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Out of the wreckage of The News of World has emerged something of true aesthetic and moral value – the poetry of Aidan Semmens... this is a book of poems that demonstrates why poetry is urgent news, an art form that finds its strength and power through revealing ambiguities and opening out the language in 'the difficulty of seeing anything'
— Simon Smith, Tears in the Fence |
Semmens doesn't blink in the face of the big scam
— Kelvin Corcoran |
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The intelligence of this writing shows in the very word edges, brightly accurate and carefully attentive — Peter Riley |
Hopefully, after his long sabbatical, Semmens has a lot of other work up his sleeve. If it's all up to the standard of A Stone Dog, it'll have been worth waiting for — Alan Baker, Litterbug |
Aidan Semmens's debut poetry collection, A Stone Dog, is published by Shearsman Books |
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The Book of Isaac The Book of Isaac is a sequence of 56 distressed sonnets in which Aidan Semmens endeavours to distil something of the Russian-Jewish experience from the history of his own family, in particular his great-grandfather, economist, lawyer, journalist and socialist Isaac Hourwich. Drawing material from the apocryphal Book of Esdras, from FBI files and other historical sources as well as from Hourwich's private and public writings, Semmens produces a fractured narrative running from the pogroms of the late 19th century to the Revolution and beyond. 'The Book of Isaac is an extraordinary collection of sonnets that explores the Tanakh and its historical and contemporary resonances, travelling through philosophy, ritual, art, peasantry and recent Russian revolutionary history — it is a very serious literary achievement, filled with haunting, beautiful lines' — Chris Hamilton-Emery 'Aidan Semmens has lain low for too long. With this sequence he announces a long-gathered subtlety and a patiently stored power.
The strength of these poems resides not only in the fact of unexpected and startling survival against the odds, but in the fearlessness of transformations undertaken in the interstices of hope, will, necessity and chance' — Richard Berengarten 'Semmens writes “I have attempted throughout this sequence to honour and continue the post-theistic Jewish tradition of my forebears as well as the aesthetic spirit of the Poets' Cafe.” He has accomplished this and more.' — Stephan Delbos, BODY (read the full review here) Aidan Semmens's second full-length poetry collection, The Book of Isaac
is available now from Parlor Press / Free Verse Editions.
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 Molly Bloom rises again: a magazine of modern poetry for the online connoisseur, edited by Aidan Semmens |
