Review by Pam Thompson of "Skinship" by Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana

 

Skinship is Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana’s second collection after Sing me down from the dark (Salt, 2022) and is both a development and continuation from the previous collection. Corrin-Tachibana lived in Japan for ten years, experienced two marriages and the challenges of coming to terms with cultural expectations, not least judgements by in-laws, and indeed her own mother.

Skinship (its meaning in Japanese, "skin-to-skin contact") sees the narrator returning to Japan after a fifteen-year absence. Candid personal narratives are delivered via a variety of forms, predominantly variations on the zuihitsu and haibun. 

A zuihitsu draws together loosely-connected fragments of different types of writing. It allows narrator and reader to travel through time and place and to grasp several understandings about an overarching subject. Take the opening poem, "Skinship: a zuihitsu," which flickers through various memories around the birth of the narrator’s son, "Our son was born in Kalamazoo Hospital," and signals aggressions she meets along the way: the nurse who seized her nipple and "shoved it" in the newborn’s mouth; the mother-in-law who insists she eats an omelette which makes her sick, the increasingly ominous significance of a song, "I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo! Recorded in 1942 by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra." 

The Forward-prize shortlisted" ‘Madame Gout: a zuihitsu" draws its title from the writings of Benjamin Franklin in his dialogue with the Gout:

                                                                       Madame Gout. You know my 
          sedentary state and on that account, it would seem, Madame Gout,
          as if you might spare me a little, seeing it is not altogether my fault.

The rest of the poem is diverting and entertaining, beginning with accounts of the rich food the poet has eaten leading to the "foot twitch" on the train journey when she is talking to the "tattooed Norwegian." As we learn about famous gout sufferers, for instance, and the word’s derivation, "from the Latin gutta, a drop of liquid," we also sense the poet’s frustration at her husband’s repeated statement that "gout is common in Japan." The final couplet stings and conveys much about the relationship: "Your husband asks how is your foot? For the umpteenth time. / He is happy you are in the house when he returns from golf."

A haibun combines a section or sections of prose with one or more haiku. Traditionally the prose sets a scene, perhaps describes a journey while the haiku provides an oblique commentary or reflection on the prose. There are harsh times certainly but "Haibun from East Lothian," with its precise details of landscape, of plants and birds and joy with a lover, temporarily blots out other concerns even as the haiku hints at warning:

                                                                The spiky cockle I carry back
          from the bay, held sideways, is a pair of birds nestling their
          heads. Upside down it is erotic. And for a few days, in a
          whitewashed cottage, I do not think of your spoilt daughter
          … my teenage son … or of the stranger husband, in the spare room.

above marram grass

quartering short-eared owls

pursued by corvids

A "burning haibun" usually has a darker intent. In at least three sections, an act of erasure is performed on the initial prose which is then reduced to a haiku. "Fishbones: A Burning Haibun" gives insight into the narrator’s fraught relationship with her mother. She was "Rarely praised" and "there were plenty of stories about the trauma of having me." The poet "yearned, even as an adult, to hold her attention." The prose section ends with "She hates me cooking Dad fish. Throws open the lounge windows. Has no patience. For fishbones." The haiku which emerges from the erasure encapsulates chillingly what the broader narrative has conveyed:

I diluted her –
she spat words,
fishbones

The inclusion of the Japanese language, its phrases and characters, adds an extra visual and aural dimension. The different layouts of the poems are a visual treat too as is their attention to the nuances of social behaviour. I admired the shifts in tone, the balancing of heartbreak with resilience and sardonic humour and the narrator’s no-holds-barred approach to her material. There are so many more threads and features to be explored (e.g. music, literature, art – for instance the sharply poignant poems written in response to Yoko Ono’s Music of the Mind exhibition at Tate Modern) in this rich and inventive collection.

 

About the reviewer
Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. Her latest pamphlet is Sub/urban Legends (2025, Paper Swans Press). She is a Hawthornden Fellow.

You can read more about Skinship by Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Emma Lee of "Not Even October" by Tim Relf

Not Even October is a collection that looks back on the ordinary moments that shape lives, while hoping that life still has more to offer. In "Time is running out" a "welcome home" banner feels celebratory until the poet learns it’s "for someone you later heard was coming home for the last time" which gives it an extra poignancy.

