poems privilege lyric and narrative ...

Due North is a poem in twelve chapters concerned with human movement northwards or out in the quest for work, subsistence, settlement and gratification, and in danger of getting trapped in various enclosures, including thought-traps. The cast includes migrant workers, returning soldiers, children growing up, and population movements such as the early 19th Century descent on the northern manufacturing districts from demographic disaster zones, with my awareness of my own ancestry among the displaced Irish of Manchester and West Yorkshire. Woven into ...

Disppearance is Lesley Harrison’s first full-length collection, bringing together new work which examines the coastline and our uneasy, unresolved relationship with the waters that surround us. Around the northern North Sea rim, the coastal margin is constantly being made and unmade by vast weather systems and currents that begin thousands of miles away. Drawing from archives, folk myth and cultural memory, these poems make real our sense of living at the edge of an older, sub-polar world, and the ongoing human process of negotiation with, of giving ...