Ben Wilkinson

Like many other poetry readers and writers, I was recently invited to submit my three favourite poetry collections of 2009 to Michelle McGrane's feature on her Peony Moon site (if you missed it, the first of eight installments is here ). And like other readers and writers who also happen to blog from time to time, I thought I'd elaborate a little on these choices, while also offering a few other collections which would have been included on a longer list (of six, to be exact). Carrie Etter 's The Tethers was perhaps the easiest choice - I can't say too much about it as I'm reviewing the book elsewhere, but its poems are so elegant, precise, witty and intense it made for a reading experience unlike any other I've had this year. Full of allusion and yet entirely contemporary, by turns darkly serious and unusually funny - it's lyrical invention, range and ambition make obvious the collection was years in the making. Take the wonderful close to 'The Daught...

You might know them for their recent hit single 'Sweet Disposition', but Austrialian four-piece The Temper Trap's debut album Conditions is equally impressive, even if the band's influences aren't difficult to spot. Worth checking out this live performance of the first track from the album, 'Love Lost'.

Changes Birds singing in the rain, in the dawn chorus, on power lines. Birds knocking on the lawn, and poor mistaken worms answering them ... They take no thought for the morrow, not like you in your new job. - It paid for my flowers, now already stricken in years. The stiff cornflowers bleach, their blue rinse grows out. The marigolds develop a stoop and go bald, orange clowns, straw polls, their petals coming out in fistfuls ... Hard to take you in your new professional pride - a salary, place of work, colleagues, corporate spirit - your new femme d'affaires haircut, hard as nails. Say I must be repressive, afraid of castration, loving the quest better than its fulfilment. - What became of you, bright sparrow, featherhead? poem by Michael Hofmann republished with permission of the author first published in The New Yorker from Acrimony (Faber, 1986) I've loved Hofmann's poetry since I first came across an old copy of what I still think hi...

The questions and discussions surrounding why and how writers write can be as fascinating and thought-provoking as good writing itself, no? And this is particularly true of poetry, with all of its nuanced complexity and intoxicating musicality (but then I would say that, wouldn't I). Well the good news is that - my witterings aside for a moment - an excellent new online project has recently been launched, intended to offer a platform for poets to talk about an aspect of writing or reading poems which currently interests them. It's called Verse Palace , and will feature a post a week solicited from poets, teachers and poetry readers of all opinions, interests and tastes. Some of the contributors already lined-up include David Wheatley , Vidyan Ravinthiran , Mary Jo Bang and Michael Hofmann . Well worth visiting the site over the coming months as it develops then, and getting involved in the discussions. First up is Poetry Review editor Fiona Sampson , with her thoughts on tran...

A great performance of a beautiful song - somehow melancholic and uplifting in equal measure, I think.

So the third issue of Salt Publishing's online literary journal, Horizon Review , has just been published. Edited by Jane Holland , it's a fascinating, varied, sometimes even satisfyingly infuriating read, and builds on the strengths of its previous issues, proving it can easily compete with the best of the printed mags. Issue 3 includes new poems by David Morley , Helen Ivory , Barbara Smith , Claire Crowther and Sam Riviere ; reviews of many recent collections including Hugo Williams ' West End Final , Carrie Etter 's The Tethers , and a particularly excellent review of Don Paterson 's Rain by John McCullough ; and a series of interviews, the most interesting, contentious and quotable of these being Vidyan Ravinthiran in conversation with Craig Raine . In fact, I might well post a separate discussion of some of the stuff which Raine has to say here, finding as I did some bits eminently sensible, some disagreeably caustic, and some just downright antagonistic (...

Ones to watch.

Q: Where is poetry heading? Is poetry that homogeneous an activity? MD: Substitute the word 'music' for 'poetry' in those two questions and you see the kind of assumptions made about poetry. Blues musicians on the South Side of Chicago, jazz pianists in London, fiddlers in West Clare, electro-acoustic composers in Rotterdam - we wouldn't dream of measuring them by the same standard, ranking them or telling them where we think 'music' is going. Poetry is not an homogeneous activity. And art has no direction . That is spatial illusion generated by early twentieth-century ideas about 'advancement' and 'progress'. If it's hard to see this now, it's because the illusion is augmented by the demands of consumerism. Our economy depends on the notion that things and ideas become obsolete and have to be replaced. Products of art and literature can be sold more effectively if they're marketed as 'new' so that newness acquires an all...

