Take the poets of Birmingham and their particular attention to the sounds of words, their sound-meanings and sound-suggestiveness, their flighty outsideness from the place, or the ghostliness, the supranatural presence and charge to the places they create in their poems. They are unmistakably here and here becomes elsewhere in their hands, a word becomes a container for another word with a different meaning; the universal poem transcends and so embeds itself as new language.

—Editorial, PBLJ9, Naush Sabah

C O N T E N T S

Prose

Michael Caines reviews Invitation to View • Gerry Cambridge on Pessoa: An Experimental Life • Fred D’Aguiar reviews The Fire People and More Fiya • Khaled Hakim reviews John Company • Ibrahim Hirsi reviews Quiet and Manorism • Lucy Holme on travels with poetry • Noreen Masud reviews Letters of Basil Bunting • Ian McMillan reviews Sonnets for Albert and The Feeling Sonnets • Oluwaseun Olayiwola reviews Voix Celeste, Temporary Stasis, and Dear Life • Seamus Perry on W. H. Auden and Birmingham • Camille Ralphs interviews A. E. Stallings • Jacqueline Saphra on poetry and protest • Jeremy Wikeley on anti-Semitism and The Waste Land • Ross Wilson on Louis MacNeice and Birmingham

Poets

Alison Binney • Nuzhat Bukhari • Regi Claire • Sylee Gore • Mina Gorji • Philip Hancock • Emily Hasler • Katy Mahon • Shane McCrae • Ciaran McDermott • Dan O’Brien • Kevin O’Farrell • Clare Pollard • Nick Makoha • William Thompson

Editor

Naush Sabah