Poetry Book Society Spring 2022 Bulletin E-Book

• Herausgeber: Poetry Book Society
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 48

Beschreibung

The Poetry Book Society was founded by T.S. Eliot to share the joy of poetry. It's a unique poetry book club and every quarter our expert selectors choose the very best new books to deliver to our members across the globe. Our lively quarterly magazine is packed full of sneak preview poems from all the selected poets, alongside exclusive interviews, insightful reviews by the Ledbury Critics and extensive listings of every book and pamphlet published this quarter. You can find out more and join our poetry community today at www.poetrybooks.co.uk.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

CHOICE

Emily Berry • Unexhausted Time • Faber

RECOMMENDATIONS

Will Alexander • Refractive Africa • Granta

Fiona Benson • Ephemeron • Cape

Warsan Shire • Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head • Chatto

Jessica Traynor • Pit Lullabies • Bloodaxe Books

SPECIAL COMMENDATION

Denise Riley • Lurex • Picador

TRANSLATION CHOICE

In the Same Light: 200 Tang Poems for our CenturyTranslated by Wong May • Carcanet

PAMPHLET CHOICE

Pip Osmond-Williams • Of Algae & Grief • Dempsey & Windle

WILD CARD

Jeremy Hooker • The Release • Shearsman Books

CHOICE SELECTORSRECOMMENDATIONSPECIAL COMMENDATION

SARAH HOWE& ANDREW McMILLAN

TRANSLATION SELECTOR

HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES

PAMPHLET SELECTORS

MARY JEAN CHAN& NICK MAKOHA

WILD CARD SELECTOR

CALEB FEMI

CONTRIBUTORS

SOPHIE O'NEILLNATHANIEL SPAINKYM DEYNLEDBURY CRITICS

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)

Complete

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

Single copies of the Bulletin £9.99

Cover Art Édouard Bossé, Unsplash

Copyright Poetry Book Society and contributors. All rights reserved.

ISBN   9781913129392    ISSN 0551-1690

ePub ISBN 9781913129590

ePDF ISBN 9781913129477

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

Welcome to the Spring 2022 Bulletin. We at the Poetry Book Society are looking forward to getting out in the world and hope to see many of our readers, poets and contributors over the course of the year. We can be found mainly in the north this spring and hope to see you at StAnza poetry festival in St Andrews on the 13th March for readings from Emily Berry, Will Alexander and Fiona Benson, or at our local Newcastle Poetry Festival in May. Wherever you are, we hope you can celebrate poetry this year and we really hope you enjoy this season’s selections.

Emily Berry is the Spring Choice with the outstanding Unexhausted Time, described by selector Anthony Anaxagorou, “as majestic as it is impressive”. The scope of the further recommendations and selections is immense, from the Tang dynasty to Greek myth, African post-colonial empowerment, anxiety of parenthood, notions of family, the body; it is a brilliant array of poetry and subject matter. The selector’s and poet’s commentary make for intriguing reading, I really hope they inspire you to either try a new poet’s work or invest in the latest from one already known to you.

We’re delighted to announce the winners of our Metro Poetry Prize too, Nicola Sealey and D.A. Prince. The prize was run in partnership with Nexus and judged by Alice at the PBS and the poet Degna Stone to give a platform to poetry in our local community. You can read the first prize-winning poem at the back of the Bulletin or see them printed on giant poster boards at Longbenton Metro Station in Tyne and Wear.

We’d also like to thank Mary Jean Chan for her excellent pamphlet selections over the last year, this is her final selection for the PBS and she hands over the baton to Nina Mingya Powles in the summer. We can’t wait to share her selections.

SOPHIE O’NEILL

PBS & INPRESS DIRECTOR

PBS CHOICE: EMILY BERRY

Emily Berry is the author of three poetry books: Dear Boy (2013), Stranger, Baby (2017) and Unexhausted Time (2022). She writes sleepcasts (bedtime stories) for the meditation app Headspace, and was a co-writer of The Breakfast Bible (2013), a compendium of breakfasts. Her lyric essay on agoraphobia, dreams and the imagination, ‘The Secret Country of Her Mind’, appears in the artist’s book Many Nights (2021) by Jacqui Kenny. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and editor of The Poetry Review, and lives in London, where she was born.

UNEXHAUSTED TIME

FABER | £10.99 | PBS PRICE £8.25– PBS CHOICE, SPRING 2022

In Emily Berry’s third full-length collection, Unexhausted Time, an astute shift in tone and theatre raises the book into an atmosphere of weighty searching, restlessness, and surprise. Berry is a master at prudently organising pronouns to complicate narratives and speakers – a feature she’s widely celebrated for in both her previous collections. The opening sequence balances a tension between speaker and addressee, one that resists clarity yet manages to beguile the reader by building enough trust, enabling poems to maintain their sense of delight and intrigue.

I decided to try and write to you

about what I’m experiencing, since

I have no techniques for helping myself.

The language gestures and bends into more obscure subjects, cultivating an asocial or timeless vortex which tugs the lens closer towards the speaker. The focus and psychology of the work appears in part to be retroactive, “It was a nice house, quite plain and tasteful, but it had a bad atmosphere. I don’t like the way things have turned out, but the law is the law.” Moving rapidly from a state of remembering into the present, Berry disrupts the very function of time through the foundation of memory, political malaise, and place.

One is never quite able to lose the sense of frustration and indignation in the collection’s overall character. Poems appear to be in conversation with each other or resisting each other, adding more layers to the book’s remit. Inflections of high Modernist writing, essayism and philosophical candour give rise to the political castigation which subtly tints much of the book. In ‘Nocturne’ a distinction is drawn between hypocritical conduct at a state level and how time / history very often repeats:

I never

saw the birth of a moon, but I witnessed