Review by Karen Powell-Curtis of "Familiar Phantoms" by Sue Forrester

Sue Forrester’s debut pamphlet, Familiar Phantoms, transports us across time and place, from England to Africa and Asia. We tend to think of phantoms in terms of people, but Sue Forrester writes of places as if they too are phantoms. 

Her poems are rich with sensory details. In "Lamping with Lizard" we hear the "rustles, chirps and clicks" of Africa after dark and, by torchlight, we see "Iridescent bulbous beetles." We experience the fragrances of the "verandah scented with citronella" in "Small World," and the "jasmine blooms" in "The Scent of War." The poem "Cooking with Mother" offers taste and touch through the "production / of eighty doughnuts for the tea tent."

Forrester uses the power of objects to evoke the phantoms in her poems, and to link the past to the present. For example, in "One September Day," the Registrar’s fountain pen triggers a memory of a "21st birthday gift from Aunt Win," and simultaneously creates a new memory as she "Writes in the book, the forever book, / in the forever ink" to register a birth.

A "silver and black obsidian butterfly brooch" brings to mind another aunt in "And Apple Pie." In this prose poem, it is the absence of a particular object, a "silver-trimmed barrel" from which the aunt "dispensed chocolate biscuits" which represents the unique relationship between the niece and her aunt. Forrester writes, "And I mourn that biscuit barrel, swept away in a heartless house clearance, her daughters knowing only their mother, not my aunt."

"Needlecraft" is full of details revealing the love between a family. The central item in this poem is a knitting needle which has been repurposed to check "the lemon cake is done." The needle is the "survivor of the pair I used / when my big sister taught me to knit." This prompts the memory of sitting "on the little chair, / Daddy made for me," watching "my sister make a buttonholed loop / on the pot holder I’d knitted for Mum."

We gain a sense of a life through recollections involving cars in "My Brother’s Car." The poem ends with the moving description of the brother telling "a crowded chapel how he got to know / our father under a car" with "oil dripping onto their heads and hands: / a malodorous unction, full of grace."

The phantoms in Sue Forrester’s pamphlet are sensitively summoned but her poems never slip into sentimentality.

About the reviewer
Karen Powell-Curtis has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. Her poetry has been published in various anthologies and magazines. 

Review by Gus Gresham of "Maybe the Birds" by A. J. Ashworth

This short story collection by A. J. Ashworth is a rewarding read, each story like a piece of mysterious treasure from a dug-up pirates’ chest. The prose is beautiful, understated, sometimes beguiling, and full of humanity.

In the title story, we understand that we are in the midst of something apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic. Aside from hints, the details of the main "event" are left out. The focus is the effects upon the lives of survivors, upon a particular survivor, and the warm relationship between her and her dog. It’s about what we might leave behind as a legacy when the familiar world is lost, and in her case this takes the form of recreating the lost sounds of birdsong with bespoke clay pipes.

"Leather" is effectively a story about a story. It reads as a review of a story about woman’s strange "find" in a second-hand bookshop. This review approach works surprisingly well. It’s a clever, playful and enjoyable device. The story is analysed and questioned for us by a fictional narrator/reviewer who employs tantalising quotes from the story itself. Some of the descriptive language and tone-setting is particularly strong: "… the kind of curdled light that comes before a rainstorm," echoed later, in other lines like fried eggs that are "broken and bleeding yellow onto the plate."

"Mirrors" was a personal favourite. It has the sense of something apocalyptic again, like "Maybe the Birds," but "Mirrors" is even darker, more enigmatic, told in second person, and with the prose itself fractured on and across the pages. Unsettling to say the least, and rendered so beautifully.

There is scope for humour, too, in this collection. The premise of "The Monolith" can be gleaned from the following short quote as the protagonist speaks with her ex on the phone: "…thinks she sees a ripple across the monolith, as if it’s made of black liquid. ‘I’m not joking, Carl. There’s a monolith in the yard.’" There is so much to enjoy in this story. Mystery, inventiveness, the study of relationships, and of course more gorgeous prose: "A gust of wind makes the window frame crack like a bone."

