Jeremy Noel–Tod
To Swell a Progress
On Poetry
By Glyn Maxwell
Oberon Books 170pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry
By Fiona Sampson
Poetry is a violently opinionated business. The closest I have come to a civil war was – quite seriously – a conference on versification. Poetry lovers, however, tend to be polite people who express their feelings in convoluted ways. Hence, perhaps, their love of poetry, but also the incoherent quality of much poetry criticism.
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'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings