Reviews on The Review

Sometimes a set of poems seem to emerge with an almost all-consuming inevitability. One such was and is Crow. Another must have been The Ballads of Kukutis on its first appearance in Lituania in 1977; or that’s how it might seem seen though Laima Vincé’s new translation and published by Arc. Both Crow [...]

This book is not Davoyan’s first publication in the UK; Heinemann brought out an edition of his work some years ago but Davoyan can seldom have been as well served as in this sumptuous Arc edition, with its felicitous translations and its loving production values.
 
In his introduction, W.N.Herbert notes that Davoyan’s work contains both the [...]

Reviewed by Edmund Prestwich,
The Belgian author Maurice Carême (1899 - 1978) is apparently much loved and seen as a major figure in his homeland. I read this volume with growing respect and a growing sense that for all their absence of obvious difficulty these were poems that would reward extensive rereading. Carême’s predilection for short [...]

Reviewed by Edmund Prestwich

Liz Almond’s new collection introduces us to a wide world, full of sensual pleasures but also of cruelties, pains and dangers which she suggests we must actively face and face down if we are to live life to the full.

“Rosita Rules the Roost” illustrates some of the strengths of [...]

Reviewed by Edmund Prestwich.

Pas revoir, Valerie Rouzeau’s brilliant sequence of poems on the death of her father, is challenging in many ways and on many levels. The linguistic demands posed by its verbal dislocations and fragmentations, its allusiveness, and multiple lexical ambiguities would have put it completely out of reach of my French if [...]