LIFELINES
Duncan Forbes
Enitharmon Press Paperback, pp126;
£10.99; ISBN 978-1-904634-65-2
Phil Sidney
‘Duncan Forbes writes civilised poetry in a civilised way,’ writes one Jim Burns in the blurb of Lifelines, a career-wide selection of Duncan Forbes’ poetry. The phrase is depressing in itself (it’s tempting to ask for Burns’ definition of ‘uncivilised poetry’), but even more so because it restricts the book’s appeal to certain types of reader. ‘Ah!’ they cry, ‘at last some civilised poetry! Let us read it around the tea-table, the better to augment our witty badinage.’ For Burns (and Enitharmon …

Archie Davies
Feathers float down my mind
white drifts in.
heat-hazed memories of unforgotten mornings
like lemon-cake drizzle drip through my thoughts.
a softness unequalled.
a joy, joys, remembered.
Fathomable, I find I can see those
hours
as if written in the light they were filled with.
A
Sifting
thought
hovers lower,
lovers embracing
sleeping
and waking.
Now, as we turn into this well-trod street
long ago planted with strong trees to last
and outlast
lives, we still know the step of four feet –
our strides inchiming entwining,
each enriching each.
your laugh plays in the echo of mine
our shadows mirror our sounds in mime.
the sun is low and weak,
but higher, warmer …

Jeremy Clarke
i.m. Andrew Nicholson
Light as litter, rain’s empty containers are blowing away.
The sun’s sudden light is overwhelming. It’s everywhere
and all at once and every thing is an object of its desire.
A blackbird is singing in a jewelled city.
I’m walking to the sound of water running. Through a delicate mist
rewriting the air – the rain’s rebound. Its slow rewind, with smells.
A new wind is learning its vowels and whispers.
And the day, renewed, restarts. From the beginning,
with the smell of morning. The revelation of colours,
the resumption of sounds, and their timid first …

At the British poetry world’s biggest annual prize, a strong shortlist including three former winners battle for the prestige and the cash. The victorious poet, however, comes as something of a surprise.
Dan Eltringham
T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize Readings, Southbank Centre, Sunday 17th January 2010
All quotation from the performances.
‘It was a cold coming we had of it/Just the worst time of year/For a journey,’ intones Simon Armitage, speaking as he walks onto the reading platform, northern vowels flattening the familiar lines from Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi.’ In the refined surroundings …

Sir Christopher Ricks is one of the most important and influential critics active today. Described by W.H.Auden as ‘exactly the kind of critic that every poet dreams of finding’, he has continuously been a leading figure in literary criticism since the Sixties, famous not only for his sensitive essays but also as a captivating lecturer.

He is the author of such renowned works as Milton’s Grand Style, The Force of Poetry and Dylan’s Visions of Sin as well as the editor of the still authoritative edition of Tennyson’s poetry. A …

CR: I think that a price is paid for absolutely everything in life. That we’re sitting here, you and I, means that I’m not sitting in a sunken sauna and you’re not having a gin and tonic. Everything we do must mean not doing something or other.

I think study is professional. But it must not become simply professionalised, it must keep in touch with amateur virtues without yielding to the amateurish. So that’s a Scylla and Charybdis.

Scott Jamison
Walt Whitman is watching me piss,
And I am that far gone that for a split
Second I consider stealing him,
Fumbling him out of his glass-trap
And folding him into my pocket
Like a map.
It all started in a kitchen cupboard,
With the very American misconception
That Uisce Bethad flows through my veins
And that my dry lips’ reception
Would be like a drought’s for rain.
I pay for my lies
As whisky flows out of me,
Taking its damn sweet time
An up yours to my drunk knees.
Zipped and buttoned, I finish up
And walk home, a beery parade float,
Telling MM …

Teo Tewson-Bozic
What has two arms, two legs,
Two wheels, two wings,
And a flock above it?
The man who caught a seagull
By the neck, then rode with it
Held-out at the front of his bicycle
While it screamed and beat its wings.
Close above him its kind followed
In angry, helpless circles.

THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE
By Orhan Pamuk
Faber and Faber, Paperback, pp. 532, ISBN: 978-0-571-23699-2
Price: £12.99
AM Griffin
Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence is an unnerving tale of one man’s attempt to stay both on and off the beaten track, and a demonstration that to step outside the rules of society is to step outside humanity itself.
For Pamuk’s protagonist, Kemal Bey, Istanbul becomes a place where dignity causes suffering, shame brings relief, and imagination and desire form the basis of his reality. Kemal is concerned with two things- love and time.  He …