Oliver Dennis
Three New Collections
Love’s Bonfire
By Tom Paulin
Faber & Faber 52pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
Voluntary
By Adam Thorpe
Jonathan Cape 69pp £10 order from our bookshop
The Dark Film
By Paul Farley
Picador 56pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
In an early poem, ‘Presbyterian Study’, Tom Paulin wrote admiringly of ‘choosing the free way,/Not the formal’. It is a mode that he has pursued in poetry for more than thirty years now and one that he brings to some kind of fruition in his delightful and unexpectedly poignant new volume, Love’s Bonfire. The contained and simmering aspects of Paulin’s early work seem here to have given way, finally, to something much more playful and sweet, although a bleak sort of piquancy remains. There is a likeable, boyish modesty about many of these poems, which at times recall the perceptive gabbling of a young child – tuneful and unbridled, though never shrill. As one poem has it, Love’s Bonfire offers readers ‘the honest truth/according to Tom’.
Paulin’s particular brogue – gradually perfected over the course of his career – has for a long time demonstrated a rare ability to go on surprising the reader with its twists and turns, authorial intrusions, repetitions, snatches of dialect and so on (the idiom owes a debt to Frank O’Hara).
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Where now for active asset-management in the wake of the Woodford Equity Income collapse? My review of @davidricketts's When the Fund Stops and @OwenWalker0's Built On A Lie in @Lit_Review https://literaryreview.co.uk/stock-horror-2
'What if the 1492 "discovery" of America had been a fiasco, the major effect of which was to alert the Incas to the existence of a land to the east that might be ripe for conquest?'
@lieutenantkije on Laurent Binet's new novel, 'Civilisations'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/1492-and-all-that
'Humans may be the supremely musical animal, but, with or without us, this is a musical planet.'
@MathewJLyons on how music on earth began.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/symphony-of-a-thousand-millennia