MARIA DUARTE, LEO BOIX and ANGUS REID review Brides, Dead of Winter, A Night Like This, and The Librarians
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Poets are not born but made
ALISTAIR FINDLAY recommends a collection of interviews with 15 award-winning poets discussing how their initial drafts became the finished poem
EZRA POUND: ‘Less rhetorical din’ and ‘fewer painted adjectives,’ (pictured in Venice, 1963)
[Walter Mori/Mondadori Publishers/CC] ![REBELS: Ebada Hassan and Safiyya Ingar in Nadia Fall’s powerful debut feature Brides [Pic: IMDb]](https://msd11.gn.apc.org/sites/default/files/styles/desktop/public/2025-09/round%20up%20web_0.jpg.webp?itok=41xI6jhN)
MARY CONWAY recommends an early Shakespearean tragedy that feels so contemporary that it mirrors our daily news
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin
DAVID NICHOLSON recommends a dazzling production of Bernstein’s opera set in a world where chaos and violence are greeted by equanimity
MARY CONWAY is frustrated by a new play that loses its drama amid the moral dilemma of re-settling children in the aftermath of WWII
Acclaimed as a masterpiece when it premiered, this study of story-telling in an Irish pub more than lives up to expectations, says MARY CONWAY
SYLVIA HIKINS relishes a comedy that dives deep into Liverpool’s divided loyalties
Voice of the Hoover: Review of The Process of Poetry
ed Rosanne McGlone
Fly on the Wall Press, £10.99
FOR budding left poets and interested readers, I recommend The Process of Poetry, a rare and relatively cheap book (£10.99). It comprises interviews with 15 award-winning poets discussing how their initial drafts became the finished poem. Both draft and final version are given, thus allowing the reader to look virtually over the shoulder of the poet through the whole process of composition.
This returned me to the 1990s and the half-dozen Arvon week-long residential writing courses I attended myself tutored by the likes of Liz Lochhead, Tom Leonard, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay, Fred D’Aguiar, Brendan Kennelly, Mimi Khalvati, Brian McCabe — poet laureates, gold medal-winners et al.
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