Tara Bergin won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize in 2014 with This is Yarrow, which also received the Shine/Strong Award, and was shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award: the Poetry Book Society named her a Next Generation Poet. The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (Carcanet, 2017), a PBS recommend...

Poetry reviewing can be a thankless task. Often you’ve little to say as to those you’ll be writing about, and you can be restricted in terms of what it’s possible to write – by the number of words available, and the need to be introductory , effervescently so (literary journalism has its own languag...

Erotic poems are hard to write. Every year, The Literary Review awards a booby prize for bad sex in fiction, and perhaps there should be one for verse too. It’s often given to authors who’ve employed bizarre metaphors and grotesquely elongated conceits, who make us cringe in their questing after bot...

I’ll begin with ‘Les Énervés de Jumièges’, the poem Dugdale discusses in her interview for this edition of Prac Crit. Ekphrastic poems respond to, are provoked into being by, a difficulty which has become (for the poet; and, she hopes, for the reader) enthralling. For verse and visual art can never ...

Like Hopper had travelled in time to Glencoe / – the wall orange with sun, two gilt mirrors / and Brenda’s lad looking on from his stool; / [X] / / as she croons to her lambent baby bump / you eye the cuttings on your lap, / silent as the Girl at Sewing Machine. / [X] / / None of these f...