Author: Matthew Paul

I enjoyed this podcast discussion, 15 or so minutes in, on the ever re-readable The Rings of Saturn, not least because it involves Philip Hoare.

Here’s my latest one-point-of-interest review for Sphinx. There are lots of other new reviews there too.

I was saddened to hear the news earlier this week of the passing last Friday of David Cobb.It’s fair to say that the overwhelming majority of haibun, haiku, tanka and renga poets in the UK may well not have become addicted to haikai forms without the enthusiasm and organisational ability of David Cobb. Although there… Continue reading David Cobb, 1926-2020 →

It’s appropriate that today is the day on which my brothers and I have completed the sale of our parents’ house in Worcester Park, where they lived from 1988. On Saturday, I visited the house for the last time to check that all was well, but more to say goodbye to a place which contained… Continue reading The Day of the Dead →

Is it just my perception or have UK poetry reviews and criticism generally become – with the exception of one completely ludicrous, notorious and discredited outlier – kinder in the last few years? It’s within that context that I was surprised by the tenor and content of Rory Waterman’s review of Keith Hutson’s debut collection… Continue reading On Keith Hutson’s Baldwin’s Catholic Geese →

Through his weekly digest, Dave Bonta has done so much for poetry bloggers – me included – during the pandemic that it’s time for me to shine the light back onto Dave’s own creatvity: his videopoems are outstanding, innovative mixtures of text, video footage and music. The latest, Catching a Cranefly, is a perfect example,… Continue reading Dave Bonta’s videopoems →

As I’ve noted previously, in the last stage of my second Poetry Business Writing School I was grouped together with James (Jim) Caruth and Philip Rush, very fine poets both. One of the tasks which Ann and Peter Sansom set us (and the other groups) was to rank five poems and write about why we… Continue reading Beer o’clock →

I was interested to read Jonathan Jones’s Guardian review of the Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition at the National Gallery. It’s an important show, which rightly seeks to claim Gentileschi’s ‘greatness’, as Jones calls it, as a woman artist among the traditional pantheon of almost exclusively male painters. The physicality of her painting of ‘Judith Beheading Holofernes’… Continue reading Judith →

So here we are again, in what is marginally my favourite season. I thought I’d post some of my autumn haiku to mark it. climbing the wallsof a disused youth club:                   flowering hops*avocet billsscour the lagoon bed—hurricane’s end*autumn winda delivery of flourto the bakery *tucking a roll-upbehind his earthe harvest sun *shifting currents . . .a… Continue reading Some autumn haiku →

I was sad to hear of the death, on Thursday, of Derek Mahon, some of whose collections, most notably The Hunt By Night (OUP, 1982) and An Autumn Wind (Gallery Press, 2010) are among my very favourites. He was a supremely elegant poet. I had the bad luck to have missed his spell as writer-in-residence… Continue reading Derek Mahon →