Review by Iain Minney of "The Dark Fields" by Alan Glynn

Adam Glynn’s 2001 debut is probably best described as the fabled "positive drug story," albeit a cautionary tale about drug use. Strong themes of addiction, excess and greed run through it like a stick of rock.  

More-traditional drug users fall somewhere in-between hallucinating hippies, giggling stoners or hyperactive, gurning ravers, with the perception being uniformly negative. The "positive" drug in this novel, "MDT-48," allows the user to remain uncluttered, learning and performing practical tasks with a radically, evidence-based improvement, unlike other drugs, which merely mess with the user’s perception of themselves. In other words, MDT is the ultimate drug fantasy: it actually DOES make you smart and interesting.

Eddie Spinola is a something of an average guy; a little past his prime and stuck in a rut. The writing assignment he requested isn’t the labour of love and salvation he thought it’d be, and he has little else lined up on the horizon.  But a happenstance encounter with his ex-wife’s shady brother quickly changes his fortune. Literally.

Now (with a certain tiger-in-his-tank) Eddie’s blasting his way up the ladder a little too quickly and a little too impatiently for his own good, in order to quell his various appetites … and with his secret stockpile in place, but all manner of gaps, cracks, hallucinations and allegations becoming increasingly obvious and hard to ignore, the only question seems to be how much higher can Eddie go?

A neat and original premise is wonderfully executed (especially for a debut) and metered out with appropriate caution and respect to the subject of drug use, rather than the fantastical and pithy romanticism that could have been applied to a substance that, thankfully, doesn’t exist. Although MDT could essentially be considered an aid to concentration (some sort of hyper-concentrated Ritalin, for example), it allows the story to expand on "Addiction to ambition" as another interesting sub-reference to the Reaganomics era, to which so much is unfortunately owed.  

The writing style is pleasant too, with the quasi-autobiographical first-person narrative providing a rewarding full-circle twist ending, that underlines what must have been a genuinely thorough and painstaking research process, allowing the author any number of hidden in-jokes. The tycoon character "Van-Loon" seems suspiciously similar to a figurehead brand like Trump, the so-called "Psychopharmacological" writer probably references Tim Leary, and even the title is taken from a line in The Great Gatsby.  There’s even a theme on lost (and rediscovered) love, and a pining for lost youth, signified in Eddie's love of drugs that he used to enjoy back with his ex-wife.

About the reviewer
Iain Minney (B.A. in Journalism & Creative Writing): tall, "mature," sober, comedian(ish). He has dabbled in stand-up comedy - which he has been writing since he was teenager - as well as being involved with comedy sketches, local filmmaking groups and working on local radio for a number of years both as "Head of News" and having his own weekly 3-hour show. He has been interested in writing for some time and even tried recording a number of audiobooks of short stories he's written together with satirical rants based on the standup he never quite "stood up" with. He loves old punk and 80s rock music, all manner of movies, and Bill Hicks and George Carlin SAVED HIS LIFE. But that's a whole other conversation.

Review by Tracey Foster of "Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain" by Matthew Green

Imagining our home, town and local landscape as a wasteland; envisaging the future for our sea-ravaged coasts and climate-battered green spaces is a real prospect that we face today. Matthew Green makes this all the more possible with this well researched book as he takes on a journey through existing derelict sites here on our own British soils. These include places simply eradicated through disease, plagues, coastal erosion, storm surges and land acquisition, leaving us with a ghost map of former communities. Green, a historian, writer and broadcaster, knows how to tell a good tale and evokes a sublime sense of the uncanny with descriptions of visits to these sites. Abandoned homes, half-shelled churches, submerged dwellings and fake buildings make ideal sites to set a horror movie.

