A Blog About Books and Reading
A Blog About Books and Reading
If there is any obvious hope to be found in the sombre and desolate poems on offer in this collection, it is in the perseverance of nature in the face of violence and peril.
Fully seven of the ten longlisted titles are published by American houses.
These are not a young man's verses; they are the ruminations of someone in the twilight of middle-age.
There is ambiguity here, but also a plaintive recognition of very human emotions that are often denied or ignored by people frightened by their complexity or contradictions.
Siebert's empathetic approach to her material is admirable and she has the capacity for cutting observation.
Jones's preference for selecting elder statesmen and women generally omits a broad range of voices that have helped push Canadian poetry out of the confines of its colonial past.
Owen is a lyric poet who delights in working within traditional forms.
Holy Winter is as much about the practice of writing poetry, and its place in a riven world, as it is about exile and anxiety over geopolitical fractures.
Both volumes contain references to the Hebrew word "hineni," translated as "here I am."
Last year was the first under the new prize regime.