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The Literary Desk · Review · Issue 1

Reviews of Paul Farley's The Ice Age and John Burnside's The Light Trap

Paul Farley · John Burnside

This page carries two collection reviews from the first issue of The Wolf. The reviewer is not named in the text.

The first covers Paul Farley's The Ice Age, published by Picador at £8.99 and described as shortlisted for that year's Forward Prize. The review begins with the poem '11th February 1963', which joins two events on the same day, a Beatles recording session and a scene in a London flat, through the image of a milk bottle. The reviewer treats that chill as the tone of the whole book. Farley's earlier first collection had won the Forward Prize for best first collection. The reviewer praises his gift for making daily oddities look new, naming 'The Reading Hour', 'Dead Fish' and 'Winter Hill', and notes the speed with which he moves between images, which is called both his strength and his flaw. A hint of Larkin is detected, and the book is judged representative of current British poetry and a deserving winner.

The second review takes John Burnside's The Light Trap, from Cape at £8.00, his eighth collection. It takes its epigraph from Wallace Stevens's blackbird poem and keeps returning to that poem's images. The reviewer reads Burnside as a poet of the numinous, concerned with seeing, not seeing and the pull of the extraordinary inside the ordinary, drawing on Lucretius, Heidegger and Einstein but resting on language itself. The collection is called ambitious, and the reviewer has a name for its stance.

Work
The Ice Age; The Light Trap
Author
Paul Farley; John Burnside
Publisher
Picador; Cape

Poems in this selection

  • 11th February 1963
  • The Reading Hour
  • Dead Fish
  • Winter Hill

a hugely ambitious collection

reviewer, The Wolf, issue 1

a kind of holy science

reviewer, The Wolf, issue 1
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