Lesley Sharpe considers the element of space in ‘The Glass Essay’ by Anne Carson

‘It is as if’, says Anne Carson’s narrator in the third section of The Glass Essay, ‘we have all been lowered into an atmosphere of glass’, .…Read more

First published in The Alchemy Spoon 7, Summer 2022

All images from Culpeper’s Complete Herbal , first published 1653

‘Snow reluctant to melt’: the alchemy of the imagination in Michael Longley’s ‘The Linen Industry’.

Creating gold from dust has always been an alchemist’s art, a transformation which Carl Jung calledthe liberation of spirit from ‘the darkness of matter’…Read more

First published in The Alchemy Spoon 1, Summer 2020

‘Essence of winter sleep is upon us’: Lesley Sharpe considers the pull of seasonal change in Robert Frost’s After Apple-Picking.

Robert Frost’s ‘After Apple-Picking’ is the perfect autumn poem, unsentimental and filled with the kind of disorientation which is a mark of both rapture and ripeness…Read More

First published in The Alchemy Spoon 5, Winter 2021

A ‘wild patience’: magic and transformation in Integrity by Adrienne Rich

The ‘wild patience’ that opens this poem conjures an image of something held in both a delicate balance, and an impossible tension for the speaker, a woman at a certain stage of her life… Read more

First published in The Alchemy Spoon 3, April 2021

Serena Alagappan’s first pamphlet, Sensitive to Temperature, feels into the personal and wider implications of change, with temperature as barometer for everything that shifts beyond the poet’s control. Read more

In Gail McConnell’s first collection, The Sun is Open, what is not said, or seen, is as powerful as what is. Creating a complex portrait of the Belfast of her childhood, McConnell interrogates the construction of consciousness, and the authorities which shape perception, in a world darkened by the violence woven both from, and into it. This growth of a poet’s mind…Read more

In poems that are as inventive in their forms as in their language, Michelle Penn’s sequence Paper Crusade explores the many uses of power. Inspired in part by an interpretation in dance of The Tempest, Penn’s poems draw on and move beyond the intertextual reverberations of Shakespeare’s play to unfold themselves in voices that are both archetypal and unpredictable, reaching deep…Read more

Sarah Westcott’s keen-eyed second collection, Bloom, deals in surfaces that shift and cut, resist, ‘knives turned in the light’, ‘the lake’s blue skin’ ‘the crust of birds’, and those that create and dissolve boundaries…Read more

Naush Sabah’s debut pamphlet Litanies opens with a compelling account of the narrator’s renunciation of religious faith, an Islamic inheritance and its authority. ‘I dared’, she says,…Read more

In her second pamphlet, Vital Capacity, Fiona Larkin explores both the complex biological processes of the lung, and the ephemerality of breath: breath as life force, as rhythm, language, and song…Read more

Corrupted Poets’ anthology Living with other people proposes a range of perspectives to explore what it means to inhabit, and share, physical and emotional spaces, an editorial project which, gathering poems and art on so large a theme, is necessarily ambitious. Read more

Chris Hardy’s latest collection Key to the Highway maps a journey from the poet’s early years to later life – a coming of age that spans seasons and continents, city life and the natural world - its ‘jungle and savannah’, its hornbills, snakes and hawks – to examine, ultimately, what remains…Read more

Heron 1 read more

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Heron 3 read more

Review of KMS Birthday lecture 2018 Mansfield & DH Lawrence…Read more

Figure Group with the Artist, Another Woman and Two Children by French Windows by Vanessa Bell (1879–1961)

Review of KMS Birthday Lecture 2012…Read more

Grasse, Provence, Aesthetica 2024

Lighthouse 24 Spring 2022

Revolution Finished Creatures 8 2023

Labyrinth Live Canon Anthology 2022

Antler Dreamer Aesthetica 2017

Tiger in a Tropical Storm Finished Creatures 1 2019

River, Lady Fern, Second Sight Invisible Zoos (Eithan Bridge 2019)

Orchid

The dictionary concurs, The Alchemy Spoon 2: Metal

The Reflecting Pool, after you left, arguments against sun, Thresholds (Clayhanger Press 2022)

Encounter Finished Creatures 4 (Stranger) 2020

Fever Finished Creatures 6 (Pressure) 2022