Tag: poetry

review of new publication by Patrick Dubost

I have a review up on Stride Magazine blog, of Patrick Dubost’s new publication Manifesto for a Modern Theatre In 49 Interchangeable And Optional Articles. Published by Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, the work is translated from the French by Eleanor Margolies, and includes photocollage illustrations by Sylvie Villaume.

In much of Dubost’s wider practice he performs with musicians, where his vocal improvisation operates among and with other instruments in live sound events. These events are a mode of theatre, at work with language, sound, and meaning, with what can be heard, and what might be understood. The 49 articles in this Manifesto might be read as a guide or annotation for those performances. And as a prompt to performances by other readers.

You can read the review HERE.

poems on tentacular issue 4

I have two poems, ‘Gules‘ and ‘Cuirass‘ from the Blazon sequence out now on the website tentacular. Edited by Jonathan Catherall, issue 4 is focused on varieties of translation, visual, from other languages, across divides.

The poems in Blazon are the outcome of a sequence of homolinguistic translation procedures. These were carried out using chance guided operations and substitutions on the textual content of an online directory of websites.


‘She Mick …’ in Purge 6

The latest issue of the occasional magazine Purge, edited by Robert Hampson has just arrived. Purge 6: hostile environment includes work by Allen Fisher, Drew Milne, Karen Sandhu, David Herd and Amy Evans Bauer among others. My piece ‘She Mick on JB’s Island’ is published as a supplement to this issue.

‘hostile environment’ refers to the expressed policy in 2012 of Theresa May, then Home Secretary. It was her intention to make the UK a hostile environment for migrants and those seeking asylum. In practice, the implementation of this policy distributed the function of border officials into the everyday work of administrators in hospitals, universities, letting agencies etc.

‘She Mick on JB’s Island’ draws on my mother’s experience of migration to the UK in the 1950s, and folds this with a sense of the limiting of expression, silencing of voices, caused by this hostile environment, and the disproportionate impact of the policy on lives of women.

Review of Rowan Evans’ Last Verses of Beccán

My review of Rowan Evans’ new publication from Guillemot Press, The Last Verses of Beccán is live now on the Stride website.

Lastness, lateness and the left behind are woven through this book, from the title, to references to last things (‘eschaton’), to grave slabs, cemeteries and remains within the shifting sounds and forms of its mix of languages. Here are heard the leftovers of poems written on the edge, in the far outposts of a Christian world, the last place before wide ocean, somewhere to go to escape your fate or to end your days.

Read the rest of the review HERE.

More details of the publication at Guillemot Press.