The cult of the picturesque began in the eighteenth century and the hunt for the ideal gothic ruin set the middle classes wandering over our own local sites of abandonment. Prior to this no one cared enough to notice and nature was left to take over where man had fled. The passion for old antiquities saw an outbreak of "ruin poetry," waxing lyrical about the joys of the desolation and pathos that surrounded such sites. Old ruins became national monuments and were put back on the maps. The romantic movement that followed revelled in the desolate, evoking reverie to ponder life, death, longing, absence and mourning. One such place to inspire scores of collections of poetry was Dunwich, Britain's lost Atlantis. This was a whole city built on the Suffolk coast, comprising several large churches and a thriving port. A series of huge storm surges eroded the cliffs beneath it and its demise was recorded in early photographs and newspaper reports. The sad sight of a graveyard tumbling onto the rocks below brought many visitors to the site, to write, paint and muse on life's fragility. The writer Henry James being one of them, this prompted him to say: "Sadness hung in the air like the salt spray of the sea; a sense of squandered potential pervaded everything and yet was somehow uplifting."

Green also gets special permission to visit the military training zones on Norfolk. This was land acquired during WW2 that encompassed several old villages on the promise to return them after the war. Several residents left notes pinned to their front door for the army, asking them to take care of their family’s homes in the anticipation of a return. What is left behind now is a ravished wilderness and bombed-out buildings. Very little remains for those families to return to apart from the church where they are allowed back one day a year at Christmas to tend graves and gather to sing hymns: "The path of lime trees leading to the church is specially illuminated and on those bittersweet occasions, the cadences of their song, the streaks of the choir, the gushing of the air through the bellows of the organ effuse from the glowing nave, soaring over the shards, the mounds and the ruins of deserted and disfigured villages, transforming them through the redemptive power of sorrow, and resurrecting them in the theatre of the mind."

What Green did find there was a range of fake building shells, made up in fine detail to replicate medieval Normandy towns, German hamlets, post-war Soviet concrete jungles and even a market town of Basra, simulating the ongoing challenges of today's army recruits: "It was one of the eeriest, most disquieting places I have ever set foot in."

Green travels from the top of Scotland in St Kilda on a journey through lost Britain to the submerged village of Capel Celyn in Wales and takes us with him. Embarking on this journey and in the process losing his father and his marriage, he faced a long period of emotional turmoil: "Ambushed by memories, with the past hanging like a pall in the air, the present seemed so thin as to barely exist at all."

His personal circumstance is in tune with our times. The British psyche, used to change, as our land mass alters and shifts through waves of invasion and geological movement, looks set to face the greatest alteration of all. This book is a fascinating insight into the previous lives that were altered, communities that were lost and the warnings we can take from a long view of nature's reclamation. 

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, Zine magazine and The Arts Council and she writes her own blog, Small Sublime, here. 

Review by Laura Besley of "Intimacies" by Lucy Caldwell

Lucy Caldwell’s story, ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad,’ won the BBC Short story prize in 2021. Two years earlier, ‘The Children’ was short-listed. Both are available to listen to on BBC Sounds and both are in Caldwell’s latest short story collection, Intimacies – a collection which, according to the back cover, ‘exquisitely charts the steps and missteps of young women trying to find their place in the world.’

In his introduction to the Oxford Book of Short Stories, V. S. Pritchett writes: ‘the short story tells us only one thing, and that, intensely.’ Caldwell’s winning story – told in second person present tense – is about a woman on a transatlantic flight with her 22-month old daughter and the connection she makes with the man sitting next to her. It explores, as the title of the collection suggests, an intimacy, a moment. Within the limited timeframe of the flight and the couple of hours that follow on from it, ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad’ focuses on the intensity that springs up between the main character and her fellow passenger, bringing in her thoughts on motherhood and her marriage. What do you choose to reveal about yourself? And how real can such a connection really be? 'There is an artist whose work you saw once in a Whitechapel gallery: she had stitched to a globe of the world metallic threads representing one single day’s flights, then somehow dissolved the globe, leaving just the sugar-spun mass of threads, and you think of it now, of how it made you think, how fine the threads that connect us from one person, or place, to another, and how precious, and how strong.'

