Review: Namanlagh by Tom Paulin (Faber and Faber, 2025) The “power to think / has clean left me”, Tom Paulin claims – not quite convincingly – in his sharply observant new poetry collection, Namanlagh, which chronicles the author’s experience of crippling depression and advancing age. “Have I at last started to climb out / of … Read more
The Revolutionary Andrée Blouin, 1921-1986 A hungry child can never truly sleep. In the orphanage for sinful offspring – our fathers white, our mothers African – the nuns were merciless, severe. I shook by night inside a narrow, iron cot, aware only of my body’s hunger, a heavy shadow shuttering my limbs. I prayed for … Read more
A Poem for Refaat Alareer In the poem your butchers fear to breathe, the murdered nurseries are clean, the brimming table-top restored – your every room aflush with idleness again, a bowl of flying spices near to hand, the oven-bread uplifted through the haze: a feast the windy air will sing from the open-hearted balcony … Read more
There’s a strangeness to singing in a language you don’t understand, akin, perhaps, to the sensation that comes with remembering, vividly, a person who has died. In both cases, you can almost touch the life recalled, even as the shadow glimpsed in that one word, “almost”, clouds your every sense. Whenever I hear a song, … Read more