Daniel Soar

Bloodaxe, the independent poetry publishers, are excited. Their new anthology, Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, is, they claim, set to topple The Nation’s Favourite Poems as the bestselling poetry book in the UK. This is good news for poetry publishing. The anthology of the nation’s soon-to-be second-favourite poems was brought to us by the BBC, who need no further...

The setting is a lake in Leitrim, near the beginnings of the River Shannon, not far from the Border. The nearest town isn’t referred to by name, though if you spend long enough looking at the right map (Ordnance Survey of Ireland, 1:50,000 Discovery Series, No. 33, top right-hand corner) you will see Shruhaun, the village on the way to it. If you head away from the lake in one direction...

A blank page is frightening. Something has to be written, but how do you choose the words? Why this word and not that? How to overcome the arbitrariness of writing? One way is to trick yourself, to pretend that what you’re about to write has already been written, that someone has been there already and that you’re only following his traces, trying to reconstruct what must have...

The Big Issue, the magazine sold on the streets by the homeless, is ten years old this month. The next three issues will describe and celebrate its history; the first of these – available on street corners in almost any town in Britain of any size you care to name – leads with an extract from Tessa Swithinbank’s book Coming up from the Streets: The Story of the ‘Big...

Reading depends on memory: when one thing reminds you of another, however vaguely, both make sense. Even when the devil is in the plot, memory counts: the detective reminds the house party that the wound was inflicted from the left and you kick yourself for not remembering, once it’s been pointed out, that one of the guests swung her beads in her left hand. In this special sense, memory...