Tag: poetry

Review – A Thousand Mornings

Posted October 2, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 6 Comments

Review – A Thousand Mornings

A Thousand Mornings

by Mary Oliver

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 82
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

Whether studying the leaves of a tree or mourning her treasured dog Percy, Mary Oliver is beautifully open to the teachings contained within the smallest of moments. In A Thousand Mornings she explores, with startling clarity, humour and kindness, the mysteries of our daily experience.

I think A Thousand Mornings is my least favourite of Mary Oliver’s collections that I’ve read so far. It retains that strong sense of joy and wonder in the world that I enjoy about her work, so there’s that, but I didn’t connect with the individual poems as strongly as I’d hoped to.

I think… partly it felt too short? With a few more poems, a bit more chance to get my teeth into it, maybe I’d have gelled with it better? But it’s hard to say; you can only go on what’s there, and it didn’t sing to me the way I’d hoped.

I do love her work so much in general, though. The sense of love and joy in the whole world is palpable, and always enjoyable; she had such a gift for joy.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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Review – Love Sonnets and Elegies

Posted September 19, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Love Sonnets and Elegies

Love Sonnets & Elegies

by Louise Labé

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 121
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Louise Labé is commonly regarded as the most original woman poet of the French Renaissance. The daughter of an illiterate rope maker in Lyon, known to her contemporaries for her unusual learning as well as her skills as a singer and lutanist, Labé was in her thirties when she published her complete Works in 1555 and then disappeared from the scene, not to be rediscovered until the nineteenth century. Her love poetry, made famous by Rilke’s German versions, is published here with the originals en face and newly rendered into English by award-winning translator Richard Sieburth, who also includes a biographical chronology of the poet, notes, and an informative afterword to this edition. These Love Sonnets and Elegies confirm Labé’s reputation as the first modern Sappho.


I know very little about Louise Labé, but I was digging around in the National Poetry Library’s offerings for translated poetry, and dug up Love Sonnets & Elegies, a selection of… well, it’s in the title. The introduction gives a little bit of context about who Labé was (albeit I also went off and read Wikipedia and a few other pages to try to puzzle together a bit more).

The edition is bilingual, and in the ebook it’s all just continuous rather than a facing translation, which I found a bit annoying — it was harder to glance back and forth between the two, and since I can read French quite well, I did want to, while not being so good at French that I felt confident about reading French poetry easily…

I enjoyed Labé’s work quite a bit, in any case, especially when she slipped in references to Catullus. This stanza struck me from one of the poems:

How cruel a thing is fate, how inhumane!
Here I am, recovering from a scorpion’s bite,
Asking its venom to make me well again.

I found myself thinking for some reason, reading Labé’s poetry here, that she’d have done a wonderful voice for Vergil’s Dido.

All in all, a pretty good read. And I’d love a full-length biography of Labé, I think.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – Impossible Paradise

Posted September 11, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Impossible Paradise

Impossible Paradise

by Chen Yuhong

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 152
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

One of Taiwan’s most celebrated poets, Chen Yuhong draws on both Western and Asian literary traditions, inflected by her work as a translator of contemporary English-language women poets (Glück, Oswald, Duffy). This selection makes her art widely available in English for the first time.

Her award-winning translators, George O’Connell and Diana Shi, carry across the richly metaphorical lexicon of her poems and their uncanny inhabitation of places both real and imagined, conjuring mood, angles of thought or light, animal presence, and the tides of the seasons.

In a world where much that seemed united has frayed, Chen Yuhong’s finely balanced poems bring us news of other imagined worlds, and acknowledge the unexpected, its capacity to terrify or astonish.

I decided recently to try a bit more poetry in translation, and this collection of Chen Yuhong’s poetry, Impossible Paradise, is one of the picks that came out of that urge. The translations are collaborations between Diana Shi and George O’Connell, and there’s a translators’ note about the poems they picked and their methods of going about translation, which is pretty interesting.

There are also some brief notes on individual poems, but they’re presented after all the poems, which is kind of unhelpful. Luckily I didn’t find them too necessary to understand the poems.

I enjoyed Chen Yuhong’s work, all in all; I connected better with some poems than others, but I didn’t get impatient or immediately mentally disengage from any of them (which I always find myself wanting to do with certain poetic styles, e.g. poems full of apparent non-sequiturs, chained together like nonsense). There were a few I liked a lot, or sections of longer poems I liked — this one, for example:

You imagine
a seagull poetics,
each breaking wave
its turbulent poem,
a seagull theology
Solomon’s wisdom,
ceaseless Song of Songs.

I think the poem ‘Pharaoh’ was a favourite, pretty unsurprisingly from me.

