Our news desk editor, Ron Paste, has decided to leave The Lyre in order to further develop his career in other directions. This will, therefore, be his -- and our -- Last Paste.
Ron was appointed to run The Lyre in 2009. He immediately flicked through Fiona Sampson's anthology, A Century of Poetry Review, only to discover that his copy was missing some history.
Ron is not a very successful poet, prose writer and critic and is in little demand as a reader of his work, a teacher or lecturer, never mind as a judge of poetry competitions. In the face of adversity we wish him well, and will never mention the Great Crisis -- what Crisis? -- again.
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The Lyre has retired before. But this time we're not joking. We've got reading to do. There's Certain Prose of The English Intelligencer (Mountain Press), a major document of English poetry, only overdue by forty years. There's Peter Manson's Mallarmé, The Poems in Verse (Miami University Press), one of the great works of English translation this century. And, from Capsule Editions, there is Denise Riley's Time Lived, Without Its Flow.
There are Ira Lightman's new books. There's a new sequence by Simon Smith. There's this pamphlet from Emily Critchley, crossing the Channel. There are new collections by Agnes Lehozcky and Vahni Capildeo. There's An Andrew Crozier Reader. There's The Death of Pringle.
There's Michael Robbins' first book of poems, by Michael Robbins. There is a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents called Vorticism. There are Pitch Press' extended reflections on how we got from God to Don Paterson. There are 'the most exciting contribution[s] to poetry' since 1855. There is this emetic horror. And then there is its antidote.
We could go on. Instead, we leave you with the words of the poet who achieved the most posts on The Lyre, and dominated our most viewed pages. By any measure, he is undoubtedly now one of Britain's most popular poets:
To be this with sweet
song and dance in the exit dream, sweet joy befall thee is by
rotation been and gone into some world of light exchange, toiling
and spinning and probably grateful, in this song.
-- J.H. Prynne, Kazoo Dreamboats (2011)
Thanks for reading.
