Poetry Book Society Autumn 2021 Bulletin E-Book

• Herausgeber: Poetry Book Society
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 56

Beschreibung

The Poetry Book Society's quarterly poetry magazine featuring sneak preview poems, exclusive interviews with major worldwide poets, reviews and extensive listings.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

CHOICE

Hannah Lowe • The Kids • Bloodaxe Books

RECOMMENDATIONS

Raymond Antrobus • All The Names Given • Picador

Togara Muzanenhamo • Virga • Carcanet

Jack Underwood • A Year in the New Life • Faber

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe • Auguries of a Minor God • Faber

SPECIAL COMMENDATION

Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate EmergencyEd. Kate Simpson • Valley Press

TRANSLATION CHOICE

Jacek Gutorow• Invisible • Trans. Piotr Florczyk • Arc Publications

PAMPHLET CHOICE

Tanatsei Gambura • Things I Have Forgotten Before • Bad Betty Press

WILD CARD

Threa Almontaser • The Wild Fox of Yemen • Picador

CHOICE SELECTORSRECOMMENDATIONSPECIAL COMMENDATION

SARAH HOWE& ANDREW McMILLAN

TRANSLATION SELECTOR

LORETTA COLLINS KLOBAH

PAMPHLET SELECTORS

MARY JEAN CHAN& NICK MAKOHA

WILD CARD SELECTOR

ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU

CONTRIBUTORS

SOPHIE O'NEILLNATHANIEL SPAINKYM DEYN

EDITORIAL & DESIGN

ALICE KATE MULLEN

Join the PBS

Choice

4 Books a Year: 4 Choice books & 4 Bulletins (UK £55, Europe £65, ROW £75)

World

8 Books: 4 Choices, 4 Translation books & 4 Bulletins (£98, £120, £132)

Charter

20 Books: 4 Choices, 16 Recommendations & 4 Bulletins (£180, £210, £235)

Complete

24 Books: 4 Choices, 16 Recommendations, 4 Translations & 4 Bulletins (£223, £265, £292)

Single copies of the Bulletin£9.99

Cover ArtI Want To Live With No Fear, courtesy of Shilpa Gupta Photographer Scott Beseler

Copyright Poetry Book Society and contributors. All rights reserved.

ISBN 9781913129279 ISSN 0551-1690

ePub ISBN 9781913129378

ePDF ISBN 9781913129385

Poetry Book Society | Milburn House | Dean Street | Newcastle upon Tyne | NE1 1LF

0191 230 8100 | [email protected]

WWW.POETRYBOOKS.CO.UK

LETTER FROM THE PBS

This Autumn Bulletin will be shipping as summer ends. I hope you have all managed to have a break and enjoy some of the good weather we have had, whether home or abroad – maybe even been to a literary event or two! And we thank you for making the choice to buy from the PBS, buying fabulous poetry books direct from us over the summer and into autumn. We know there are other options out there and we really appreciate your support!

The Autumn Choice goes to Hannah Lowe with The Kids. She writes in her commentary that she learnt as much as she taught in her time as a secondary school teacher; such a beautiful sentiment which feels apt for the selections in this Bulletin. You can watch Hannah reading her poems online at our PBS Showcase with Kazim Ali and Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe at Durham Book Festival in October and at a virtual PBS NCLA event with Raymond Antrobus at 7pm on the 25th November. Check out our website and social media for details.

Across this brilliant array of titles there is an invitation to pause for thought and to learn. We are asked to question how to live in the world today, read the space and the silence, consider the climate emergency, parenthood, untethered bodies, internationalism. There is so much to absorb, appreciate and take in from the collections, personally I am finding it hard to decide where to begin.

We are always looking for ways to support poets and their writing, and we now have resources to help you, our readers, with your reading! Introducing Readers Notes, which will be available in the Members Area of our website as soon as this Bulletin has taken flight. Three poems are included from this season’s titles with helpful discussion points. We hope this will be useful for those of you in poetry book clubs, and those reading independently. Alongside our Instagram Live Book Club, which you can catch up with on our Youtube channel, we are creating a brilliant PBS member’s resource.

Prize season will be upon us before we know it, as with previous years we have a special “bundle” offer for the Forward Prizes including all ten shortlisted titles, available to order from our website www.poetrybooks.co.uk or over the phone.

SOPHIE O’NEILL

PBS & INPRESS DIRECTOR

PBS CHOICE: HANNAH LOWE

Hannah Lowe was born in Ilford to an English mother and Jamaican-Chinese father. She has worked as a teacher of literature, and is now a lecturer in Creative Writing at Brunel University. Her first book-length collection Chick (Bloodaxe Books, 2013) won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry, and was selected for the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets 2014 promotion. This was followed by her family memoir Long Time No See (Periscope, 2015), which was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Her second collection Chan was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2016 and in 2020 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors.

THE KIDS

BLOODAXE BOOKS | £10.99 | PBS PRICE £8.25– PBS CHOICE, AUTUMN 2021

The opening of the very first poem in this collection of sonnets sets up the tension and rhythm within the confines of the form which Lowe is able to make great use of:

My father was dead. I rode to work each morning

through Farringdon, down Charterhouse Street,

and saw the same white dog – a terrier – licking

a puddle of blood, leaked by the morning meat

The play of caesura against enjambement, the cleverness of the ending of line three, which presents something cute before giving us immediate and visceral horror as we turn into the next line, show Lowe fully at home, calm and confident as a sonneteer.

Lowe has spoken elsewhere of the idea of the sonnet as a classroom, which makes me think both of its walls of containment and its windows outside. The other layer here is the awareness of sonnet traditions within education: early on the poet climbs past “Shakespeare’s doubtful face” on the way to teach, and in ‘The Art of Teaching II’, we are told that:

Boredom hangs like a low cloud in the classroom...

...there is no volta here, no turn,

just more of the same

The language of the sonnet itself becomes the language of the environment, just as the classroom itself mimics that sonnet shape.

As the collection progresses, we move backwards from the teacher to the pupil, exploring the awkward triumphs and difficulties of adolescence, and then forwards into motherhood, and the raising of a child. Sometimes the sonnet unrolls its lines, sometimes it tips sideways and, at one vital moment, in ‘The Stroke’, five sonnets run together, the emotion and weight of the moment temporarily breaking down the form’s own defences.