Poetry from the UK & Ireland

A beautiful and extraordinary piece of work, written with such attentiveness to the world, to sound, to the poetic legacy. Many of the poems are touched with sharp sadness, a deep and philosophical awareness of how things are. Human politics, especially in the potent opening poems, speak through the natural world. Finely crafted, meticulously written and trimmed down to the essence of observation and emotion – I don’t read much in contemporary poetry that is so hard won. Time and time again I was struck by the power of individual poems, but simultaneously by their lightness and wryness.

Jennie Feldman’s writing has an exactitude of word to thought, thought to feeling, that makes her poetry entirely her own, fed as it is by so many different cultures and traditions. As a translator and as a citizen of the world, she travels between languages, histories and places. But her poetry brings something into English that was not here before.

Places you Leave is relentlessly energetic and politically insistent without ever being pedantic, these are knife-sharp glimpses of the world. The specificity of the details – spindling out over and again – never releases us. We’re yanked along image by image, observation by observation. And, suddenly, it occurs that we’re the angel going backwards with the world collapsing in our wake.

Like a great photographer, MARA BERGMAN celebrates the moment and detail at the core of memory. Together, her poems show the great changes families experience – the free and fearless life of a young woman set alongside a dying mother hanging on so she can hold a great-grandchild, the one-sided conversations we have with the dead.

Her dynamism is infectious – you are drawn into this family’s wonder, love, compassion, grief and happiness. Bergman’s poems remind me of Pablo Neruda’s belief in the driving force of love: ‘Hold on to that, don’t let it get away …’ and one of the final poems, ‘The Happiness’, delivers the book’s message: ‘Before it leaves, I will bury it deep enough to save.’

After reading these poems, you’ll feel braced and ready, you’ll feel wiser and more generous, you’ll want to hold on to moments that contain your own astonishment.

A welcome and most welcoming varied new collection of Mara Bergman’s richly textured and sharply focused poems that explore and celebrate what she memorably calls ‘the gloriously ordinary’.

Crossley-Holland uncovers not only words but an entire landscape which haunts and is rich in echoes.

His language has been honed by the Norfolk and Suffolk climate itself, and has the polish of split flint.

His poetry is accessible yet uncompromisingly contemporary...

It takes a pause in the familiar current of one's consciousness to come to one's accustomed place afresh and — as Eliot put it — 'know the place for the first time'. [...] The ability to see the essence behind the appearance is an art in which Crossley-Holland has few, if any, equals.

The whole pamphlet is heartbreakingly beautiful.

... incredibly powerful, forensic and unwavering, and of course word-perfect. I'm very taken by how unexpected so many of your turns of phrase are, the way you move between powerful punches and graceful almost-analytical perspectives. A work of art...