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Readers will be deeply grateful to the late Peter Oram for giving new life to the work of a major Russian poet who has never been fully recognized in the English- speaking world – even if his haunting words have been heard in Russian by the millions who have seen his son’s film Mirror.

Arseny Tarkovsky lived through the Soviet period from beginning to end, preserving his inner independence and leaving a precious legacy of memorable lyrics that achieve a dream-like potency of suggestion. Oram’s inventive and beautifully shaped translations combine in an exemplary way poetic freedom and a careful attention to the form and the sentiment of the originals.

The themes which Volha Hapeyeva deals with are not the easiest: war, death, gender. But she doesn’t make it hard for the reader to follow her lyrical confrontation with these themes. Hapeyeva’s language gains its power from its almost laconic simplicity. Her poetry evokes melody; combativeness exudes from all the text pores of the poems.

The treasure's there / only for the finding.
Every good poem is an expedition of sorts. In lesser work we are led towards a carefully landscaped revelation which always belongs wholly to the poet, but in the effective poem we're set loose and, following a map partly of our own making, find ourselves at last in a distant corner of ourselves. In The Marks on the Map Brian Johnstone takes us on a remarkable journey, not just to discover what is there, but also what was there, mapping time as well as space. This is one map I would urge readers to follow, because the world through which Johnstone guides us is so utterly moving, so totally familiar and so entirely new.

Surefooted in his work as cartographer of the overlooked, Johnstone takes us on an expansive journey in this absorbing collection of tributes, stories and memories as he maps out the effects of time on people and places. Throughout, we encounter that characteristic Johnstone timbre — one of respect, sophistication and, above all, grace.

Poetry is a world of the imagination that begins with the loneliness and pain of a first-person persona but does not neglect social pain, but rather accompanies it. Thanks to the poem, the first-person can go beyond the first-person and “I” can become “we.” The eggs, pots, brooms, washing lines, flounders, croakers, and cutting boards that I evoke in my poems are metaphors of fragile and endangered women’s existence, as well as being universal human metaphors. I desperately go rowing across a first-person world in an attempt to reach a universal sea.

[Kim Seung-Hee's] poems vividly depict the pitiful state of one who relies on a distant gleam of light as they follow a path across dark fields. The darker the language of her poetry seems, the more it becomes a premonition of dawn….