Amanda Bell
Articles by Amanda Bell
2021
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Poetry
How much is enough?
Is a chapbook more likely to work as an organic whole than a full collection?
2020
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Scourging Buffoonery
Rita Ann Higgins’s new collection ranges from polemical pandemic poems to a meditation on the society which locked up its unwanted – ‘poor devils with…
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Irish Literature
Great Upheavals, Small Triumphs
In “The Changing Mountain”, his recent essay on the mutable parameters of elegy (Poetry London Issue 96) Stephen Sexton notes “the imperceptible change a photograph, say,…
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Rue For You
Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel historical novel is set in Shakespeare’s England, in a time of plague, a time when the playwright himself suffered bereavement with…
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World Politics
Digging Deep
Robert Macfarlane’s latest exploration of the natural world leaves one with the impression of the world as a hollowed-out vessel, infinitely fragile and perilously finite,…
2019
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Navigating loss
Mary Noonan’s descriptive powers recall, in their meticulous detail, Elizabeth Bishop. She is a poet of the senses – this collection is drenched in colour,…
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Attentive Living
To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of…
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World Literature
Love Your Hair
Hair – rather than skin colour –can be seen as the principal signifier of race and has the power to confer classification as black or…
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Fernweh, Sehnsucht, Brame
Solitary travelling in remote places can be dangerous, particularly for a woman. But what is the alternative? Stay at home and never go anywhere? ‘It’s…
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Irish Literature
Deadly Precision
A particular feature of Rita Ann Higgins’s new collection is the use of juxtaposition: essays appear side-by-side with poems tackling their subject from a different…
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Irish Literature
Affinity with Far Away
A bilingual collection of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems contains some new poems and many previously published. The decision to use new versions, suggesting that there…