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| cover image ŠTed Nield 2009 |
Still This Need now
available online at Waterstones, Amazon, or direct from the distributors Central Books.
Some reviews:
Still This Need is a multidimensional map of the personal, historical
and natural. The reader is instilled with a sense, crucially, of their place in the world rather than
dominance of it. Rather than preaching, McKimm gently prods the reader to wake up, to look at what is in front of them...Although
this is only a first collection, it is wholly realized. The collection’s crystalline images and melodic lines alone
are worth the purchase. But it is his cartographer’s eye – caring, careful, precise – which leaves the reader
with the feeling they’ve been somewhere beautiful.
Jennifer Matthews, Verbal (Issue 31). Download the full review here
It is very much a proper collection.
There are no fat nor empty gestures within, no fireworks that glisten briefly before fading away, no showing off nor
grandstanding. Just poetry at its very finest. Honestly hewn from a poet comfortable in his landscape and at home with the
very business of writing poetry before being generously handed over to the reader with a minimum of fuss....This really is a magnificent debut collection and you are left with the overriding feeling that
this is only the beginning of what will become an intriguing and fascinating journey. You really should get in there early
and buy this book.
Matt
Nunn, Under The Radar
McKimm is a lyric poet with a finely-honed
gift for observation, especially of landscapes and nature, and a surefooted grasp of rhythms that renders his work gloriously
musical...but he also springs all sorts of little surprises that help set him apart from a number of other promising young
poets....he frequently dodges the default persona of many a male poet under the age of 45 - streetwise, occasionally cynical,
always ironic - and instead adopts something altogether more vulnerable, more emotionally direct....a collection that repeatedly
takes the current moment as the only certainty, and writes and rewrites past and future around it. If that gives him huge
scope to expand on this superb beginning, that's something to be grateful for.
Matt Merritt, Polyolbion. Read the full review here
Readers who cherish Northern Irish landscape will find in McKimm a source of great promise....Stillness pervades
this collection; still moments listening to the call of a creature in the night, memories that 'soar still beyond the
boundaries' ('Cemetery'), the stillness of water, the becalmed relationships which ended his parents' letter
writing. Particularly impressive in scope are the sequence poems such as 'The Lammas Lands', a poetic account
of the water-course through Hackney Marsh....he examines the cost to the countryside of human progress. McKimm portrays
creatures at the limit of human contact, representing a world almost lost.
F.J.
Williams, The Warwick Review
His mode of observation may be nearly Wordsworthian, but McKimm is not merely
concerned with the act of looking and seeing; his work is far more sensually evocative....The language in ‘The Moose’, as
in most of the collection, is simple — sometimes surprising — but never abrasive. The collection leans on tradition
with its attention to naturalism, geography, and in particular, ornithology, but opens itself up to the reader most successfully
when observation is transcended by the sensual.
Charlotte Newman, Horizon Review. Read the full review here
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My poem 'Still Life with Five Nests' is published in Best Irish Poetry 2010,
edited by Matthew Sweeney. Containing 50 poems that have appeared in journals during the past year, the 2010 edition
contains poems by Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Leanne O'Sullivan, Leontia Flynn, Eva Bourke,
Kerry Hardie and many others.
It can be purchased direct from the Munster Literature Centre here, where there are also special offers on the previous editions.
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Dove Release: New
Flights and Voices
Edited by David Morley, Dove Release documents
a decade of writing at The University of Warwick. It features poems by sixty writers, most of them poets
in their twenties, including some winners of the Eric Gregory Awards, as well as work by more senior poets. What
unites them is a course at Warwick University called 'The Practice of Poetry'.
This anthology is available from Worple Press, PO Box 328, Tonbridge,
Kent, TN9 1WR, priced £10.00. Also available from Central Books
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Anthologies:
Heaventree New Poets Volume 1: Zoe Brigley, Michael McKimm, George Ttoouli (Heaventree, 2004)
Phoenix New Writing (Heaventree, 2004)
Sherb: New Urban Writing from Coventry (Heaventree, 2006) The Shuffle Anthology (The Shuffle Press, 2008)
Poems online:
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