Peter Riley’s list of titles noted, current through July 2022:
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Jean-Luc Chanterret, The Lascaux Notebooks, edited and translated by Philip Terry. Carcanet 2022. 404pp paperback, £20.00.
This could be the point at which “modern poetry” invents itself into a complete (underground ) nonentity.
Tony Connor, A Century of Childhoods. Kin Press 2022. 48pp pamphlet, $1o.95.
What was surprising was not so much that Tony Connor was still writing poems, having given the impression that he stopped about 15 years ago, but that the poems are modern. One hundred four-line poems, entirely without active verbs: that sense of suspended action over large extent.
Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey, Into the Interior. Shearsman Books 2022. 32pp pamphlet. £6.50
Mark Dow, Plain Talk Rising: Poems. PTR (New York) 2018. 58pp pamphlet
Alan Halsey, Remarks of Uncertain Consequence. Five Seasons Press 2022. 128pp paperback.
Sadly, Alan Halsey, fabulator of poems, graphics, publications, free choruses, second-hand books and many other artefacts, died in October 2022.
David Herd, Walk Song. Shearsman 2022. 92pp Paperback, £10.95.
Andrew Jordan, The Trusty Servant. Shearsman Books 2022. 72pp paperback. £12.95
Tom Lowenstein, The Bridge at Uji. Shearsman Books 2022 . 126pp paperback.
117 short poems, turning to face the diurnal challenge which the river transects from below.
The Letters of Douglas Oliver and J.H.Prynne 1967-2000, edited by Joe Luna. Amsterdam and Sophia, The Last Books 2022. 208pp paperback.
Those who succumbed to the recently published correspondence of Prynne and Olson, will find this a more balanced exchange, less messianic and more open — more indeed of a pleasure mutually discovered in the process of expansion. A venture, then, for each poet to find out what he has created as it bounces off the other, and declared without self-protection. There is some amicable dissonance towards the end regarding Prynne’s difficulty and what Prynne called Oliver’s “populism” but the central substance is always poetry itself, rather than the poet or his ideas. I think anyone could disagree with everything either of them says and still find this a major documentation of what was going on behind British poetry in the mid-century.
Alan Morrison, Green Hauntings: New and Selected Poems 2006-2016. Caparison 2022. 322pp hardback, £15.00
(“…his ability to transmute social history into highly readable long form poems.”)
Franca Mancinelli, The Butterfly Cemetery. Translated from the Italian by John Taylor. Bitter Oleander Press (NY) 2022. Bilingual text. 186pp paperback.
Osip Mandelstam, The Voronezh Workbooks, translated from the Russian by Alistair Noon. Shearsman 2022. 178pp Paperback, £13.00
Osip Mandelstam, Occasional and Joke Poems, translated from the Russian by Alistair Noon. Shearsman 2022. 106pp Paperback, £11.0)O
Osip Mandelstam, Whoever Has Found A Horseshoe, translated by Anthony Barnett. Drawings by Lucy Rose Cunningham. Allardyce Book ABP 2023 [sic]. 30pp card-bound.
Meticulously and affectionately adjusted to the favoured version.
Denise Riley, Lurex. Picador 2022. 74pp paperback £11.00
Maurice Scully, Airs. Shearsman Books 2022. 126pp paperback.
José-Flore Tappy, Trás-os-Montes. Translated from the French by John Taylor. Bilingual text. Bitter Oleander Press 2021. 206pp paperback $22.00
♦
Peter Riley, for ten years poetry editor of The Fortnightly Review’s New Series, is a former editor of Collection, and the author of fifteen books of poetry (including The Glacial Stairway [Carcanet, 2011]) – and some of prose. He lives in Yorkshire and is the recipient of a 2012 Cholmondeley Award for poetry.
Peter Riley’s Collected Poems, containing work from 1962 to 2017, was published in two volumes by Shearsman in 2018, followed by Truth, Justice, and the Companionship of Owls from Longbarrow Press in 2019. An earlier book, Due North, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2015. A collection of his ‘Poetry Notes’ columns has been collected in The Fortnightly Reviews: Poetry Notes 2012-2014, and published in 2015 by Odd Volumes, our imprint. A second volume is in the works. An archive of his Fortnightly columns is here.
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