Tag: contemporary poetry

I edited the zen space

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Title says it all. I edited the inimitable Marie Marshall's journal of zen bones, the zen space. I was asked in winter & due to snowballing circumstances it took me a while to snap myself round; but I did, it is done, you can read it here, there's some good stuff & photography by me. [...]

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Review of Stephanie L. Harper’s The Death’s Head’s Testament

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The Death’s Head’s Testament continues on from Stephanie’s previous book This Being Done & fortunate for us Stephanie is in the present progressive, hammering out the dimensions of poems. The poems here continue to wade in the difficulties of womanhood, family, child-rearing, love, life, memory & death. There is wakeful invention, an intellectual alacrity, sure-footedness [...]

Superimpose

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A new poem, written since moving back to England. My themes are altered & I am now beginning to find my stride with them, especially owing to my access to books being greatly improved; having a marked effect on my perceptions. I apologize for my tardiness, I read with gusto, insatiably; finding little time for [...]

Marriage is crap

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I've had a couple of weeks off from Yoon Yong's weekend in Jeju, talking idleness & reviewing & what not. There are still quite a number of poems remaining from this set. Here we have Yoon Yong doing some reviewing herself. Marriage is crap   …The deep blue sky of wintry Seoul (that could be a poem’s [...]

A sort-of-review of Marie Marshall’s T.S.Eliot Prize nominated ‘I am not a fish’

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You’ll never believe me…I was waiting to Skype God. You can imagine the anxiety! I mean…the Almighty, the Alpha & the Omega, Tetragrammaton—YHWH. It was buffering his end, ringing out. There was a lot of eeking & blare. The postman dropped his delivery. I was gripped on what God was going to look like. I [...]

Lynne Burnett (Chapbook Confessions #6)

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After a hiatus due to my returning to England, here is Lynne Burnett’s confession & a blinding return it is for Underfoot.

If you are interested in submitting your confession, see our guidelines and get in touch.

Underfoot Poetry

Chapbook Confessions is a series in which poets discuss, at length, the writing of their most recent collection of poems, in whatever way they desire. For more information on the series, go here.

Below, Lynne Burnett writes on her 2018 collection,Irresistible (Finishing Line Press).

41tczvccz0l._sx322_bo1,204,203,200_First, I must confess I never intentionally set out to write a chapbook—both in the sense of writing poems specific to a theme or project, and in manuscript size. I always thought I’d write a “proper” book and as the years passed and the number of poems written and eventually published grew, that it would certainly be bigger than chapbook sized! Especially since I was late coming to the party, having put writing aside for twenty years to raise a family and then a further twenty to tease out the fruits of that elongated pause. I learned though that one hand must…

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There’s no need to be a poet (time is forgotten)

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This poem from the Yoon Yong series is probably a personal anxiety of my own showing through the tissue paper of personality. I think all poets (I cannot speak for translators) have some such concern as this in their transmogrification of reality & experience into the poetic. The solution: not apologizing for seeing, trying, relying & [...]