Review: Namanlagh by Tom Paulin (Faber and Faber, 2025) The “power to think / has clean left me”, Tom Paulin claims – not quite convincingly – in his sharply observant new poetry collection, Namanlagh, which chronicles the author’s experience of crippling depression and advancing age. “Have I at last started to climb out / of … Read more
Review: Fog Bells: 8 Contemporary Turkish Poets (Dedalus Press, 2025) “A writer’s life”, the poet Nick Laird once remarked, with a self-assurance befitting a Royal Society of Literature Fellow, “is a cycle of trying to get to their work, sitting staring at the blank screen, wandering off, steering their reluctant bodies back” to the desk … Read more
The Revolutionary Andrée Blouin, 1921-1986 A hungry child can never truly sleep. In the orphanage for sinful offspring – our fathers white, our mothers African – the nuns were merciless, severe. I shook by night inside a narrow, iron cot, aware only of my body’s hunger, a heavy shadow shuttering my limbs. I prayed for … Read more
Review: We Must Begin with the Land: Seeking Abundance and Liberation through Social Ecology by Stephen E. Hunt (Zer0 books, 2025) Environmentalists find themselves in the paradoxical situation of living in a golden age of radical ecological thinking – even as our global economic system blasts through one climactic tipping-point after another, more or less … Read more
A Chapter in the WarAppian, 95-165 CEUnder orders from Octavian, the hardened captains – Pansa, Carfulenus – patrolled the narrow pass they had determined to defend, with the Martian legion and half a dozen cohorts in their train.Surrounded all about by mulling marshland, heavy bogs, eight miles south-east of Mutina, their suspicions as they carried … Read more
“Trump Inhabits Trumpistan”, writes Chris Agee in his rampaging poetic satire, Trump Rant: “Trump Is the Wolf of Washington”. Written over a four-year period from 2017 onwards, and arranged as an expanding series of mock-newspaper headlines, Agee’s book begins as an act of stinging personal portraiture and ends as a thorough-going investigation of America itself … Read more
The Vagabond J.M. Synge, 1871-1909 To comprehend, regard the brutal wilderness to hand. More than most, the burrow-broken vagabonds recall the living tune. In remoter reaches of the Wicklow hills, they live where a sodden soul could barely pass, and look out all the year on unimpeded barriers of heath. In every season, heavy sleets … Read more
Fragments of a Litany Gaza, 2023-24 Grieve with the butchered gods of love for Layan al-Baz, the young, the strong, her soft arms cut by shrapnel, her wounded leg a stump. May the world record unquietly the wordless eyes of Abdul, of Kenza, and Karam – who buried their mothers in a barren yard. And … Read more
A Poem for Refaat Alareer In the poem your butchers fear to breathe, the murdered nurseries are clean, the brimming table-top restored – your every room aflush with idleness again, a bowl of flying spices near to hand, the oven-bread uplifted through the haze: a feast the windy air will sing from the open-hearted balcony … Read more
Bliain an Áir ‘The Year of Slaughter’, 1740-41 Around the earth, a warring, wooden sea of brigs was bristling, a-flame; volcanic ash descending on the vacillating map. The weathered world began to shift – a tiny alteration sowing ice across the land. The shining-bellied geese no longer wintered by the lough. The turf-blue river waters … Read more
There’s a strangeness to singing in a language you don’t understand, akin, perhaps, to the sensation that comes with remembering, vividly, a person who has died. In both cases, you can almost touch the life recalled, even as the shadow glimpsed in that one word, “almost”, clouds your every sense. Whenever I hear a song, … Read more
Dutch Masters An age away, the scented evergreens are still, a lucent wave commits to hush, the sun emits a breath, as the noon-deep labourings commence: the slender, severed necks are tossed, the throttled mouths are mounted in the heat, and inch by inch the fragrant earth is stripped of human foliage, an evacuated island … Read more
Questioning a Tank Into the shocked, shucked shell of the hospital at Kunduz, which for ten days past, in streaming light (the season’s slant of sun), has spilled a steaming trail of twisted bricks, chewed up rails, a grieving mist – the site where the counted, cradled sick burned up, the still un- bordered doctors … Read more