Tall Reflections Tuesday September 15th 2009 7.30pm continuing the tall-lighthouse cambridge series alan buckley & ben wilkinson voluntary contributions - suggested £2 Visual Arts Centre, Christ's College, Cambridge Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour Old Brompton Road, London SW5 Monday 21st September, 8pm pick of the crop with emma jones , greta stoddart, mike bartholomew-biggs, olivia cole, martha kapos , ben wilkinson, emily berry and siân hughes with music from singer/guitarist henry fajemirokun A poetic cornucopia for autumn’s equinox featuring: * Emma Jones (b. Sydney), first collection The Striped World (Faber, 2009), now Wordsworth Trust Poet-in-Residence; * Greta Stoddart, Salvation Jane (Anvil, 2008), lives East Devon, teaches for Poetry School and Bath Spa Univ; * poet & mathematician Mike Bartholomew-Biggs (b. Essex), Tradesman’s Exit (Shoestring, 2009); * journalist and Gregory-Award winner Olivia Cole, first collection Restricted View (Salt, ...

The September issue of Poetry magazine has just been launched. It includes, among other things, a new sequence from David Harsent , and two poems from Don Paterson 's new collection Rain , published by Faber tomorrow. It also includes a meaty review of Frederick Seidel 's Poems 1959-2009 (a poet whose Faber Selected I recently bought and am currently enjoying) by Poetry regular, Michael Hofmann .

"My foremost preoccupation at the moment is the search for an idiom which is individual, contemporary and musical. And one that has sufficient authority to bear the full weight of whatever passion I would wish to lay upon it. "Every poet who has been confined - at the mercy of form when he has come of age emotionally - and has found half the things he wants to say well out of his poem's range, knows the immensity of the task. And I am not speaking here of metrical skills, but of absolute freshness and authenticity in handling diction. "What I write about must develop from my life and times. I am especially conscious of the great natural forces which bring modern life up to date. My concern here is with the exact emotional proportions - proportions as they are now current for me. Ideally, whatever is heightened should be justified both by art and by life; while the poet remains vulnerable to those moments when a poem suddenly makes its own terms - and wit...

At the start of this year a new Arts Council-funded initiative was announced - the prestigious poetry press Faber were to release a series of pamphlets by young poets, influenced by the continuing success of tall-lighthouse's Pilot series, edited by Roddy Lumsden . Like the Pilot series, each poet receives editorial input and a pamphlet of their poems is published, but the Faber scheme also offers some financial help for the poets. Now, the first pamphlets in the series are scheduled to be published in early October of this year. And the selected poets - Fiona Benson (pamphlet cover pictured above), Heather Phillipson , Toby Martinez de las Rivas and Jack Underwood - seem to represent a fair cross-section of the type of poetry emerging from this new generation of poets; unusual, edgy, contemporary and occasionally free-wheeling... hard to say anything substantial here without going into great detail (and even that would only be based on the handful of poems I've seen by the...

A few weeks ago I went to see Moon , the excellent debut film from director Duncan Jones (once known as 'Zowie Bowie') - an impressively eerie, cerebral and often darkly funny piece of sci-fi cinema that details the life of a man alone on the lunar surface. I highly recommend it, and briefly entertained thoughts of writing a lengthier piece about it here, but then a friend of mine has recently set up a film review blog, and has done an excellent job of writing an intelligent and incisive piece on the film. So I needn't bother waffling on - instead, you can read the review here . What's more, it doesn't completely give the game away unlike many reviews I've read of Moon , which means if you do decide to go and see it, this review won't ruin your experience of it.

