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A partial archive of the New Series.

A partial archive of the New Series, 2009-2023.

Getting away.

Tom Lowenstein: ‘Mina Gorji must write fast: her first book appeared in 2020 and this was followed by Scale in 2022. This is a speed which proclaims not hurry, but urgency and the pressure of life-enhancing splinters of vision.’

The ‘Poetry Notes’ list 2022.

Peter Riley: ‘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.’

A kind of hush.

Tom Lowenstein; ‘Brody’s agnostic mother presumably thus experienced an issue that was quintessentially Jewish. But that made it no less painful.’

India Objectified.

Tom Lowenstein: ‘This, in sum, is a book that could not have been written or presented differently. It is bewildering in both its wealth and diversity, and no single “native” devotee could know about or understand so many other traditions.’

Poetry Notes: Nine in early 2022.

Peter Riley: ‘Peter Dent has written and published a lot over the years (a list of 30 titles at the back), almost all of it in the form of prose poetry (which some denizens of creative writing classes seem to think is a thing of liberating revolutionary impact which they invented last week.)’

Poems from ‘Existence Phenomena’.

Tom Lowenstein: ‘Serenity is the goal. And this requires acceptance.
And there is no reason for assuming that this bundle of selves
should be exempt from the natural process.’

‘What about these birds?’

Peter Riley: ‘Prynne’s readership is indeed secure but the extent to which it is academy-centred is questionable, thus whether it is maintained by pressure of secondary attention rather than a particular kind of pressure the texts exert towards the cultivation of the barely legible.’

Messages of Bewilderment.

Tom Lowenstein: ‘But I’m pure and whole, aren’t I,
she submitted with childlike sincerity,
nor do I house material of any nature in my subconscious.’

‘Last kind words.’

Peter Riley: ‘The song was recorded in 1930 in a makeshift studio in Grafton, Wisconsin, and issued by Paramount Records as‘ Last Kind Words Blues’ on one side of a 78 rpm shellac disc with the musician’s name given as “Geeshie Wiley”. It’s not a simple lyric. It’s not about slavery, but slavery is there in it. It’s about the victims of war, but forgets that and after verse four goes off into transferable formulae (floating verses).’

To the muses.

Five Poems By TOM LOWENSTEIN.   O MUSE, WHEN I put my cuff to the sugar bowl and you come up smiling, how I love to play hide and seek with you, for aren’t we equally untrustworthy? And when you pretend sometimes to let me win, how charming but unsafe it feels to maintain, at […]

Reading Heine.

Tom Lowenstein: ‘In the bitterness of this self-preoccupation
you have contrived exquisite paradoxes
which are clinched with easily deployed rhymes.’

Peter Riley’s summer poetry 2020.

Peter Riley: ‘They differ greatly from each other, but if my intention has succeeded, they all allow the possibility of what Blake would have called “multiple vision”, however casually or marginally.’

More delicate, if minor, interconnections.

Tom Lowenstein: ‘Landlocked I remain, balanced uncertainly in the margin,
but still facing outward to some theoretically out of reach infinity.’

Seven more.

Tom Lowenstein: ‘As the spatula scrapes away debris, an artefact emerges with its tessellation warped, the colours veiled in dust. These are not consolidations of an imagined underworld: the lid, the crust, the integument of an interior, but conservation of soul life.’