Ben Parker
Ben Parker completed an MA in Creative Writing at UEA in 2008. He is currently working at Berghahn Books, an academic publisher based in Oxford that specialises in the humanities. When not lounging around reading poetry he tries to get serious with some popular science. He can also be found half-way up a climbing wall most weeks. His website is: https://sites.google.com/site/benparkerpoetry/
Low-Tide Lottery, by Claire Trévien
Reviewed on November 16, 2011
Low-Tide Lottery is the 8th release in Salt’s Modern Voices series, an ongoing project publishing short books by poet’s without full collections to their name, but who are well-established on the magazine and performance scene. As with Faber’s New Voices series, it is good to see some of the major publishers of poetry offering a [...]
Black Cat Bone, by John Burnside
Reviewed on September 12, 2011
Black Cat Bone opens with ‘The Fair Chase’, an 11-page poem concerning a hunter pursuing an unnamed quarry. Beginning with a long piece such as this is a risky gambit, with most contemporary poets tending to place them near the end of a book. This gives them the chance to win the reader’s trust and [...]
The King’s English, by Kingsley Amis
Reviewed on July 21, 2011
The ‘King’ of the title is of course Kingsley Amis, under a nickname which he ‘tolerated’ according to his son Martin Amis in the introduction. This book, published posthumously, is Kingsley’s take on good use of the English language, a sort of updated and more personal version of the Fowler brothers’ 1906 book of the [...]
Rain, by Don Paterson
Reviewed on July 18, 2011
When Don Paterson’s Landing Light came out in 2004 it cemented his position in the forefront of British poetry. His work could no longer be labelled as simply laddish and playful, a view that had been understandable though not accurate, following his first two collections, Nil Nil and God’s Gift to Women. This new level [...]
Farmers Cross, by Bernard O’Donoghue
Reviewed on June 8, 2011
Bernard O’Donoghue was born in Ireland, but moved to England when he was 16; he was educated first at a Manchester grammar, then at Oxford where he is still a fellow. As such he is often classified as that recognisable character the Irish émigré, along with Beckett, Joyce, and now to some extent Paul Muldoon. [...]
Pure Hustle, by Kate Potts
Reviewed on May 31, 2011
Kate Potts has previously published a pamphlet, Whichever Music, and appeared in the Bloodaxe anthology of new poets, Voice Recognition, in which she was one of the stand-out writers. Pure Hustle is her debut collection and will not disappoint those who have previously encountered her work. Those for whom Pure Hustle is their first experience [...]
November, by Sean O’Brien
Reviewed on May 17, 2011
The titles of works of literature carry a certain amount of weight beyond mere semantic content by virtue of their privileged position alone; in works of poetry, where words are subject to particularly fierce interrogation, that weight is increased. November, the title of Sean O’Brien’s new collection, inevitably carries with it connotations of conclusion and [...]
Family Values, by Wendy Cope
Reviewed on April 28, 2011
Despite the fact that the Modernist movement in literature is over 100 years old, there are still those who believe that the free-verse style which came to define it is the standard mode of contemporary poetry; bemoaning the lack of proper rhymes in today’s poetry they yearn for a vague golden-age somewhere in a past. [...]
Selected Poems, by Anthony Hecht
Reviewed on March 30, 2011
With some poets it is difficult not to apply knowledge of their personal history to the reading of their poems. In the case of the American poet Anthony Hecht one event seems so central to his work and his world view that it is impossible to ignore. On April 23rd 1945, aged 22, Anthony Hecht [...]
White Egrets, by Derek Walcott
Reviewed on March 23, 2011
There is a common view that winning the Nobel Prize is a mixed blessing for a writer. It is one of the highest recognitions they can be accorded, but it all too often signals the end of the greatest period of creativity. Since winning the Nobel in 1992 Derek Walcott has gone on to produce [...]
