Editorial

This issue marks Horizon Review’s third appearance online, and for this auspicious occasion we offer you the Poetry Issue.

2009 has been an eventful, if turbulent, year for British poetry. The national Laureateship, previously occupied by Andrew Motion, fell vacant, and Carol Ann Duffy finally took up the post — Britain’s long-awaited, first-ever woman Poet Laureate. Similarly, the position of Oxford University Professor of Poetry was offered to a woman for the first time — Ruth Padel — who subsequently withdrew from the post amid bad press. It’s regrettable that some of the publicity garnered by poetry this year has been negative, but this does not appear to have prevented poetry from securing a foothold, however precarious, in the public consciousness.

It’s unlikely that poetry, in this age of the moving image, will ever rise to the heights of popularity it occupied under the Romantics, for example, whose individual collections could sell in their thousands. But even in the glory days, sales could be hard to come by. In this issue, Fred Beake takes us back to that poetic epoch with his essay on Shelley, a less popular poet during his lifetime than later generations found him, while Katy Evans-Bush wonders why Ernest Dowson, Victorian poet and Decadent, is not better known now.

Some might argue that poetry is unpopular by nature and inclination, even that popularity lowers standards of writing. It is true that the poetry market is saturated with debuts by unknowns and over-hyped mid-career collections by safe, mediocre talents — yet this has long been the case. What we need now is what we have always needed: not more, but better poetry. We need poets who are genuinely excited by the possibilities of language and poetry, poets who read more than they publish, and who are in it for the long haul.

In the past, the accusation was that only dead poets were taught in schools. Now, it appears we have the opposite problem — too many newcomers only seem aware of poetry written since the 1950s. The advent of the internet may have granted access to the reading and publishing of poetry at the click of a mouse, and allowed new-wave literary journals like Horizon Review to flourish, but it has brought its own problems, such as over-rapid rises to prominence shored up on the new and lacking the solidity of old-style poetry apprenticeships — which entailed reading, reading, and more reading. Correspondingly, Horizon Review continues to publish new poetry and fiction alongside explorations or versions of work from an earlier age. Once the ideas of past writers are fully opened to us, their ambitions and adventures can become ours too, both as readers and writers.

In this latest issue, we also have an exciting selection of short stories chosen by our new Fiction Editor, Nuala Ní Chonchúir, while Reviews Editor George Ttoouli comes on board with some innovative ideas on critical reviewing. This time round, our Interviews section presents some extremely candid conversations with poets Craig Raine and Pascale Petit, award-winning novelist A.L. Kennedy, and Hugo Williams, whose West End Final, also reviewed in this issue, was shortlisted for this year’s Forward Prize for Best Collection.

In the Translations section, Alistair Noon returns with his translation of Osip Mandlestam’s ‘Armenia’, Jon Stone revisits Yosano Akiko’s tanka, and Catherine Hales translates contemporary German poet, Norbert Hummelt, alongside his original text.

We publish brand-new poetry here from David Morley, Helen Ivory and Claire Crowther, amongst others, plus a collaboratively-written poem by Barbara Smith and Tony Williams as part of an intriguing Horizon experiment — follow the link below to that page if you’d like to join in-. There are also critical essays from Sophie Mayer on Ruth Padel’s recent Darwin: A Life in Poems and on Earthworks, Salt’s groundbreaking series of Native American writers.

To close out the issue, George Ttoouli takes us on a surreal dance through the prose poem, while Guardian-blogger Peter Robins cooks the books in his regular Horizon column.

As ever, we welcome letters to the Editor concerning any of the work or ideas featured in this or earlier issues of Horizon Review: jane@saltpublishing.com

Jane Holland