New and Recent Poetry from the North: Spring 2023
Spring has arrived and Senior Programme Manager, Will Mackie has handpicked some of his favourite poetry releases from Northern poets. Check out his top recommendations for collections that were published in Spring 2023.
I’d like to especially highlight two beautifully produced books. La Mystérique (Guillemot) by 2020 Northern Writers’ Awards winner Jennifer Lee Tsai visits Liverpool, Hong Kong and China in stunning, meditative poems. Katie Hale’s brilliant and unflinching debut collection, White Ghosts (Nine Arches), was awarded a 2021 Northern Debut Award, and is due out this March – her poems trace and confront family history and the legacies of past generations.
Bloodaxe published landmark editions by two remarkable northern poets in February. Nayler & Folly Wood by Peter Bennet includes work from different stages of the poet’s career, including his masterful Flambard collections, offering a wide-ranging selection of precise, mystical and often astonishing poems. The comprehensive and expertly curated new Collected Poems by the late Anne Stevenson is wonderful reading experience that shows the incredible range and quality of her life’s work as poet.
I’m also very much looking forward to reading Self-Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant (Carcanet) — the follow-up to his lyrical and haunting debut, Thinking with Trees – and Material Properties (Picador), the new collection by 2016 Eliot Prize winner Jacob Polley.
If you’re a poet based in the north or a publisher with a new collection or pamphlet by a northern poet and would like to be considered for future versions of this round-up, please get in touch with Will at [email protected]
Giveaway!
We have two copies of White Ghosts by Katie Hale to give away. For the chance to win, tell us what you’re reading on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook using the hashtags #NorthernBookshelf and #WhiteGhosts. Winners will be drawn on 24 March 2023.