I've a new essay over at the North Sea Poets substack, addressing the decline of reviewing culture, the rise of the poetry prizes, artistic standards and integrity. It also recently featured in the TLS 's NB column . Winners and Losers: The Death of the Poetry Critic by Ben Wilkinson “Reading reviews of modern poetry is like attending a prize-giving in a small, caring primary school: everyone has done terribly well, it’s all absolutely marvellous.” So ‘Harvey Porlock’, the emboldened pseudonym of one Terence Blacker, reported on the efforts of poetry reviewers in the Sunday Times back in the mid-’90s. Granting the odd exception, you’d be hard pressed to argue otherwise, and things have only worsened since. Friendly encouragement for beginners is one thing, but once a poet is at the advanced stage of putting a book out into the world, i.e. tentatively but seriously offering their work for intelligent readers’ honest appraisals, donning the kid gloves and trumpeting th...
from the publisher: This ambitious new collection from poet and critic Ben Wilkinson finds its author experimenting with poetic voice and the dramatic monologue. Carefully crafted yet charged with contemporary language, the book brims with everyone from cage fighters to boy-racers, cancer patients to whales in captivity. Several poems unpick the preconceptions and prejudices that can inform so many of our encounters – with the world, art, and one another – while others take a sideways glance at everything from male depression to the history of meat-eating; from the philosophy behind athletic competition to surreal yet familiar emotions. Notable here are poems that wrestle with the mystery of failed and successful relationships, both providing moments of transcendence and despair. There are well-observed pieces about sport, particularly the rewards of running, from a noted devotee. Wilkinson has also been deeply inspired by the French symbolist poet Pau...