POETRY BIRMINGHAM
Literary Journal

I S S U E 7

Recipes too are crafted things like poems, passed on first orally or written and shared, known on the tongue and senses, preserved as an element of a culture’s will to survive. A poem might be thought of as a last gasp against oblivion, the printed page a monument to life. Some of the writing in this issue evokes the threat of the sea and its violence. It’s why its cover bears an image of the HMS Hampton Court; the painting preserves the violence of the English at sea. It’s a violence not everyone survives; their poems and their recipes don’t reach us. We can’t read or write in their place but we can read and write in our own with them in mind.

—Editorial, PBLJ7, Naush Sabah

C O N T E N T S

Prose

Reem Abbas reviews Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night and The Wild Fox of Yemen • Fahad Al-Amoudi reviews Of Sea • Romalyn Ante reviews Pa-Liwanag • Khaled Hakim on music lost in translation • Mona Kareem reviews Let Me Tell You What I Saw • Dominic Leonard on Vahni Capildeo • Amit Majmudar on Kabir • Barry Pierce reviews pandemonium • Brenda Porster on Federico Italiano • Camille Ralphs interviews Karen Solie and Daljit Nagra • Declan Ryan reviews Away From Me and Auscultation • Gene Seymour reviews Wicked Enchantment • Shash Trevett on the incarceration of Ahnaf Jazeem • Jeremy Wikeley on Spring Journal and Autumn Journal • Jennifer Wong reviews Forty Names, Speculum, and Honorifics • Karen McCarthy Woolf reviews Thinking with Trees and The Giddings

Poets

Reem Abbas • Ali Al-Jamri • Kate Bingham • Claire Booker • Nuzhat Bukhari • Gerry Cambridge • Jonathan Catherall • Kitty Donnelly • Mave Fellowes • Roz Goddard • Nicola Healey • Daisy Henwood • Lucy Holme • Federico Italiano • Ahnaf Jazeem • Kabir • Phil Kirby • Roy McFarlane • Anita Pati • Stav Poleg • Madeleine Pulman-Jones • Sam Riviere • Robert Selby • Samuel Tongue • Rory Waterman • Ashley George Williams • Ross Wilson