"Small Feathers Falling" centres on the treatment of women by some men. There are creepiness and horror in this tale, which – among other things – stands as a stark reminder of how we should listen to our gut when the early warning bells chime in a new relationship. We dismiss sinister behaviour all too often, don’t we?, and let it slide all too often. The casually delivered, derogatory names the male antagonist calls the female protagonist become "dark moths in her head." The descriptions of the owl are wonderful, and the story’s creepiness and tension build to a point where anything could and does happen.

The book’s "Afterword" is an insightful essay which provides a more academic angle on the book’s themes. Ashworth talks of "… how female characters in postapocalyptic settings … [continue] … with preapocalyptic activities." List-making and sculpture are suggested to be the mainstay here, and indeed the title story comes back to mind with the protagonist’s careful and loving clay-hewn "syrinxes" designed to mimic the sounds of birds in a world that has lost its birds (and we has suspect lost much more).

Each story is also rich with allegory, in my view, and Maybe the Birds is a collection to be savoured.

About the Reviewer
Gus Gresham’s short stories have appeared in literary magazines and online, many of which are now collected in his latest book, Angel Reach. He is author of the novel Kyiv Trance and of the young adult novels Earthrise and Marmalade Skies. He has travelled widely and worked as a mechanical engineer, fruit picker, construction worker, environmental activist, writer, English tutor, audio-book producer, interpersonal skills facilitator, and building surveyor.

You can read more about Maybe the Birds by A. J. Ashworth on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Martyn Crucefix of "Dear Life" by Shanta Acharya

In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Edward Said describes the "contrapuntal" music of those living in exile: the awareness of at least two cultures providing a "plurality of vision," a simultaneity, ways of perceiving that wind in and out of each other. Shanta Acharya's new collection provides the reader with just such music. One of her most powerful poems opens "Alien, outsider, firangi, gaijin, exile / are some of the names of the pariah gods of exile." Born and raised in the Hindu religion in India, transplanted to pursue academic studies in the West, and having spent years working in the financial industries, the various strands of her music weave fascinating tunes. Her poems are concerned with identity, home, distance, love, and the world's violence, and succeed in addressing questions of faith more directly than most contemporary UK poets.

"Looking For Myself" eloquently explores the theme of identity and Acharya states the complexity of her position: "Single, female, first generation immigrant, no security, / intelligent, neurodivergent, born to be different." This difference is often associated with the poet's spiritual beliefs, her scepticism about the either/or of rational Western thought which she counters with the Hindu concept of divinity as neti, neti (not this, not that). But prayers often go unanswered, and the poet has to come to some sort of negotiated settlement with the silence: "All I seek is a place in your temple / to sing."

This poet's singing voice is particularly evident in this new collection in its use of the ghazal. This couplet form, with its return at the end of each second line to a refrain, perhaps suits the "contrapuntal" songs of exile, the voyage out, the returning back. A particularly powerful example (the title phrase serving as refrain) is "Find Me," with couplets addressing the plight of a child refugee, an old woman, the disappeared, the dead in shallow graves, and "the bones of exiles." "Things" is a marvellous listing ghazal (infinite things, love of things, I-don't-know-what-to-believe-in things, nothings) culminating in Acharya's final imperative of faith, seemingly unshakable despite the horrors of the world from which her poems never shrink: "Waking to the mystery of the Thing of things, / live in peace that passes the understanding of things."

About the reviewer
Martyn Crucefix: Between a Drowning Man was published by Salt in 2023; his translations of Peter Huchel (Shearsman) won the 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. A Rilke Selected Poems, Change Your Life, has been published by Pushkin Press, 2024. Martyn's blog is here. 