A Hundred Doors, by Michael Longley
Reviewed on March 18, 2011
The title of this new collection of poetry by Michael Longley ostensibly refers to a Byzantine church on the Greek island of Paros, visited by the poet in a piece of the same name. However, as with his poems the title means far more than simply the subject at hand. Memory features heavily in this [...]
The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, edited by A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth
Reviewed on March 7, 2011
If there is one poetic form that even non-specialists have heard of, it is the sonnet. This may be in part due to the ubiquity of Shakespeare’s 154–long sequence of them, lines from which have passed into common cultural parlance. However, he is far from the only exponent. The list of practitioners is long and [...]
Edgelands, by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts
Reviewed on March 5, 2011
Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, two well-regarded British poets, set out in Edgelands to explore those forgotten spaces that exist between city and countryside: neither one nor the other we know them mainly as wastelands, business parks, canals, power stations; places we generally ignore, seen most often from a car or train seat, or [...]
Sleeping it Off in Rapid City, by August Kleinzahler
Reviewed on February 27, 2011
The first four lines of the first poem in this ‘New and Selected’ edition of August Kleinzahler give a pretty good impression in miniature of his impressive range: “On a 700 foot thick shelf of Cretaceous pink sandstone / Nel mezzo … / Sixth floor turn right at the elevator / “The hotel of the [...]
Enchantment, by David Morley
Reviewed on February 25, 2011
David Morley’s poetry collection opens with a sonnet-sequence, written in memory of a friend of his. Although they have the requisite 14 lines Morley’s sonnets depart from tradition in a number of ways with line-lengths of around 15 to 20 syllables, and lacking end-rhymes, but building internal patterning with assonance and half-rhyme. The quality of [...]
Selected Poems and Translations, by Ezra Pound
Reviewed on February 16, 2011
Ezra Pound, on first reading TS Eliot, wrote “he has actually trained himself AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN”. Though Eliot received considerable help from the French Symbolist style, his case is certainly different to that of Pound. To become ‘Modern’ Pound turned to the past, learning all he could of the technicalities of verse [...]
Shakespeare, Sex, and Love, by Stanley Wells
Reviewed on February 10, 2011
The poetry of William Shakespeare runs the gamut from vulgar humour through to exquisite expressions of supreme love, touching at some point on every stage between the two. In his plays and in his poems he showed a remarkable understanding and fascination with the effects of desire, of both the purest and most impure kind. [...]
Night, by David Harsent
Reviewed on February 2, 2011
“There’s a smell of scorch in the air. And the time to be gone has gone.” So runs the last line of Night’s unnamed, prologue poem. The sense of menace in these two stripped-back and direct sentences goes only someway to preparing you for the shadowy and often threatening worlds David Harsent conjures in this [...]
Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, by Samuel Beckett
Reviewed on January 20, 2011
Texts for Nothing is the third and final volume in Faber’s new editions of Samuel Beckett’s short prose, following The Expelled and Company, and includes almost 30 pieces written between 1950 and 1976, some in English and some in French subsequently translated by Beckett. The works collected here are almost unanimous in their brevity, both [...]
Strange Likeness, by Chris Jones
Reviewed on January 9, 2011
The title, Strange Likeness, is taken from the 1971 collection Mercian Hymns by Geoffrey Hill, in which the reign of Offa, an Anglo-Saxon king, is merged with twentieth century events. However, beyond some discussion in the introduction, the work of Hill is not dealt with in Chris Jones’ analyses of the uses of Old English [...]
Selected Poems, by Wallace Stevens
Reviewed on January 7, 2011
Of the American-born High Modernist poets TS Eliot and Ezra Pound are perhaps the most recognizable names, with the details of their lives known almost as well as their poems. Wallace Stevens, on the other hand, is perhaps less familiar, certainly in the UK. His surprisingly conservative life-style (working in the legal department of an [...]
