Holiday reading

I'm off to lie around in the sun for 10 days, and I'm looking forward to catching up on some reading. In terms of poetry, that will be the new Bernard O'Donoghue collection, The Seasons of Cullen Church, Adam Zagajewski's Selected Poems, and Jack Gilbert's Collected Poems.

I'll also be reading Jonathan Bate's biography of Ted Hughes, and Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister – I've been working my way through Chandler's entire catalogue, and it never gets dull.

George Mackay Brown

It's 20 years today since George Mackay Brown died – there's some interesting stuff on him here. He's one of those poets I go back to a lot, perhaps because he's really not a lot like anyone else at all.

Blackbox Manifold 16 out now!

Issue 16 of Blackbox Manifold is out now, with work by Matthew Carbery, Imogen Cassels, Adam Hampton, Lewis Haubus, Tom Jenks, Kent MacCarter, Amy McCauley, James Midgley, Peter Mishler, Simon Perchik, Stuart Pickford, Sam Riviere, Iain Rowley, Ian Seed, Afshan Shafi, Rachel Sills, Dale Smith, David Spittle, Catherine Vidler, Corey Wakeling and John Welch.

There are a new series of essays on the sequence and seriality by Dorothy Alexander, James Capozzi, Alan Golding, Astrid Lorange, Simon Smith and Anne Stillman, and there are also pieces by Ed Luker on JH Prynne, Joe Luna on Douglas Oliver, and Adam Piette on RF Langley.

A Sky Full Of Birds reviewed in Cage & Aviary Birds

A Sky Full of Birds reviewed in the Literary Review

Thank you

I just wanted to say a big thank-you to everyone who has bought a copy of A Sky Full Of Birds. On the release of any book, you're struck by a sudden fear that absolutely nobody, other than your closest family and friends, could possibly want to buy and read it. So, to find out that it has sold over 1,000 copies in its first three months is absolutely thrilling – thanks too to everybody who has reviewed it, helped publicise it, and generally spread the word.

If you're interested in finding out more, click here.

A Sky Full Of Birds reviewed in Countryfile magazine

I'm very grateful to Ben Hoare, and Countryfile Magazine, for this very generous review of A Sky Full Of Birds. It's very pleasing, too, that the review is sandwiched between books from Stephen Moss and Edward Thomas.

Geoffrey Hill, 1932-2016, RIP

Very sad to hear of the passing away of Geoffrey Hill yesterday. As I've noted on here a few times before, I can't pretend to know the bulk of his work very well, but Mercian Hymns was some of the first poetry to really grab my attention, and I still love it, while an early Selected Poems is one of my most re-read poetry volumes.

Here's his An Apology For The Revival Of Christian Architecture In England, a wonderful sonnet sequence that appeared in that Selected.