‘The Children’ is, in some ways, more technically skilful. Within the story there are three separate strands woven together to form a single coherent narrative: a young mother, who finds a lump in her breast; a 19th-century writer called Caroline Norton is separated from her children and seeks to bring about a change in the law; and the children of asylum seekers being taken from their parents at the US border. It feels very modern in its form, with tweets, -and bang up-to-date politically, as well as timeless regarding its subject matter and the inclusion of poetry. 

My only reservation about Intimacies is its claim to be about young women in the modern world. Nine of the eleven stories are about motherhood, or near-motherhood, and to me it feels like the balance tips too far in that direction. Personally I am very interested in stories on modern motherhood, but I wonder if you weren’t, whether you might struggle to find what you are looking for within these stories. Having said that, there is no doubt that Caldwell, who is also a novelist and playwright, is extremely adept at writing in the short story form, and this is a heartfelt and beautiful collection. 

About the reviewer
Laura Besley is the author of three collections of flash & micro fiction: (Un)Natural Elements, 100neHundred and The Almost Mothers. She is also an editor for Flash Fiction Magazine. She tweets @laurabesley.

Review by Tracey Foster of "Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems" by Simon Armitage

Sometimes we assimilate into the region that we are born into and sometimes it has a habit of permeating through us, long after we have left it. ‘Scratch my skin, I’ve got cinders in blood stream’: as a writer who is drawn to the north of my youth, I can fully empathise with Simon Armitage and his fifty-year relationship with a place that has been an inspiration and an echo that has woven through many of his poems. Watching the world from his bedroom window as a small child, his back to the moor, these ‘moonstruck observations’  were the seeds of inspiration that would come into sharp focus as an adult: ‘At night, the horizon brimmed with a darkness like outer space, crowding the corner of my eye, thickening and deepening at the back of my mind.’ 

This collection of fifty poems, entitled Magnetic Field, covers the span of his craft and contains some early unpublished pieces and some new poems written especially for this publication. Here, the landscape is revealed; even before the words can rush our ears, the land itself is offered as a visual prompt. The book jacket insides are decorated with a bird’s eye view of the topography that inspired the writer’s musing, a landscape that he calls ‘transcendent and transgressive.’ A graphic nib punctuates every dot of the moor and grassy knoll of the surrounding heathland, setting the tone before we delve into the punchy style of his prose. The River Colne, the canal and the inter-Pennine train line all cut through the granite outcrops that flank the small town, suggest a route out, a getaway to another life and possibilities that must have tempted the young aspiring poet. We are given specific markers on the map to place the poems within the land, honing our view right down to his dad’s greenhouse nestled behind a row of terrace houses:

          When you disturbed them
          The seeds of rose-bay willow-herbs lifted
          Like air bubbles into the beam of light.
          Then you’d emerge, a hoard of tomatoes
          Swelling the lap of your luminous shirt. 

The obsession with his childhood home, that he calls ‘a cathedral of the ordinary,’ is again and again a starting point for his recollections. We are taken on a sepia journey to his distant past and misdemeanours. His poem 'Privet,' based on a punishment of arduous pruning, dished out by his father to atone for some offence, ends with his young body lying prostrate on the bush, ‘floating there, cushioned and buoyed by a million matchwood fingertips.’ His parents are a tender refrain that punctuate the text, a working-class embrace that can’t be contained within a valley. He fondly recalls his mother,

          at the twin-tub, 
          manhandling shirts, 
          hauling drowning sailors 
          from sea to deck.

With good humour, Samuel Laycock, ‘the other Marsden poet’ is recalled and used for textual intervention. He deliberately adopted the Lancashire dialect of the cotton workers in his pieces and is commonly known as the bard of the loom, the workshop and the mill. Similarly, Armitage lets his own voice flow through his poems too, and the voices of his parents lovingly nag in in dialect: ‘An imperial spanner and a saw so blunt, we could ride it bare-arsed to London.’ 

