Oliver Reynolds‘s most recent collection of poetry, Hodge, is published by Areté .
The thought of writing a poem about tramlines beginning: The city lies bound in its net of tramlines ... got no further. Go out and look at the tramlines, they don’t bind the city at all, they lie in the street between comradely ranks of cobblestones, go out and look at the city, it’s not bound, cities can’t be bound. No, tramlines are for putting small change on, the tram...
for Sebastian Barry
Possible seals disappearing far-out off Pembrokeshire, sleek commas suddenly lost in the sea’s murky prose,
came back to me (memories taking a year to surface) as we returned at midnight from the Laird and Dog.
It was our daily goal, two poets retreating from a Writers’ Retreat to beer’s bitter salve.
We’d walk out at twilight, up a drive squeezed...
In ‘Barn Roof’, one of her earliest poems, Molly Holden speaks of ‘quarried colours’. The phrase says much about both her artistic ambitions, which strove endlessly after...
Poetry written in dialect seems to be undergoing a resurgence. Tony Harrison has made extensive use of Northern idioms. Tom Paulin has been busy raiding Ulster (and, I suspect, Scottish)...
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