The Wrecking Light, by Robin Roberston
Reviewed on January 2, 2011
This is Robin Robertson’s fourth collection of poetry and the third to win one of the Forward prizes, this time for the Best Single Poem: ‘At Roane Head’. This is the penultimate poem in The Wrecking Light and contains in miniature many of the themes that run throughout the book: the sea, changes both physical [...]
Here Comes the Night, by Alan Gillis
Reviewed on December 28, 2010
As with his previous collection, the TS Eliot Prize shortlisted Hawks and Doves, the poems in this new work make direct use of contemporary events whilst also returning to the perennial themes of verse: love, death and beauty. Where Hawks and Doves drew on the language and events of, amongst many other sources, the war [...]
The Expelled, etc., by Samuel Beckett
Reviewed on December 21, 2010
In 1946, half-way through the story that was to become ‘The End’, Beckett stopped writing in English and started writing in French. From then on Beckett wrote almost exclusively in his adopted tongue, translating into English initially in partnership with other translators but eventually undertaking the process on his own. This change of language is [...]
The English Sweats, by James Brookes
Reviewed on December 13, 2010
The English Sweats is the debut pamphlet of the young British poet James Brookes, however the first two things we encounter in this book are not his poems but a quotation in English from Cassius Dio and then a quotation in Latin, reportedly a ‘caption to Henry Peacham’s Emblem 75. This gives a pretty accurate [...]
Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, by Don Paterson
Reviewed on November 27, 2010
Books of literary criticism do not frequently make you laugh out loud, and they reference Kanye West’s ‘Gold Digger’ even less frequently, yet Don Paterson’s Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets manages to do both while still providing a perceptive and erudite commentary on the most famous collection of poems in the English language. The book consists of [...]
The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce, by Matthew Bevis
Reviewed on November 18, 2010
This study by Matthew Bevis, part literary-criticism, part social-history, examines in depth the relationship between literature and political speech. With particular reference to Byron, Dickens, Tennyson and Joyce he considers how their writing was influenced by public voices and parliamentary discussion, how these influences manifested themselves in their published works, and how the writers themselves [...]
Company etc, by Samuel Beckett
Reviewed on November 10, 2010
“With leastening words say least best worse. For want of worser worst.” So writes Samuel Beckett in ‘Worstward Ho’, one of the four late prose fictions collected in this new edition by Faber. As an exhortation it may not strike one as particularly inspirational, yet in many ways it is the key objective for one [...]
Human Chain, by Seamus Heaney
Reviewed on October 25, 2010
The title poem of this collection is written in the 4-stanza 12-line form that Heaney perfected in his 1991 book, Seeing Things. It is a form which recurs throughout Human Chain, making up almost half the pieces. The human chain of the poem refers to the passing of bags of grain by aid-workers from hand [...]
Ludbrooke & Others, by Alan Brownjohn
Reviewed on October 20, 2010
For the past few years, in a number of newspapers and poetry magazines, Alan Brownjohn has been publishing 13-line poems whose titles all begin with the word ‘His’. The possessive pronoun refers to Ludbrooke, a roguish anti-hero of a particularly British kind: a deluded underdog, often drunk, often unsuccessful, yet always regarding himself as a [...]
Of Mutability, by Jo Shapcott
Reviewed on August 9, 2010
Other than her Rilke translations, published in 2001 by Faber as Tender Taxes, Of Mutability is Jo Shapcott’s first collection for 12 years. This long gap may have been partly a result of the illness to which she alludes in ‘Procedure’: “all that mess / I don’t want to comb through here because / it [...]
How I Escaped My Certain Fate, by Stewart Lee
Reviewed on August 5, 2010
Part-autobiography, part-script, part-critical commentary: How I Escaped My Certain Fate, by the comedian Stewart Lee, is something of an experiment. To my knowledge, no other such book exists. This seems entirely fitting for a performer who, after carving out a relatively straight-forward but highly amusing career with Richard Herring on Fist of Fun and This [...]
