Reviews
In Praise of Men and Other People
"Ann Sansom's new collection is a welcome return for a quietly authoritative, resiliently gritty poet whose debut collection. Romance, won her many admirers. These are poems that overturn readers' expectations. They often present human dramas in which people are seen as acting out their versions of themselves in their own fictions. They are set in curiously deracinated urban landscapes, homing in on chance encounters and missed connections, and balanced by a brisk authenticity and affectionate generosity."
Times Literary Supplement
Romance
"Ann Sansom’s naturally accomplished and instinctively organised poems come as a breath of fresh air … There is a maturity to her work, a sureness of hand associated with only the most established poets, but there is a freshness too, and a bareknuckle confidence that seems to sing of the author’s realisation of poetry as a first language and a mother tongue."
Simon Armitage
Opening the Ice
"A clear sense of narrative illuminated by accurate observation . . . with a sharp edge of personal involvement, of love and love lost that gives her poems an intimate feel. Warm, direct and delicately phrased."
David Harmer
Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a British poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, resigning in 2019. She is the first woman, the first Scottish-born poet and the first known LGBT poet to hold the position.
Fleur Adcock is a New Zealand poet and editor, of English and Northern Irish ancestry, who has lived much of her life in England. She is well-represented in New Zealand poetry anthologies, was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Victoria University of Wellington, and was awarded an OBE in 1996 for her contribution to New Zealand literature. In 2008 she was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature.
Jane Draycott is a British poet. She is Senior Course Tutor on Oxford University's MSt in Creative Writing and teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster.
Pascale Petit, is a French-born British poet of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. She was born in Paris and grew up in France and Wales. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and was a visual artist for the first part of her life. She has travelled widely, particularly in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon and India.
George Szirtes is a British poet and translator from the Hungarian language into English. Originally from Hungary, he has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life after coming to the country as a refugee at the age of eight. Szirtes was a judge for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Jo Shapcott FRSL is an English poet, editor and lecturer who has won the National Poetry Competition, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Costa Book of the Year Award, a Forward Poetry Prize and the Cholmondeley Award.
Anne Stevenson was an American-British poet and writer and recipient of a Lannan Literary Award.
Rosemary Tonks was an English poet and author. After publishing two poetry collections, six novels, and pieces in numerous media outlets, she disappeared from the public eye after her conversion to Fundamentalist Christianity in the 1970s; little was known about her life past that point, until her death.
Grace Nichols FRSL is a Guyanese poet who moved to Britain in 1977, before which she worked as a teacher and journalist in Guyana. Her first collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. In December 2021, she was announced as winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Anne Barrett Rouse is an American-British poet. Along with Michael Donaghy and Eva Salzman, she has been cited as a noted American-British contributor to contemporary British poetry.
Bloodaxe Books is a British publishing house specializing in poetry.
Colette Bryce is a poet, freelance writer, and editor. She was a Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee from 2003 to 2005, and a North East Literary Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne from 2005 to 2007. She was the Poetry Editor of Poetry London from 2009 to 2013. In 2019 Bryce succeeded Eavan Boland as editor of Poetry Ireland Review.
Sean O'Brien is a British poet, critic and playwright. His prizes include the Eric Gregory Award (1979), the Somerset Maugham Award (1984), the Cholmondeley Award (1988), the Forward Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize (2007). He is one of only three poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same collection of poems. He grew up in Hull, and was educated at Hymers College and Selwyn College, Cambridge. He has lived in Newcastle upon Tyne since 1990, where he teaches at the university. He was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor at St. Anne's College, Oxford for 2016-17.
Ecopoetry is poetry with a strong ecological emphasis or message. Many poets, poems and books of poems have expressed ecological concerns; but only recently has the term ecopoetry gained use. There is now, in English-speaking poetry, a recognisable subgenre of ecopoetry.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Carole Satyamurti was a British poet, sociologist, and translator.
Neil Astley, Hon. FRSL is an English publisher, editor and writer. He is best known as the founder of the poetry publishing house Bloodaxe Books.
Peter Sansom is a British poet.
Sarah Wardle is an English poet.
Ágnes Lehóczky is a Hungarian poet, academic and translator born in Budapest, 1976.