So overall a good experience, I’d say!

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – Flowers of a Moment

Posted September 6, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Flowers of a Moment

Flowers of a Moment

by Ko Un

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 103
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Flowers of a Moment is a treasure trove of more than 180 brief poems by a major world poet at the apex of his career. A four-time Nobel Prize nominee, Ko Un grew up in Korea during the Japanese occupation. During the Korean War, he was conscripted by the People's Army. In 1952, he became a Buddhist and lived a monastic life for ten years. For his activism confronting South Korea's dictatorial military government, he was imprisoned and tortured. He has published more than one hundred volumes of poetry, essays, fiction, drama, and translations of Chinese poetry.

Flowers of a Moment is a collection of short poems by Ko Un, in translation from Korean. Some of them are only a few words long across a couple of lines: rather than long evocations of feelings and situations, it feels more like they’re a collection of moments of stillness and observation.

Predictably I liked this one, though it’s probably the most trite of the lot:

There has to be more energy for loving
than energy for hating
Here in this world,
and in the other world too,
there is a morning, evening, night worth
living

I light a lamp in solitude

A very quick read, but sometimes it was worth lingering with an image or feeling. It’s lightly illustrated as well, but I didn’t think that added a lot.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – The Weather Wheel

Posted September 3, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – The Weather Wheel

The Weather Wheel

by Mimi Khalvati

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 80
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

In these new poems, each of them written in couplets and contained within the space of 16 lines, Mimi Khalvati takes the weather, the seasons, and the passage of night and day as the ground on which she draws her emblems of human life and love. An extended elegy for her mother, the book is also a series of meditations on the small details of animals' lives and on the vulnerable animal within the human being.

I didn’t enjoy The Weather Wheel as much as I enjoyed the other collection I’ve read by Mimi Khalvati, though there were a few images and poems that struck me and will probably stick with me, mostly surrounding her grief for her mother, like this couplet:

I measured distances by her. My mother my compass,
my almanac and sundial, drawing me arcs in space.

Overall, not a favourite collection, but all the same, my feeling when I finished it was fairly positive, if that makes sense! Something I’m glad to have read, more for the overall impression than for individual poems.

I liked the Afterwardness collection quite a bit more, though.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – Eleanor Among the Saints

Posted August 27, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Eleanor Among the Saints

Eleanor Among the Saints

by Rachel Mann

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 80
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

In her second collection, Mann wrestles with the questions and possibilities raised when trans identity, faith and the limits of myth and language intersect and are tested. Eleanor Among the Saints is a study in the queer joy found in counter-factuals and fantasy, shaped through the prism of the disputed story of Eleanor Rykener, a medieval trans woman, seamstress and sex worker.

I got very irritated by aspects of the style in Rachel Mann’s Eleanor Among the Saints (omitting many definite and indefinite articles, for instance), but there were times it definitely managed to borrow the sound of scripture very effectively, and it often felt like it’d be very rich to read aloud, and to dig deep into and dissect with close reading — even if I didn’t enjoy it very much per se in and of itself.

I did love learning a little about John/Eleanor Rykener as a result of having read this; I appreciated the explanatory note afterwards, and the exploration of the details we know about Rykener’s life and what that might’ve been like. What she (I say she though it is always difficult to know how someone may have identified if they’d had the modern conception of gender to begin with) thought and felt, how she may have conceived of herself… we know very little, and Mann embroiders a lot.

I guess overall this is one I found more interesting than likeable, but I’m glad I gave it a shot.

I’m also feeling confirmed in this opinion because I watched Rachel Mann’s appearance on last year’s alumni University Challenge and found her so annoying in the way she behaved toward her team members. Not as annoying as people who break the rules and confer when they aren’t allowed to, but pretty dang annoying.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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Review – Obit

Posted August 22, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Obit

Obit: Poems

by Victoria Chang

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 123
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In Obit, Chang writes of "the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking." These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died ("civility," "language," "the future," "Mother's blue dress") and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living.

Victoria Chang’s Obit is — unsurprisingly — all about grief and loss, and not just the moment of someone’s death but also the moments of decline before, and the moments going through and sorting their things after, and many in between. It all circles round the loss of her mother and her father’s stroke (which took away his ability to understand and produce orderly language), casting forward and backward in time to try to make sense of it all.

The prose-poem obits are the strongest part, and I really disliked the layout of the poems in… I think it was part two? Unreadable with the spacing provided (at least in the ebook, but that seemed to be image files of the printed book for those sections, so I don’t think it was ebook formatting messing things up). It didn’t all strike a chord with me, but as I lingered with it and watched Chang reckon with the messy nonsense of grief and the living after, there were definitely parts that stood out, like this bit:

 When I told my children, the three of us hugged in a circle, burst into tears. As if the tears were already there crying on their own and we, the newly bereaved, exploded into them.

