New Walk

Time for another intermission in the constant stream of hastily-written NaPoWriMo poems, this time to flag up Issue 2 of Leicester-based literary mag New Walk.

It well and truly confirms the good impression made by the debut issue back in the autumn, with poetry from, among others, Alice Oswald, Carrie Etter, Matthew Stewart, Dan Wyke, Tom Pow, D A Prince and  Martyn Crucefix, plus fiction from Bill Jones and Robert McGowan.

Best of all, perhaps, given how difficuklt it can be to find extensive writing about poetry these days, there's a wealth of good reviews, essays and comment. J M Coetzee writes on Zbigniew Herbert, Martin Stannard (the academic, not the poet) on Larkin's Letters To Monica, and there's much more - I look forward to getting stuck into it this weekend.

Among the reviews, there's Geoffrey Heptonstall's take on hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica. I'll take a closer look at it on here later (probably after NaPoWriMo is finished), but for now I'll just say that I'm grateful to him for such a thoughtful and generous response to the book.

Robert Hass

Over at his blog Other Lives, Dan Wyke has posted this fine poem by former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass. I've read a fair bit of Hass's work in anthologies before, but I look forward to catching up with a lot more when this book comes out in the UK (actually, it's tempting to jump the gun and just order the US version).

EDIT: Just noticed that Hass is one of the headline poets at StAnza 2011.