Ben Wilkinson

There's a lot to be said for brilliantly designed and stunningly produced books, second fiddle though these things are - and certainly should be - to brilliant, stunning writing. When the two are combined, though, the book lover really can't ask for much more. And so it is with these recent Faber Firsts reissues: beautiful, highly affordable hardbacks of classic contemporary collections, including Armitage 's Kid , Cope 's Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis , Paterson 's Nil Nil and Larkin 's The Whitsun Weddings . They seem a continuation of the beautiful Faber 80th Anniversary Poetry Classics , selected poems of various poets which include similarly stunning designs and not only make the perfect gift for the newcomer to British and Irish poetry, but are tempting to those of us who already own other, doubtlessly less stylish, selecteds of Yeats, Plath, Hughes, Auden, Betjeman and Eliot . Good news, then, for those of us who live in or around Sheffield, as the Bl

The fifth issue of literary ezine Blackbox Manifold has just been published, and well worth reading it is too; the usual mix of big names and new voices and poems of all styles, subjects and schools. And so you can read new work from George Szirtes , Sharon Olds , Vidyan Ravinthiran , Carolyn Hart and Susan Wicks , among others. I've a couple of poems included, too. There are also reviews by Vahni Capildeo , an exciting young poet in her own right (check out her stuff in Roddy Lumsden's recent generational anthology, Identity Parade ) , and by Adam Piette , co-founder and editor of the magazine. Also worth checking out is the prose and poetry forum Ink, Sweat & Tear s , which features a new poem, piece of prose writing or visual artwork almost every day. Recent highlights include Helen Mort 's 'The Lovesick', which somehow manages to conjure genuine emotion from a Carry On scene, Helen Ivory 's amusing account of her time at Latitude Festival, and Dan Wyk