I've come across poems by Australian poet Les Murray here and there - in anthologies, online, and in magazines like a recent issue of Poetry London (Autumn '08, above) - but haven't yet bought a collection of his work. I'm thinking of ordering his Selected from Carcanet soon though, as I was reminded of what I admire in his work reading 'The Quality of Sprawl' in Shapcott and Sweeney's excellent Faber anthology, Emergency Kit , last night: the verbal dexterity, originality and often dark humour, though the unswerving certitude of some of his poems can get a bit irritating. Still, 'The Quality of Sprawl' is a fine piece, and one which uses the conversational, narrative style to great effect, I think. It's one of his more well-known poems, but for those unfamiliar, you can read it here .

A lesson in how not to give a poetry reading, by comic genius Rik Mayall.

In much the same way that D Nurkse’s seventh collection of poems, The Fall (2003), comprised of three sections of grouped poems, his ninth and latest book, The Border Kingdom , is divided into four sequences. The variety of the poems and the uneven length of the sequences, however, suggest that the book’s prevalent theme was not conceived from the outset. Poems, after all, have a useful tendency towards naturally grouping themselves together and forming a coherent whole; different poems extending into one another through recurrent images and themes, as a result of the poet’s preoccupations, interests and concerns. Where The Fall’ s sections addressed childhood, married adulthood and illness in old age, then, charting the Blakean journey from innocence to experience and the consequent fraying of our thoughts, beliefs and singular identities, The Border Kingdom ’s four groupings of poems approach states of limbo and ambiguity from an assortment of often unusual angles, spanning wars wag...

With the shop’s back room packed and excellent readings from Helen Mort , Chris Jones and Frances Leviston , last week’s poetry event at the Oxfam bookshop on West Street, Sheffield was a modest success. It was a pleasant feeling to be promoting Sheffield poets while also making money for such a worthwhile cause – through a mixture of kind donations on the door and book sales, including Helen Mort’s new tall-lighthouse pamphlet, A Pint for the Ghost . Her performance included a number of poems from this new collection - eerie and provocative pieces on the ghosts and pubs of Sheffield and Derbyshire, past and present - and a handful from her first, the shape of every box , including an atmospheric poem about Division Street, located only a stone’s throw from the venue. Unsurprisingly, copies of her new pamphlet were quickly snapped up after the reading. Chris Jones also performed a wide selection of his published poetry to date, from affecting vignettes about his young son from his pam...

Oxfam Poetry Night @ Oxfam Bookshop ( West St / Glossop Rd ) featuring four Sheffield poets: Frances Leviston , Chris Jones , Helen Mort , and Ben Wilkinson Tonight (Wednesday 15th July), 6.30pm - 9pm £2.50 donation on the door and free poetry CD

Over at her blog , should you fancy a look, Carrie Etter has kindly featured a poem from The Sparks , as part of a (very) brief tour of blogs I thought I'd do to promote the pamphlet. The poem is ' The Mole ' (hence the photo above), and was first published in the Times Literary Supplement early last year.

Well, it's that time of year again... When those festival goers with exceptional taste head out to the Suffolk countryside to enjoy three days of great music, poetry, literature, cabaret, film and comedy at the wonderful, indefatigable Latitude festival . Sadly though, I won't be attending this year, and am particularly gutted as the line-up for the Poetry Arena looks at least as strong - if not stronger - than when I was reviewing and blogging on the festival last year and the year before. Tim Turnbull , Tim Wells , Jackie Kay , Simon Armitage , Kathyrn Simmonds , Helen Mort , Caroline Bird , Emily Berry , Andrew Motion , Paul Farley - Latitude attracts some serious poetic talent, and unsurprisingly the tent's audience often spills into the sunshine outside: Armitage was particularly popular on both the Poetry and Literary stages last year, and Daljit Nagra drew a big, midday crowd. This year, there's also music from the likes of The Pet Shop Boys , Nick Cave and t...

So I'm reliably informed that the latest issue of Poetry London has been launched, at the Ledbury festival no less, and though I haven't had chance to read a copy yet, it looks like an excellent issue. New poems from Paul Farley , Heather Phillipson , Jacob Polley , Christopher Horton , Sam Riviere and many more besides. I'm particularly looking forward to seeing two poems in the issue by Mary Jo Bang , whose work I intend to read more of. The issue also includes poetry reviews by Todd Swift , Helen Mort , Jack Underwood and Katy Evans-Bush , and a vignette of a poem, 'Camouflage', by yours truly. A sample of the poems and features in the issue can be read online .

