Author: Matthew Paul

Here is my latest review for Sphinx.

Over on Twitter the other day, Matthew Stewart tweeted a picture of a poem concerning his childhood phone number, from his excellent collection The Knives of Villalejo, and wondered what numbers other folk remembered. When he tweeted the same question previously, it somehow sparked off the following poem of mine – not about our family phone number when I… Continue reading Numbers →

I often write poems which tell stories, in either an overt narrative or in a purposefully less obvious manner, so naming characters is something I give a lot of thought to. What I’ve concluded – though this isn’t any major revelation – is that there’s a balance to be struck between names which have an… Continue reading On the use of names in poems →

yellow iris no ferry running today or tomorrow

  the spring wind sings around the log pile old and new griefs

I recently read and reviewed Belinda Zhawi’s rich and beautiful pamphlet Small Inheritances and so I was really pleased to hear this programme which she made for BBC Radio 4. It’s available for a year, so worth a couple of listens, I think, since it contains a wealth of treasure in its 27 minutes.

My latest ‘one point of interest’ (OPOI) review on Sphinx has been published, of a fantastic pamphlet. Alongside my review of The Deal are others of it by the terrific poets Charlotte Gann and DA Prince. Somehow, the three reviews seem to barely have overlapped, which is a serendipitous wonder. 

I was saddened today to see from Richard Williams’s always brilliant blog, The Blue Moment, that Ron Rubin, or Ronald as I knew him, died a fortnight ago at the age of 86. I knew him not through music, though I was aware that he was a jazz bassist, but because he was also an excellent haiku poet, particularly of sharp senryu, who… Continue reading Ronald Rubin →

Spilt Milk was one of several books, also including Susan Wicks’s Singing Underwater and Thom Gunn’s Collected, which, after a few years’ absence, coaxed me back into writing poetry in the late 1990s. I remember reading it by a pool c.1998 and thinking it was the ideal holiday poetry collection, because it’s suffused with what became Sarah Maguire’s… Continue reading On Sarah Maguire’s Spilt Milk →

I was thrilled this morning to find out that Julie Mellor has written a lovely, very perceptive review of my collection, The Evening Entertainment, on her excellent blog.