The Elephant, by Sławomir Mrożek
Reviewed on June 8, 2010
One of the ten books in Penguin’s new Central European Classics range The Elephant is a collection of short stories by the Polish author Sławomir Mrożek. Published first in 1957 they were written at a time when Poland was governed by Soviet implemented Communism and it is this ideology which looms large over the majority [...]
Satisdiction, by Ammon Shea
Reviewed on May 6, 2010
In writing a review of a book such as this one, it can be tempting to employ as many polysyllabic words as possible, particularly the obscure ones you have picked up as a result of reading it. However, this would go against the spirit of Satisdiction, the paperback edition of Ammon Shea’s account of reading [...]
On Monsters, by Stephen T. Asma
Reviewed on March 30, 2010
Late on in Stephen T. Asma’s On Monsters he concedes that “one will search in vain through this book to find a single compelling definition of monster.” As he goes on to say, this is not because he forgot to include one, but rather because he does not think there is one. What qualifies as [...]
The Eerie Silence, by Paul Davies
Reviewed on March 5, 2010
Are we alone in the universe? This question, which forms the subtitle for Paul Davies’ new book, must rank as one of the most scientifically and philosophically interesting that we can ask. What makes it perhaps even more interesting is that unlike questions such as ‘why are we here?’ it presents us with only two [...]
How Many Friends Does One Person Need?, by Robin Dunbar
Reviewed on February 1, 2010
The answer to the question posed by the title, How Many Friends Does One Person Need?, is, according to Robin Dunbar, 150. Or, rather, no more than 150. This figure has become known as ‘Dunbar’s Number’ and is based on extensive studies conducted in a wide range of societies. If nothing else it should provide [...]
Why Not Socialism?, by GA Cohen
Reviewed on November 18, 2009
Why Not Socialism, is the final, essay-length book from GA Cohen, an important Marxist philosopher who died earlier this year. Its size and design suggest that it is a book intended to be carried in a pocket, perhaps on a camping-trip such as the one with which the book opens. The camping trip which Cohen [...]
The Cat Inside, by William S. Burroughs
Reviewed on September 16, 2009
In 1986, as William Burroughs was working on The Western Lands, the final instalment of the epic trilogy with which he closed his career as a novelist, he published a small book with a small print run. That book was The Cat Inside, republished this year by Penguin in a highly desirable ‘Modern Classics’ edition. [...]
The Ascent of Money, by Niall Ferguson
Reviewed on August 3, 2009
Just as those authors who were half-way through biographies of Michael Jackson felt their pulses quicken on receiving the news of his death, so too must have Niall Ferguson as the credit-crunch began in earnest and everyone started talking about money. The hardback edition of his book The Ascent of Money was published at the [...]
Spent, by Geoffrey Miller
Reviewed on July 1, 2009
Sex, Darwin, capitalism. Geoffrey Miller’s second book certainly ticks off some major search terms. His first, The Mating Mind, put forward the case for sexual choice as a major driving force in our evolution, and demonstrated the huge influence this had on human nature. Spent picks up where that book left off, applying evolutionary psychology [...]
The Secret Life of Words, by Henry Hitchings
Reviewed on May 28, 2009
Please welcome the newest addition to the Bookgeeks crew, Ben Parker, who kicks off by reviewing a book that takes as its subject the very tools of the reviewer’s trade – words… We are currently experiencing the fastest pace of neologisms, adoptions and coinages since the time of Shakespeare, thanks in part to the popularity [...]
NewsNow
Literature News 24/7-
The Bookgeeks Interview
Simon Kernick
Simon Kernick is one of Britain’s most exciting new thriller writers. He arrived on the crime writing scene with his highly acclaimed debut novel The Business of Dying, the story of a corrupt cop moonlighting as a hitman. However, Simon’s big breakthrough came with his novel Relentless which was selected by Richard and Judy for [...]
-
Latest Competition
Five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was one of the big film releases of 2011, and to celebrate its release on DVD we have five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won – consisting of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.
Latest Bookbitz reviews