There are poems that push at what poets are "supposed" to write or not write about, e.g. in "Roadkill," where "poets must not linger by dead objects in the road" and those who claim there are rules are 

          the people who claim prose poems don’t exist then spend hours picking
          at the bones of line breaks. You’ll find them staring off –
          heroically and tragically – in their author photos as if they’re trying
          to see beyond joy and love, beyond moons, shards, flowers, geese,
          lambs, crows, cow parsley, beyond the whole damn kit and caboodle
          of clichés.

The frustrations of bureaucracy and "computer-says-no" scenarios feature too. "Proof of life" drips with the exasperation of those captcha tests. 

The title poem is about lighting the first fire of the year as the chill of autumn begins, memories of "sleepovers, beaches, bike rides," and ending "I’ll sit and watch / today go up in smoke." "May" deals with the superstition of bringing hawthorn into the house, as the poet breathes "in a shower of speckled blossom. So much for that stench: / it’s a myth. If this is how death smells, well, perhaps / there’s nothing to be afraid of, after all."

There’s a wry humour and Relf relishes poking fun that those who impose restrictions while championing those who rebel, demonstrating how humans connect and evolve. Not Even October probes the everyday, asking readers to see the extraordinary in the ordinary and look again at what seems familiar in these lively poems.

About the reviewer
Emma Lee’s publications include a novel Stalling an Ambush (Pegasus 2026) and poetry collection The Significance of a Dress (Arachne, 2020). She co-edited Welcome to Leicester (Dahlia Books, 2016) and Over Land, Over Sea (Five Leaves, 2015), reviews for magazines and blogs here. She is Treasurer for Leicester Writers’ Club.

You can read more about Not Even October by Tim Relf on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Shanta Acharya of "Between A Drowning Man" by Martyn Crucefix

The ‘Invitation’ ‘to talk / about difference/ with its ambiguous / double birth’ at the beginning of two thought provoking sequences of poems, Works and Days (forty-nine poems) and O, at the Edge of the Gorge (fourteen poems) reflecting on ‘the world’s complexity,’ that makes us ‘other’ everything,’ is not the only reason that invited me to read these poems that resist definition. ‘Why make it a god,’ Crucefix asks. ‘Instead say something / something of difference / with its sudden / sometimes shocking riches / an othering/  to hone attention / not dull it.’ We have the experience, but miss the meaning. Like gods, the poems do not easily yield their meaning. 

The title of the book, Between A Drowning Man, its incompleteness, was a hook, inviting me to read the title poem first. However, ‘between a drowning man’ does not provide any simple answers even when the line is completed. On the contrary, it serves as a warning that navigating one’s path is not going to be straightforward, not unlike life. We face the unsettling juxtaposition of an unknown stranger’s mortal struggle and the intimacy of the writer’s ‘child’s skinny dipping.’ The rest of the poem does not offer any definite answers, not about the fate of the ‘drowning man’ or the child. Instead, we are reminded of the ways in which things fall apart: ‘between brother / and estranged younger brother / between mother and one of her six children / between the kissing gate / and the coffin route between cup and lip,’ and so it goes on to conclude ‘with its improbable cost / with its “always and forever” critical burden / words scrawled on a scrap of paper by someone / by the old gods of rumour / all the bridges are falling down.’ 

The image of a world in discord, with echoes of Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming,’ reaffirms itself as you begin at the beginning ‘like crimes woven into the weft of a tee-shirt / waiting on the reduced rail // … like envy buried long years in the black heart / of expressed admiration’. That ‘othering’ prompts the poet to see difference in a way that makes it open to interpretations. And ‘so it is—in and around and over and above –’ because ‘all the bridges are down.’ Broken bridges offer a metaphor for alienation, if not collision and confrontation, as a default landscape of our increasingly broken and fractured times. The reference to Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal on the front cover, the deep sense of loss, ‘the pathos of old things passing away and no things coming’ the great past crumbling down, breaking down, is palpable in the refrain: all the bridges are falling down.  

