Press Release

For Immediate Release

April 7 2008

The Poetry Review Green Issue looks at what it means to be human in a changing world.

What is poetry's place in an ecological world? The answer, as Fiona Sampson explains in her editorial, “has to do with the very nature of poetry” – since “…even an apparently innocuous poem can be full of social or political resonance".

Australian Poet John Kinsella’s essay in this issue’s Centrefold deals more directly with environmental issues. For anyone who knows Australia, Kinsella's article will evoke a very familiar image of the Western Australian wheatbelt with its standpipes or  "rural life-sustainers" that punctuate the landscape.

These standpipes form the basis for a sequence of poems Kinsella is writing. However, he is not trying to evoke a cosy remembrance of these things but rather to present them as symbols of modernity’s colonisation of wilderness.

Meanwhile, Scottish poet John Burnside appeals to the spirit of wilderness which lurks inside every art-form, however “civilised”, when he reinvigorates myths of Pan and Apollo through an essay and poems.

Not all the poems and reviews in the Green Issue are obviously 'ecological'; but read against this background they take on extra relevance. For example, one of the great explorers of human nature, Sharon Olds, explains how our personal environment need not prevent us from exploring unknown experiences or territory: “For me the idea that some human experience had not been written about much excited me as a poet.”

Other highlights of the Green Issue are Stephen Romer’s ‘Letter from the Loire’; the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize; and poems by Moniza Alvi, Colette Bryce, John Burnside, Polly Clark, Robert Crawford, Marie Etienne, Marilyn Hacker, John Hegley, Jaan Kaplinski, Sinead Morrissey, Sharon Olds, Don Paterson, Christopher Reid, Michael Symmons Roberts et al.

All this and we also have a free 64pp supplement, an anthology of ten key Contemporary Lithuanian Poets featuring Tomas Venclova, Sigitas Parulskis, Kornelijus Platelis and Eugenijus Alisanka.

Poetry Review is a world class publication and Britain’s longest-running and most prestigious poetry magazine. Started in 1911, it continues to be “the magazine of record” (Michael Schmidt in The Guardian) and as well as being the UK’s bestselling poetry magazine, hailed by Andrew Motion as “required reading”. Poetry Review has been at the forefront of many of the key artistic debates and movements in poetry and has an excellent track record in spotting new talent.
 
Notes to Editors
· If you would like to interview Fiona Sampson, the first woman editor of Poetry Review since Muriel Spark in 1947, please contact Lisa Roberts on 0207 420 9895 or email  marketing@poetrysociety.org.uk
· Poetry Review is available for subscription from Paul McGrane. Telephone 0207 420 9881 or email membership@poetrysociety.org.uk.
· Becoming a member of the Poetry Society will provide you with four issues of Poetry Review a year. To find out more call 0207 420 9881 or email membership@poetrysociety.org.uk.
· To find out more about the Poetry Society visit www.poetrysociety.org.uk