reviews and essays online

Verse Palace

The Line

This is the original, much shorter version of an essay I later expanded for a book called Stress Fractures, published by Penned in the Margins (2010). Poetry through tightrope walking technique.

Contemporary Poetry Review

The Tawdry Halo of the Idle Martyr: MacNeice’s Autumn Journal
The Poet Realized: in conversation with Ruth Fainlight
Classic Readings: a take on Joseph Brodsky

There are more of my essays on the Contemporary Poetry Review; they have been archived, but you can access them (as well as lots of other great material) for a small annual charge.

Normblog

Writer’s Choice: On Divine Comedies, by James Merrill

Horizon Review

By the Light of the Silvery Moon: Dowson, Schoenberg and the Birth of Modernism
To Hull and Braque: a review of Ian Duhig’s Pandorama

The Poem UK

This site had my reviews of books by Dorothy Molloy and Ian Duhig; unfortunately these appear now to be down. With luck it will be fixed.