Overall, not a personal favourite, but an interesting collection and one I enjoyed.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – If All the World and Love Were Young

Posted August 16, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – If All the World and Love Were Young

If All the World and Love Were Young

by Stephen Sexton

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 115
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

When Stephen Sexton was young, video games were a way to slip through the looking glass; to be in two places at once; to be two people at once. In these poems about the death of his mother, this moving, otherworldly narrative takes us through the levels of Super Mario World, whose flowered landscapes bleed into our world, and ours, strange with loss, bleed into it. His remarkable debut is a daring exploration of memory, grief and the necessity of the unreal.


I wasn’t sure what to expect from Stephen Sexton’s If All the World and Love Were Young, knowing it was based around classic video games, and I felt a bit iffy when I first plunged in at the lack of punctuation. A few commas really wouldn’t go amiss… but as I read on, something grabbed me anyway.

The whole collection is basically haunted by his mother’s cancer, the first attempts at treating it, and her eventual death, and I found that a sense of sleeplessness, dread and grief filtered through, even though I didn’t follow some of the poems, even though some of them just seemed weird. Little bits and pieces caught at me, like this one:

 I take the Orpheus route from world up into another
via footholds and fissures and bone dry mouths in the sheer rock’s face
into the brightly-lit waiting room and something like wakefulness.

Overall, there weren’t a lot of individual poems I loved, but something about the collection as a whole got to me.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – Ambush at Still Lake

Posted August 9, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Ambush at Still Lake

Ambush at Still Lake

by Caroline Bird

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 83
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

Caroline Bird's new poems show us the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness after the happy ending. This is a collection about marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery in which a recurring dream is playing out: a world where mums impale themselves on pogo-sticks, serial killers rattle around in basements, baby monitors are haunted by someone else's baby and, through it all, love stays and stays like a stationary rollercoaster that turns out to be the scariest, most thrilling ride in the amusement park.

I admit to mostly picking up Caroline Bird’s Ambush at Still Lake for the pulpy cover, when browsing the National Poetry Library’s collection via random tags. Her editor’s reaction does sum things up pretty well:  “It is bleak, repellent and hilarious in an American Psycho-ish way. Hectic and vivid.”

I wasn’t a huge fan overall, though I recognised the poems as well written and well structured. Some of the ideas behind them are clever, a little amusing, but I just didn’t enjoy the grotesquerie of some of them, like the woman swallowing her kid’s toys and the descriptions of all that…

Not a collection for me, but I still find the pulpy cover amusing, and there were a few poems that did speak to me.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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Review – Winter Hours

Posted August 3, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Winter Hours

Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems and Poems

by Mary Oliver

Genres: Non-fiction, Poetry
Pages: 109
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, her most personal book yet "What good company Mary Oliver is!" the Los Angeles Times has remarked. And never more so than in this extraordinary and engaging gathering of nine essays, accompanied by a brief selection of new prose poems and poems. (One of the essays has been chosen as among the best of the year by THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 1998, another by The Anchor Essay Annual.) With the grace and precision that have won her legions of admirers, Oliver talks here of turtle eggs and housebuilding, of her surprise at an unexpected whistling she hears, of the "thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else." She talks of her own poems and of some of her favorite poets: Poe, writing of "our inescapable destiny," Frost and his ability to convey at once that "everything is all right, and everything is not all right," the "unmistakably joyful" Hopkins, and Whitman, seeking through his poetry "the replication of a miracle." And Oliver offers us a glimpse as well of her "private and natural self—something that must in the future be taken into consideration by any who would claim to know me."

After reading a couple of her poetry collections, I was keen to read anything else by Mary Oliver, so I picked up Winter Hours, which is composed of essays and prose poems. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, really; things don’t entirely fit together, though the strength of her writing skill and something of her attitude to the world comes across in each.

Distractingly, though, I can’t tell whether the essay on Edgar Allan Poe is intended to be a serious piece of consideration of his life and work. It seems like it, but then she… makes up something that I’ve absolutely never heard of and can find no reference to anywhere, suggesting that the name “Egaeus” (which she spells “Agaeus”) is close to the word “aegis”, which she defines as a sick note in English schools (in the present tense). That isn’t how you spell the name and that term is not a thing: definitely not in the present, and I can find no evidence that it ever was.

It was weirdly discombobulating and left me feeling out of kilter with the whole book. So… beautifully written, but I’m not sure how seriously to take any of it, and that really changed my enjoyment of it.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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