Martha Kapos is an American living in London. She was born in New Haven, Connecticut, grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts and read Classics at Harvard. She then came to London to study Painting and Art History at the Chelsea School of Art and remained there to teach – lecturing and writing about art and poetry until 2001. She has two books on painting and poetry in early modernism to her name, as well as criticism in various art magazines and artists’ catalogues.
 
Her first poetry publication was a pamphlet, The Boy Under The Water, from The Many Press in 1989. In 1994 she won a Hawthornden Fellowship, and was shortlisted in 2000 for Poetry Review’s Geoffrey Dearmer ‘New Poet of the Year’ award. She became Assistant Poetry Editor of Poetry London in 2001.
 
My Nights in Cupid’s Palace, came out from Enitharmon in 2003, received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and won the Jerwood/Aldeburgh Prize for best first collection.
 
Her second collection, Supreme Being, was published by Enitharmon in November 2008 and received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It was reviewed in The Guardian by Carol Rumens on Saturday 17 Jan 09. Her third collection, The Likeness, (Enitharmon, 2014) was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
 

“I would imagine that there would be somewhere within oneself a kind of speaking out, someone speaking through the poem, hoping that their voice would be heard. When one does have a publisher and readers, I imagine it’s satisfying a primitive call that one has unconsciously been making, and that may be why Stephen appears as an angel (laughs).”

 

from Twenty Years On – Martha Kapos interviewed by John Welch
read whole Interview

 
 

Review comment:
 

Her work has been likened to a kind of Cubism of the mind and this does give a sense of the planes and angles of her vision, its stunning shifts and openings out. Poems convey both distance and warmth, the poet’s curiosity untrammelled, her powers of concentration intense … Martha Kapos is one of our most original and searching poets.

 

PBS Bulletin

 
 

Interview by John Welch (The Many Press), August 2009:
 

 

read full interview (pdf)