The Making of a Poem has consistently excellent poems, worthy of emulation and worth buying for the selections alone. Being able to follow the transition from rough draft to finished poem provides fascinating insight. It’s isn’t some ineffable genius that creates such works, but hard yakka combined with a crucial sense of what does and doesn’t work which only comes with extensive reading and years of practice: the long apprenticeship that the poets featured here have clearly had.
Tag: poetry
A review of Amanda Chimera by Mary B. Moore
As Joseph Brodsky put it, “to the poet phonetics and semantics are, with few exceptions, identical.” And one can see this in Moore’s poems that are so marvellously, deliciously musical, locating their meanings like an orchestration rather than a thesis, a wondrous symphonic search to understand the dimensions of a dual self.
A review of My City is a Murder of Crows by Nikita Parik
Language is given the incisive treatment as Parik describes consonants and vowels in the speaker’s mouth, finally describing how the consonants are bound together like bread in a sandwich. However, the deeper principle is that although dark moments are inbound to our existence, we will overcome difficulties such as Covid collectively. This volume records the poet’s experience of Covid through poetry.
A review of The Haunting by Cate Peebles
When working on a collection that relies so heavily on intertextuality, less is often more. The Haunting draws upon over twenty different pieces of media, ranging from nineteenth century novels to contemporary horror films. While many of these allusions feel at home, the sheer volume an at times feel overwhelming. Peebles’ ambition to capture the full spectrum of what it means to be haunted is admirable, but sometimes, attempting to encompass every possible reference dilutes the potency of the haunting itself.
A review of 18 Shticks by Margarita Meklina
At forty-five pages, 18 Shticks isn’t a long collection, but it covers a lot of ground. Individually these are stories of ordinary lives made surreal through life’s twists, through close examination, and through a sense that just beneath the surface of any situation, there is another reality simmering.
A review of Fragmentation and Volta by Paul Ilechko
The collection may end with the word “home” but that word is followed by an ellipsis, that punctuation mark which means that something has been left out. Here at the end, it alludes not only to the contents being fragmentary but to the whole collection itself being a fragment. The book itself is a border, a liminal space inviting everything unsaid to gather around it.
A review of Twelve Days From Transfer by Eleanor Kedney
This collection is wonderfully vast with its symbolism and imagery that will surely challenge readers to think about infertility differently. Kedney’s intention of her work being a vessel for other woman to understand infertility’s emotional and psychological impact is enlightening, especially as I am a young woman in her twenties—infertility hasn’t crossed my mind yet
A review of Unruly Tree by Leslie Ullman
And only a poet blessed with imagination and a solid understanding of poetics could embark on a project such as Leslie Ullman has devised here. Using “Oblique Strategies” as a basis for a disciplined exploration of the boundless possibilities of creative interpretation, she has produced a series of informed, entertaining and highly individual poems.
Maya in the Zen Forest: A review of The Forest I Know By Kala Ramesh
The “forest” of the forest i know is essentially a metaphorical Zen forest where the poet learns life’s trust as well as its tedium. She humorously notes the many gurus along herpath and their lack of utility in her enlightenment. In Zen, a master is not necessary to experience satori, which is a sudden realization into the human experience. In this practice, the master pulls punches and jokes to encourage enlightenment.
A review of Down River with Li Po by Karen Pierce Gonzalez
Engaging the emotions that emanate through Li Po’s work, and with delicate strokes, Gonzalez packs maximum impact into snapshots of the natural world. ‘Pink yarrow garden’ and ‘patchwork planets’. Traversing the rural and the urban, the seen and the suggested. Lotus flowers, urban streets and vast mountains.