Ben Wilkinson

Edited by Roddy Lumsden , and tall-lighthouse press’s Pilot series is an exciting, enterprising and much-needed addition to the world of poetry publishing: showcasing the work of eighteen up-and-coming and wonderfully varied poets, all under the age of thirty. Adam O’Riordan is one of the first to receive the Pilot treatment, and his wonderful pamphlet showcases the fruition of his years studying under both Andrew Motion and the late great Michael Donaghy. The first thing you notice in reading this selection of O’Riordan’s work is the sheer ambition and range of his subject matter. Opener ‘Trawling’ takes the sweeping birds eye view of Larkin’s ‘Here’ to the zooming precision of the ‘Google Earth’ level: encompassing the ‘satellite / as it travels in Trappist silence’ through to a coffee cup ‘slid[ing] along the galley’ of a ‘lonely trawler’; ‘the smell of spilt diesel, fish guts, / blood and brine, gravity in flux’. The off-kilter half rhyme here is perfectly executed: the reader get...

Here's a draft of a new poem. I'll leave it up for comments and ideas for the next few days. ... it's gone now ...

This brilliant and affecting song appears repeatedly in the recent film The Darjeeling Limited from Wes Anderson, the director of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic . Once you've seen the film (and accompanying short, Hotel Chevalier ) this song will no doubt become embedded in your thoughts. If it does, then you'll understand my saying that it's not necessarily a bad thing. A wonderful piece of music, and a wonderful film, which is generating new and deserved interest in Peter Sarstedt's songs.

This past week, I've bought some new (and not quite so new) poetry books, and all, alongside Orhan Pamuk's prose memoirs Istanbul, are thoroughly enjoyable yet very different reads: among them Frances Leviston's debut, Tom Paulin's Liberty Tree and Martha Kapos's My Nights in Cupid's Palace . The latter has struck me especially as Kapos's poetic voice is quiet, subtle and extremely succinct, but at the same time often affecting and resourcefully imaginative. Though the collection on the whole is largely consistent and enjoyable, then, it is perhaps worth reading if only for a few of its more sparkling and moving poems, and the ones which struck me in particular were the rhythms of 'The Swing', the quiet desolation of 'Lost Profile', but most of all the carefully unpacked and suggestive metaphors of 'Finding My Bearings', a poem you can read on Todd Swift's Eyewear from when Kapos was a featured poet. Have a look here . Otherwise...

I'll leave this poem up for about 24 hours for comments, ideas and suggestions . ... it's gone now...