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NICK MATTHEWS welcomes the return of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s music to the repertoire of this years’ Three Choirs Festival
Page-turning pleasures
Fellow poets tell ANDY CROFT what collections they couldn't put down in the last 12 months
LEO BOIX reviews a caustic novel of resistance and womanhood by Buenos Aires-born Lucia Lijtmaer, and an electrifying poetry collection by Chilean Vicente Huidobro
MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
Stephanie Bowgett
The Raven and the Laughing Head (Calder Valley) is Mark Hinchliffe’s first collection and he starts with the familiar and then spins it in the natural and spiritual world, weaving reality with ancient myth.
His syntax and vocabulary are deceptively simple but layered with ancient mythologies — Sioux, Green man, Gilgamesh — with the most commonplace given complexity and dignity. People interact with lions, ravens, jaguars and hares who ride on trains and inhabit care homes, bringing comfort, dignity, truth and tenderness. I have read some exceptional poetry books in 2017, but none more original, challenging and exceptionally moving than this one.
Stephanie Bowgett has been running the Albert Poets in Huddersfield for over 20 years. Her most recent collection is A Poor Kind of Memory (Calder Valley Press).
Kate Fox
Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches) is a great collection of poems but also a manifesto, compendium and multimedia experience.
More from this author
ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician
New titles from Fran Lock, Richard Skinner, Tara Bergin and Mark A Murphy
New titles from Kurdish poet İlhan Sami Comak and Volker Braun, one of Germany’s most important writers
New collections from Neil Fulwood, Kevin Higgins, Clare Saponia, Nora Blascsok and Peter Godfrey
