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’.
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