Reviews

The trusty New Oxford Shorter English Dictionary defines “triste” as “sad, melancholy; causing or expressing sorrow; lamentable” and while the poems in Carmen Bugan’s fifth collection have all these qualities, they also contain a good deal of consolatory power in response to marital breakdown, the death of loved ones and the insecurities of our current political moment.

Blue Atlas is an absorbing and heart-wrenching collection that revolves around the poet’s decision, thirty years back, to have an abortion rather than go full term with an unplanned pregnancy.

Harry Clifton’s tenth collection of poetry has arrived in time for the poet’s 71st birthday and provides a kind of creative reckoning by the poet with his own “child-self” from the perspective of “old age” (“Neruda,” p. 16). The collection circles back to "a lost maternal ground" after "half a century" of writing, as the book's back cover informs us ...