You can read another review by Claire Cox of Dear Life by Shanta Acharya on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Review by Martyn Crucefix of "In a Cabin, in the Woods" by Michael Krüger, trans. Karen Leeder

In the midst of the Covid pandemic, German poet Michael Krüger was also beginning to be treated for leukaemia. He retreated to a wooden house near Lake Starnberg in Germany and began to dispatch poems – 30-40 line meditations from a life-preserving quarantine – which were published to great acclaim in Süddeutsche Zeitung. This book contains 50 of them in superb translations by Karen Leeder.

With his own mortality standing so close, the small things loom large ("the flies can hear me") and picking details from beyond the window, or from memory, he is "amazed / at the richness, the lustre, the splendour." In contrast, the stricken world at large provides a new vocabulary: "Today: herd immunity. Let’s see how long / that lasts." Krüger’s work has always glittered with vivid images. The sunlit glint of the nearby lake is "like a huge barrel of mercury, / about to spill over." If that image is full of foreboding it’s no surprise and, even hidden away as he is, Krüger never loses his sense of wider concerns. As the spring birds arrive, military aircraft ("windowless, big-bellied, camouflage beasts") pass overhead carrying lethal hardware to poorer parts of the world.

There are moments of despair. Gazing into the mirror the question is whether it is "still worth shaving" and there is a sort of disproportionate grief when his Lavazza coffee machine breaks down, "a linguistically gifted gadget / that could gurgle, groan, moan, hiss and beep." But the book is surprisingly up-beat and its serious business has to do with poem-making, bringing order and meaning to an off-kilter, deadly (and for Krüger) godless world just beyond his doorstep: "I have to give things / a truth they cannot find by themselves." So when the local farmer (and his son) mows the nearby meadow, it’s like "a ballet for two tractors," and after rainfall it is like a Dutch painting, and Krüger is moved to quote his great German poet-forebear, Peter Huchel, transmuting the natural world to human meaning: "it points / off into the grass / like a truth."

About the reviewer
Martyn Crucefix: Between a Drowning Man was published by Salt in 2023; his translations of Peter Huchel (Shearsman) won the 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. A Rilke Selected Poems, Change Your Life, has been published by Pushkin Press, 2024. Martyn's blog is here. 

Review by Martyn Crucefix of "Slow Burn" by Jordi Doce

The late John Burnside praised Jordi Doce as "one of the three or four living European poets whose work I most treasure." Slow Burn is a sequence of ten delicate, untitled poems of grief, finely translated by Paul O’Prey. It is not till later that the reader is told "death made its move" and Doce initially establishes an unsuspecting mood, comparing the human body to an ordinary "sunlit town square." The café chairs, the old men’s talk, the pigeons, the bell tower, form a "simple / homeostasis," a stability yet to be struck down. Likewise ordinary language (meetings, conversations) only functions up to a point, beyond which hovers "the god / of what’s left unsaid." 

Though distanced into the third person, the fifth poem portrays the writer as he used to be: "rummaging through things, / looking for their meaning." The switch to the present as he "peers through the window" comes as a shock: "He has stopped hearing the voice of himself." Doce’s verbal strikes have an unnerving delicacy. Another poem opens "Whose certainties were these?" and the juxtaposition of certainties with the past tense does powerful lifting in characterising the devastation of loss. The writer’s business is now left in "neglect" and any talk of peace or tranquillity is "to speak a dead language" or is at best "a craving for some plausible / sense of order."

A later poem takes up the earlier suggestion of the unsuspecting ordinary and evokes the shattering effect of grief through the image of a house having lost a room: "We dropped our guard / for just a moment / and it disappeared." It is here that death makes its move, "without / any hint, without any warning. / And took the whole house." The final italicised poem looks back at the sequence preceding it from beneath a sky that is "both itself / and something strange" and affirms that the flames of loss have passed across the flesh of those remaining, for whom, beneath their skin, "embers smoulder on." It is this residual grief that constitutes the mournful "slow burn" of this moving, melancholy, restrained, and exquisitely written chapbook.