For months it sits unplugged, collecting spider webs spun and undone, while dust complicates sunlight through the shed’s single window at the broken egg of dawn. Or nursing the dregs of blackness that settle in its gut as you haul it out onto the lawn, plug it in or fill it, yank at its ripcord – the sudden hum of blades and the patch of mown green, now glowing. It churns like a stomach hungry for anything: leaves, daisies, insects, dogshit; the sheer weight of things bulked to a cube inside of it. Afterwards, the lines of the garden shimmer like wood grain, pious tree rings unravelled and planed down to chair legs. Or the glint of varnish as you empty the basket into the brown bin: the painted toy man of a toy set or model village, still smiling. poem by Ben Wilkinson first published in Brittle Star , issue 17, summer 2007

A friend pointed me to this the other day, and quite funny it is too - footage of the BBC's popular reality show The Apprentice , painstakingly edited so as to make a monkey out of Sugar and its contestants (though they often do a fair job of that themselves). Contains some strong language though, so don't watch if you're easily offended. And while we're on the subject of The Apprentice - does anyone actually know what job it is that the winner gets? Organising the stationery at Amstrad HQ? Or perhaps researching new areas for Sugar's businesses to expand into - as in Harry Hill's gag about 'Amsstairs' ("No, we don't sell 'amsters, we sell Amsstairs")? Any suggestions welcome.

Just a quick heads up to those interested - I notice that Faber poet Maurice Riordan 's entry on the PoetCasting audio site is now online, including readings of his poems 'Fish', 'Silenus' and the excellent 'Southpaw'. Well worth checking out. The recording was made on the same afternoon as my own, and along with another Sheffield poet, Chris Jones , whose readings are also now on the site - of the four poems featured, I'd recommend 'Work' in particular. Jones will also be reading at the Oxfam Poetry Night taking place at the Oxfam Bookshop on West St, Sheffield, alongside myself, Helen Mort and Frances Leviston .

The latest issue of Magma (No. 44, Summer 2009) includes my reviews of Mark Doty 's eighth book of poems, Theories and Apparitions , John Agard 's Darwin-inspired Clever Backbone , and Rob A Mackenzie 's debut collection, The Opposite of Cabbage . The issue also contains new poems by Alan Buckley , Alison Brackenbury and Sheenagh Pugh , among many other features, including an interview with Jackie Kay (pictured on the issue's cover, above). Find out more here .

Above (left): Lily Allen pictured with guitarist and bassist at this year's Glastonbury Festival Above (right): Lazy Town star Stephanie sporting her trademark garish hair

Praise be to The New Yorker , that most revered of American cultural magazines, and to Paul Muldoon, it's poetry editor, who recently appeared on The Colbert Report , reading his poem 'Tea' and indulging Colbert's gently mocking, wry brand of humour. Why? Because I've just found a brilliant poem by Christian Wiman on the publication's website, which conjured that instant, wonderful sensation of lifting the top of my head clean off and smashing the frozen sea of daily routine, as Emily Dickinson and Kafka would have it. I seriously encourage you to read it. And while you're there, take a look at Don Paterson's excellent poem 'Rain' , the title piece from his new Faber collection due later this year. That's another which transports you somewhere else in its cinematic sweep - a welcome detour and distraction from whatever work deadlines are looming over you this afternoon. Humorous and seriously thought-provoking - you can't ask for much m...

Oxfam Poetry Night @ Oxfam Bookshop ( West St / Glossop Rd ) featuring four Sheffield poets: Frances Leviston , Chris Jones , Helen Mort , and Ben Wilkinson Wednesday 15th July, 6.30pm - 9pm £2.50 donation on the door and free poetry CD

For those interested, my review of Picador poet Jacob Polley's first novel will appear in this coming week's TLS (June 12 2009). In the just-published issue of Stand , vol 9 (1), I'm informed that my review of Colette Bryce's third book of poems, Self-Portrait in the Dark , also appears.

