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Andrew Sant
Andrew Sant’s most recent book is Near the Border: New and selected poems (Puncher and Wattmann, 2023). His new collection of poems, Natural Wonders, is forthcoming.
It continued snowing.The furniture hadn’t drifted away in a removal van.We kept Sam. We didn’t catch a taxito Heathrow. The hi-fi kept going.We didn’t fly twelve thousand miles.We stayed at home.My father continued working in the City.My mother lived.She called into the morning, staccato,‘SamSam, SamSam, Sam’ and he grew faton his diet of Kit-e-Kat.I remained the ‘I’ I’d got to kno ... (read more)
Carphology, in case you have forgotten, is the ‘delirious fumbling with bedclothes’, as stated in the epigraph to David Musgrave’s poem of the same name, which is not about a pathology but, energetically though bleakly, about passion and sleep. The epigraph to the book as a whole is taken from Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, fragment C1: ‘God be gracious to Musgrave, for he is a Merch ... (read more)
The opening poem in Petra White’s first collection is a modest, tantalising, somewhat mysterious poem called ‘Planting’. A metaphor, you might think, for the inspiration and growth of a poem – much as Seamus Heaney’s famous ‘Digging’, also the first poem in a début collection, established a link via the rhythm of digging, between the act of writing and the act of cultivating land, i ... (read more)
If despair and desolation can be said to have had a high point in poetry in English during the modern era, it is in T.S. Eliot’s poetry, particularly ‘The Hollow Men’. While reading Martin Langford’s remarkable The Human Project: New & Selected Poems, I was reminded of other poets whose reputations depend upon the discomforting poems they have written. The until recently neglected Amer ... (read more)
I was in the house of a friend’s parents recently and noticed, stuck to the fridge door, a poem clipped from a newspaper, among the sundry magnets and notices. Companion to book reviews, its subtleties had taken their fancy as being more than ephemera. Good, I thought, these are poetry readers – an engineer and an art teacher – who can confidently duck and weave among poems that come their w ... (read more)
T.A.G. Hungerford’s new book Stories from Suburban Road is sub-titled ‘an autobiographical collection’ and comes complete with an appendix of photographs in the style of a family album with captions such as ‘Mick and me, 1922’, ‘Me, aged 16, and Phyllis Kingsbury, Scarborough, 1931’, and ‘Mum and Mrs Francis Victoria Wood, Como Beach, 1930’. Also, throughout the collection each s ... (read more)
This cactus looks as if, on a reef,it could be neighbour to sponge, equally at easeunder the sea – or strange as some tentacled hydraon the window ledge, freeof quickening leaves.
... (read more)