Poetry. In this accomplished first collection, Erica McAlpine draws truths from the everyday, meditating over contingency and luck and the often- vexed relationship we have to these things. The casual register of her verse belies its formal complexity. Many of the poems are crafted in tight syntactical units of just one or two sentences; others are composed in rhyming sapphics, a meter favoured by the poet Horace, whose guiding voice recurs throughout the collection. Humorous and serious in turn, these quietly virtuosic poems achieve lofty aims: to teach, to advise, to warn to show, in the...

What our tendency to justify the mistakes in poems reveals about our faith in poetry-and about how we readKeats mixed up Cortez and Balboa. Heaney misremembered the name of one of Wordsworth's lakes. Poetry-even by the greats-is rife with mistakes. In The Poet's Mistake, critic and poet Erica McAlpine gathers together for the first time numerou

What our tendency to justify the mistakes in poems reveals about our faith in poetry-and about how we readKeats mixed up Cortez and Balboa. Heaney misremembered the name of one of Wordsworth's lakes. Poetry-even by the greats-is rife with mistakes. In The Poet's Mistake, critic and poet Erica McAlpine gathers together for the first time numerou