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Top of the Pile: What I’m reading now #2
A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems About Science (ed. Maurice Riordan + Jon Turney) Another of the anthologies I’ve recently collected. This is a beautifully chaotic book. It’s sat by my bed for a week...
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Voice Recognition
Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (ed. James Byrne and Clare Pollard: Bloodaxe Books) Anthologies of up and coming poets often regurgitate the same people, or use ‘contemporary to mean...
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Marginalia: How I Treat My Books
There are many people out there with similar levels of poetry-mindedness as me. We spend the same ridiculous amounts of moolah on slivery thin books and pamphlets of verse; and reach the same levels of...
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Top of the Pile: What I’m Reading Now #3
Yes I am more than a little late on this one, but anthology-reading takes time. Yesterday in lovely sunny Edinburgh I wondered into Blackwell’s on South Bridge. Despite their sadly small and...
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Poet in Profile: Sam Meekings
Sam Meekings is a rather spiffy looking young poet I first discovered in Identity Parade. A few weeks later, I couldn’t help but buy The Bestiary. Who can resist a book called that? The deliciously...
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Picking favourites: the pains of packing
As you lot probably have gathered, at the moment I am packing. Not the usual change of clothes, underwear, wallet and toothbrush packing that I’ve been use to living between Edinburgh and St. Andrews,...
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Transatlanticism
Guys, the day has come. This time tomorrow I will be dragging my life (in 2 suitcases and a carry-on), around Heathrow Terminal 5 and departing to Atlanta. I’ll be leaving my parents’ house sometime...
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Top of the Pile: What I’m reading now #5
Hey folks! Welcome to the first American edition of FLOTSAM! Nothing much should be different (definitely NOT the spelling), but I am kicking off with a book chosen for my relocation. The week before...
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‘What are you doing?’‘Buying poetry books’‘God you are so random’: 2011′s...
The title is a gem from my sister, who loves me in a somewhat abstract way. It’s the same way I love her, without getting to tangled up by the details. Anyway, the usual trail of wreckage that New...
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Sleeping on poems can improve all things
I was struggling to get on with Dorothea Lasky’s Black Life. Then I read the second half the next day and it felt like a different sort of reading. Then I read this poem and it sort of paralysed me:...
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