About the reviewer
Martyn Crucefix: Between a Drowning Man was published by Salt in 2023; his translations of Peter Huchel (Shearsman) won the 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. A Rilke Selected Poems, Change Your Life, has been published by Pushkin Press, 2024. Martyn's blog is here. 

Review by Rennie Parker of "Poems of a Nottingham Lace-Runner" by Mary Bailey, with an Introduction by John Goodridge

 

How pleasant to make the acquaintance of Mary Bailey, a lace worker ("Lace Runner") from the great industrial city of Nottingham. For here is her pamphlet, her only one, since she was dead by her mid-thirties; but available at last thanks to the combined efforts of researchers plus Five Leaves Press.

Bailey is adept at ballad metre, but this should not be surprising, as mill hands and fieldworkers alike would improve their monotonous hours by singing. It’s possible that she had popular tunes in mind when composing her verse:

          You ladies of Britain, we most humbly address
               And hope you will take it in hand,
           And at once condescend on poor Runners to think,
               When dress’d at your glasses you stand.
  

There is ample evidence of the love she feels for her children, with none of that reserve which members of the upper classes were meant to show; she works hard and gets about, rebuking mean girls and enjoying the small wins of everyday life on the breadline. I like the sound of this person; the Baileys appear like the numerous and chaotic family next door but where their priorities are in the right order. 

Moreover, it’s important to know that literature was not only available to her but a realistic means of survival at the time. Literature was not an add-on or a hobby; it was part of the work she could do and where she might expect some benefits from that production, whether in sales, patronage, or as a springboard for a career. She knows what is popular at the time: there are moral instructions, appeals, an epitaph - but I find the most engaging piece is her verse letter, meant for her family in Staffordshire:

          Dear brother and sister the packet is come
          To let you both know we are safely got home:
          And, in this epistle I’m happy to say 
          My dear little Ellinor slept all the way …

The book was produced by subscription, same as the model used by today’s online publishers such as Unbounders; her patrons are listed at the back, numbering 90 in total with the vast majority of them being female - none of that idle sitting in drawing rooms for these ladies -  and it’s probably significant that Bailey’s two editions happened in the same decade as her vastly more popular compatriot, John Clare (who was only fifty miles away by stagecoach at the time).

As an insight into one woman’s life and experience, it’s beautiful; here is an authentic voice from those times, showing how a literate working woman thought and felt in the 1820s. Only the usual word of warning for any production like this: she is of course a supplicant, asking favours of the gatekeepers and upper class folk who could determine how she lived or died, or whether the literature should continue at all.

About the reviewer
Rennie Parker is a poet living in the East Midlands, and she is mostly published by Shoestring Press. Her latest collection Balloons and Stripey Trousers, a nightmare journey into the toxic workplace, came out earlier this year. She works in FE and blogs occasionally here. She is also on Twitter/X and Bluesky.

Review by Rachael Clyne of "The Postcolonial Flâneuse" by Ramisha Rafique

I am attracted by flânerie, the random wander in cityscape, and was intrigued by the postcolonial aspect. While I anticipated the gauntlet of sharp political comment, I found myself immersed in Rafique’s gentle reflections on gender, race and religion as she tours street cafes. As a Muslim woman she already disrupts the white male origins of the genre.

From lockdown in Nottingham to Paris and Marseille, from Istanbul and Syria she offers vignettes. She wants to be part of the flow, rather than a labelled stereotype: "She has become part of / the mass. She is him, and her, / and them." Rafique vividly engages our senses with "Café Soundtrack" – music, chatter, accents, clink of cups, adding visual notes – a man fiddling with his ring, a passerby’s cloud breath. 