Blurb writers often describe debut poetry collections as "long-awaited", but I can honestly say that I've been looking forward to Carrie Etter's first collection for a good while, having enjoyed many of her poems in magazines, not least the TLS . And now I happily find that Etter's first book, The Tethers , is to be published later this month by Seren. Having already attracted praise from the likes of Glyn Maxwell and Robert Crawford , it promises to be a highly distinctive and original collection of poems, partly given Etter's fertile imagination, but also her background as an American-born poet who has lived in the UK for many years, drawing on poetic traditions from both sides of the Atlantic. I'm delighted, then, to feature The Tethers here on the Wasteland , and include a poem from its pages below. I hope the collection attracts the prize shortlistings it will no doubt deserve, and would encourage readers who enjoy witty, sophisticated and thought-p...

photograph by Katie Utting A fair few poetry readers who drop by these parts might already know of Helen Mort , a Sheffield-born, Cambridge-based poet who won a Gregory Award in 2007. Her first pamphlet of poems, the shape of every box , was published the same year, and I'd recommend getting hold of a copy if you can - it's a good read full of distinctive, musical, lyric poems that are accessible, candid and sometimes marked by deft, even dark, humour. But Mort also has a new pamphlet in the pipeline, and one which is rather unusually accompanied by a "one-woman poetry show": A Pint for the Ghost . This, as the show's curious blog states, "is set in a deserted pub after hours where strange characters come to introduce themselves. From the phantom miner at Hanging Flatt to the spirit in the hospital x-ray machine, the ghosts of Derbyshire and South Yorkshire saunter in for a drink with me. Join us at the bar when the show is finished later in 2009." It pr...

As those of you who read other poetry & literary blogs and/or drop into UK poetry forums will know, the enterprising poetry publishers Salt have hit hard times. Partly due to discontinued grants from Arts Council England and the current economic downturn, this is particularly depressing as Salt have always been committed to building a poetry press eventually capable of sustaining itself, something it has worked towards by seeking out and publishing some of the most impressive new poets to emerge in the UK in recent years ( Rob A Mackenzie , Julia Bird , Luke Kennard , Mark Waldron and Katy Evans-Bush , to name but a few) as well as more established writers including Jane Holland , Tim Dooley and Tobias Hill . It also has what promise to be strong first collections on the horizon from Abi Curtis , Tom Chivers and Tony Williams . To help save Salt, then, please consider the following: JUST ONE BOOK 1. Please buy just one book, right now. We don't mind from where, you can buy ...

I was talking with the poet Conor O'Callaghan the other week about the dwindling number of poetry reviews published these days, particularly by the bigger publications and magazines. When his first full collection, The History of Rain , came out in 1993 with Ireland's Gallery Press, it apparently received around 25 reviews; I sincerely doubt many first books - even those published by the commercial presses - receive that kind of critical attention nowadays. Unsurprisingly, poetry pamphlets and chapbooks (or short collections) receive even less attention from print magazines, with the notable and admirable exception of a few, particularly Poetry London and its autumn round-up of their 'top ten' (or so) pamphlets of the year. Increasingly then, much reviewing of poetry seems to take place online, in magazines like those I mentioned here recently , and on various widely-read literary blogs. And why not? Many of these blog writers are published poets and reviewers for pri...

Some months ago, shortly after the poet Mick Imlah sadly passed away and his excellent collection The Lost Leader won the Forward Prize, I mentioned that I had written a piece for a profile of his work due to appear on the Contemporary Writers website. A few Wasteland readers expressed an interest in reading this piece, and as unfortunately it won't now appear, I thought I'd include it here instead. I hope it gives a flavour of Imlah's work, of which I'm a big fan, and encourages those not familiar with both of his collections (the aforementioned Faber volume and his first book, Birthmarks , published in 1988) to search them out. Mick Imlah: A Critical Perspective Alongside Michael Hofmann’s Nights in the Iron Hotel , Mick Imlah’s Birthmarks (1988) is perhaps the most original debut poetry collection of the 1980s: witty, irreverent and often darkly comic, its poems tread a line between the stylistically prosaic and the syntactically inventive and, in many insta...