New on my bookshelf

Poetry in the Making by Ted Hughes

Hughes' classic 1967 work on the writing and teaching of poetry is back in print. For me, the first chapter (called 'Capturing Animals') alone is worth the price of the book, but there's a lot more. It's always a pleasure to read a book like this by a great poet who is also a great commentator on poetry. Delightful.















Fish Bones by Gillian Sze

Taking their cues from painted scenes, photographs and portraits, these poems bring the quiet tableaus of their subjects' private lives vividly to life. Often, poems that describe still images are overly static themselves, claustrophobic with stagnant austerity... but not these. Sze's poems are often tender, funny, erotic or ardent; this is another encouraging debut by a writer who isn't content to ignore the physical world or the readers who inhabit it.