One minute we are on a Nottingham street, the next we are in Paris where statues of past empire become sleeping places for the current homeless. "For Those Lost in The Kashmiri Diaspora" concerns her own heritage and continuing impact of a region divided by the British then recolonised by Pakistan and India. The book covers many themes: conversing with God through a foreign language, social decline in the face of climate change and the joys of girl-chat setting their world to rights over coffee and cake.  A museum visit hints at how its art treasures reflect colonial tastes and cultural plunder. 

With the poet’s light touch we are offered a smorgasbord of tastes, customs and meditations, that stimulate food for thought. She eventually takes us into her familiar comfort zones, e.g. "Arab Quarter, Marseille," where her uncovered head is disapproved of by an older woman and she is comforted by "the fusion of black tea leaves, mint, and sugar." All in all, this is a pamphlet well written and worth reading.

About the reviewer
Rachael Clyne is a retired psychotherapist. Her prizewinning first collection Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams) concerns eco-issues. Her pamphlet, Girl Golem (4Word) and her latest collection, You’ll Never Be Anyone Else (Seren Books), explore themes of identity and otherness, including migrant heritage, LGBTQ+ and relationships.    

Review by Nicole Yurcaba of "Eradication" by Jonathan Miles

 

Jonathan Miles’s Eradication: A Fable is the story of Adi, a former jazz musician turned schoolteacher, reeling from the tragedy of his young son’s death. Unable to escape grief’s grip, and attempting to recover from his wife’s decision to leave him, Adi decides to pursue a strange job opportunity. He accepts an assignment to spend five weeks alone on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora. His mission: to right the ecological imbalance caused by the goats that have overpopulated the island. However, as the environment, natural elements, and wild landscape test Adi’s morality and ethics, Adi finds that the true threat to Santa Flora may not be the goats at all. The job’s rigors challenge his mental, physical, and psychological stamina, and as he relives his son’s death and the events that followed, he undergoes a transformation he never could have imagined.

Written as an introspective meditation, Eradication: A Fable is a jarring examination of one man’s reckoning with the world, love, grief, and, ultimately, himself. His "social isolato" is reminiscent of classic characters like Moby Dick’s Ishmael. The isolated island’s setting will remind readers of books like Lord of the Flies. In some ways, Eradication reads like a modern-day Robinson Crusoe because of its exploration of the humans-versus-nature ethos. More significantly, as Adi confronts the real consequences of human conquest and human incursion on fragile environments, Eradication resonates clearly with contemporary novels such as Daniela Catrileo’s stunning novel Chilco.

Eradication is morally and ethically necessary, especially as climate change and human greed continue to ravage the globe. Miles has truly contributed a beautifully eerie and hauntingly thought-provoking work to the contemporary literary canon. 

About the reviewer

Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, New Eastern Europe, Euromaidan Press, Chytomo, and The New Voice of Ukraine. Her poetry collection, The Pale Goth, is available from Alien Buddha Press. 

Review by Lisa Williams of "FantasticLand" by Mike Bockoven

It’s the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness so the time is ripe for getting cosy with some dark dystopian fiction. FantasticLand is a theme park and has been a mecca for fun since the 70s. A hurricane hits and floods the area; a team of predominantly college-aged employees are hired to look after the now-isolated park in the aftermath of the storm. What follows is a modern-day Lord of the Flies. The book isn’t for everyone – the violence is graphic and relentless. There’s a lovely juxtaposition though between the Disney-type theme park where "fun is guaranteed" and the grisly events that follow the storm, as society rapidly breaks down. The story is told through transcripts of interviews and eye-witness reports that give the story a real credibility. It’s reminiscent of a 1970s disaster movie, and in parts you do have to suspend your disbelief and just enjoy the ride. FantasticLand by Mike Bockoven is a gripping tale and fab for losing yourself in as the nights close in.

About the reviewer
Lisa Williams has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. She writes word-limited flash fiction, mostly drabbles - stories of exactly one hundred words. You can find her online @noodleBubble