The passing of time and the passing of lives are felt keenly in the prose. We shift back to his thirteen-year-old self, leaving the house by the back door and returning as a man years later who asks, ‘How did it get so late?’ The past is ever present, the memories are keen, we watch, participate and feel each heartbeat counting the time. This ache of absence is tenderly felt, as the trivial becomes poignant on passing. Two poems about his dad face each other on the page, 'The Spelling' and 'Fisherwood,' and try to face up to the loss of those we love: ‘There’s no reply. I am too late. But every son carries a key / On a string, noosed around his neck.’ 

In one poem, Armitage is hauling a dusty Harmonium from Marsden church with his dad, whose smoker’s fingers and ‘dottled thumbs’ help lift the heavy load:

          Him being him he has to say
          That the next box I’ll shoulder through this nave
          Will bear the load of his own dead weight.
          And me being me I mouth in reply
          Some shallow or sorry phrase or word
          Too starved of breath to make itself heard. 

From skimming stones across Black Moss to the tractor tyre let loose to roll freely from the moors through the main street, I thoroughly enjoyed this collection. With this homage to a northern life, I found affection for the child who’d spied his mother, crossing the street with a shopping bag, ‘nursing four ugly potatoes caked in mud,’ to the man under whose eyelids ‘northern lights and solar flares shimmer and rage.’  This is a loving tribute to a place that made him.

About the reviewer
As a teacher of Art and Design for over thirty years, Tracey has channelled her imagination into getting the best creative output out of others. She is now hoping to restore her creative mojo and has enrolled on the Creative Writing MA course at Leicester University. Last year, she completed the Comma Press short story course with Rebecca Burns and collectively published Tales from Garden Street. She is due to have first poem published by the Poetry Bus magazine and is currently working on a poetry collection.

A Book That Changed Me, by Neil Fulwood: “Collected Poems,” by Sylvia Plath

It was the mid-80s. I was thirteen. My Nan was housebound. Every couple of weeks I’d go to Bulwell library and take out some books for her. I remember borrowing a scattering of classics and regency romances, but her tastes predominantly ran to poetry. As can be imagined by anyone who knows the area, Bulwell library - back then far smaller than in its current incarnation - didn’t exactly offer the broadest selection of verse. Nor did I, at that age, have the broadest frame of reference. My literary horizons were bounded by the Alistair MacLean and Desmond Bagley thrillers on Dad’s bookshelf, plus the odd well-thumbed James Herbert paperback doing the rounds at school.

I knew Nan preferred what I’d heard referred to as the Romantics, so it was a pretty safe bet that if a collection or anthology had a woodland or river scene on the cover - or a reproduction of an oil painting with some dude in a silk shirt looking all moody with a quill pen - it would be the right kind of thing. Failing that, flick through a few pages and check that most of it rhymed. Even with these safeguards in place, though, it didn’t take long to exhaust their stock of Nan-friendly poetry. Which is how I came to take a punt on Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems. 

Nan approached the book with some scepticism. She opened it at random, read one poem (I later found out it was “Daddy”) and asked me to return it. I did, but not before reading a fair few poems. I didn’t understand many of them, but the images, the immediacy, and particularly the white-hot fury of the final works struck a spark in my mind. Poetry can do this? I thought. I want in! When I finally returned the volume, I immediately checked it out again on my own library card. And renewed it over and over until the librarian started eyeing me suspiciously. I asked my folks for a copy for my next birthday. It was probably for the best that neither of them perused it before they got stuck in with the wrapping paper.

It’s because of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems that I read poetry, let alone write it. My third collection is out in July, and it’s all because I choose a book at random in Bulwell library when I was thirteen.

About the reviewer 
Neil Fulwood lives and works in Nottingham. He has published two full poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It and Can’t Take Me Anywhere; his third, Service Cancelled, will be released on 29th July 2021.

You can read more about Neil's work and his collection Can't Take Me Anywhere on Creative Writing at Leicester here.