Poetry Review 108/02 Summer 2018

The Poetry Review Volume 108, No 2, Summer 2018

When I reread this issue’s poetry, I noticed that “the sea is to be heard all through it”, which is what Virginia Woolf said in her diaries of To the Lighthouse. Maybe I was particularly listening out for it. “[T]he sea’s mouth is louder now”, writes Mel Pryor in ‘Cliff’, “than the spoken word”. We talk about the sea as if it is one thing. But the sea is not one thing, just as language is not one thing – its iterations are infinite; “the sea’s many tongues” (Pryor again) have much to say, and – like poets, like people – many different means of communicating.

from Emily Berry’s Editorial

Poems

Heather Christle, Thank you for all your help, When It’s a Jar
Richard Price, I would like to meet people
Rachael Allen, Promenade, Desiccated Porcine Armour Thyroid Remedies
Mel Pryor, Night Watch with Stars and Considered Lilies, Cliff
Anzhelina Polonskaya / Andrew Wachtel, ‘Everything moves toward the sea’, Unfinished Music
Hagiwara Kyojiro / Sho Sugita, from Death Sentence
Andre Bagoo, from The Scarlet Ibis
Anita Pati, Dodo Provocateur
A.K. Blakemore, dicks like jesus, mouse
Hugo Williams, The Deal, Bucephalus, A Marvel of the Age, St Pancras Old Church and Hospital
Róisín Tierney, Pity the Squid
Jenna Clake, Cloud Appreciation Society
Ulrike Almut Sandig / Karen Leeder, Gold-Marie’s dream, Pitch-Marie’s fever dream
Leonardo Boix, from Table Variations
Clara Janés / Louis Bourne, No Truce, The Dunes of Your Shoulders
Iain Twiddy, The Needles, The Hearing Aid
Helen Mort, Rain Twice
Mary Jean Chan, The Fencer
Liz Berry, Spiritualist Church, Early, Placenta
Wayne Holloway-Smith, [Extracts from Love]
Vidyan Ravinthiran, Mercy Invincibility, Conversation
Martina Evans, Clinical Indications
Hugh McMillan, Mongrels, Rummaging in a box on St Andrew’s Day
James Byrne, from WITHDRAWALS
Peter Gizzi, The Present Is Constant Elegy, Sky Burial

Enquiry

Essays on translation by Khairani Barokka, Sophie Collins and Carole Satyamurti

Report

The edge of the language: Katrina Naomi on poetry and poets in Japan

Reviews

So Mayer reviews an anthology of Māori Poetry
Alexa Winik on Sophie Collins, Lila Matsumoto and A.K. Blakemore
Kit Fan on Robin Robertson and David Harsent
Jennifer Wong on Li-Young Lee and Faisal Mohyuddin
Declan Ryan on Hannah Sullivan, Abigail Parry and Phoebe Power
George Szirtes reviews Luljeta Lleshanaku and Volker von Törne
Srishti Krishnamoorthy-Cavell reviews Dorothea Lasky and Emily Critchley
Dzifa Benson on new translations of Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf, Ana Blandiana and Cevat Çapan
Amy Key considers the lost and found work of Joan Murray

The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2017

Ocean Vuong introduces his choice of winner: Raymond Antrobus’s ‘Sound Machine’