The poems in Works and Days, ‘written over a period of years, are responses to a series of historical moments in a progressively more disunited kingdom.’ They draw on two other texts: Hesiod’s Works and Days, probably the oldest poem in the Western canon, driven in part by a dispute between brothers, and vacanna poems that originated in the bhakti religious protest movements in 10th-12th century India that also ‘expressed a great deal of personal anger, puzzlement, even despair about the human condition.’ This forensic unfolding of two landscapes – contemporary Britain post-2016 and the countryside of the Marche in central, eastern Italy’ - represents complex parallel journeys. The leitmotif which runs through the first section of ‘all the bridges falling down’ and the epigraph to section two, a quotation from Canto 16 of Dante’s Paradiso in which cities pass out of existence through warfare or disease etc., offer hope. One must destroy in order to recreate, and even Time is not exempt from this process of regeneration.  

In a poem titled ‘can you imagine’ (for my children),’ the reader is invited to imagine a world in which ‘you carry me safely because the truth is / I’m no burden in your rucksack,’ no longer sharing the companionship of others, because ‘you find the bridges between us fallen down / and you mourn but you can imagine.’ The recurring metaphor of the fallen bridges, the disconnection and isolation in our lives portrayed less than a decade after Brexit are meant to disturb, hurt, confuse. We are no longer children and cannot create a world of our own. In our adult, increasingly global world, with technology that is meant to connect us, the world no longer makes sense. 

A poet, translator, reviewer and poetry blogger, Martyn Crucefix has won prizes for his poetry and translation. As a translator of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus, Laozi’s Daodejing, Huchel’s These Numbered Days, among others, Crucefix has been building bridges for those who want to cross the divide between cultures, countries, ways of seeing the world and each other. Words are bridges, language itself a bridge – yet we inhabit an increasingly complex world where loneliness and isolation are on the rise. In ‘fifteen kilometres of traffic’ an acceptance of this isolation is disconcerting: ‘you make a choice you go your own way … / because all the bridges are down.’ His understanding of the central role language plays in our lives, that creation of bridges between humans, is a fundamental aspect of his work.

The poems are packed with layers of meaning and references. If you get one reference, you many miss another. I had to look up ‘you make a choice you go your own way – / this has been better said before of course— / you cannot take the other way.’ To encounter references to Fleetwood Mac and Robert Frost in the space of three lines is not something familiar to me. Perhaps the unexpectedness of the juxtaposition is the key to our lives. Having grown up with English and American literature, I got the reference to Frost. Not that it matters if you get all the references as we are constantly reminded ‘all the bridges are down.’ The important thing is to enjoy the poems. Thankfully, not all the bridges are down all the time. ‘fifteen miles of traffic’ is also a brief meditation on the art of decision making in a world of AI and technology, where satnavs offer shortcuts which are nothing till they can be proven. 

The second section of poems, O, at the Edge of the Gorge, is a revised text of a sequence of fourteen linked sonnets, originally published in 2017. The sequence begins and ends with ‘carpenter bees,’ whose significance is not clear. Carpenter bees are traditionally considered solitary bees, though some species have simple social nests in which mothers, sisters, daughters may cohabit. I am not sure if their solitary character ultimately matters as ‘each lone speck’ vanishes ‘into the gorge as if headed home.’ 

In the final sonnet, the hawk’s resting place in the ‘shivering of poplars’ where he sways so that he is neither falling nor at ease with ‘these whisperings that cradle him on a whim’ is a powerful image of the transitory, even precarious aspect of life, including that of nations and civilizations. In the middle of all this, one encounters moments of realisation ‘in sharpening gusts along the valley floor / the little twister birthed from a scrap of air / whirling inches above a littered drain / in a back street of some hilltop town // like Urbisaglia or some place that has seen / and has survived change of use / from sacred temple to church to slaughterhouse / and no gully nor hill can stop it.’ In this uncertain, shifting world ‘great swathes of air’ gather strength to flex ‘all things to a scurrying to keep up / and the truth is some will and some will fail.’ In this inexorable move towards extinction, ‘perhaps he can build something on that–.’ But ‘it occurs to him the terrible shortness of time / remaining unless its vision involves / the hawk how soon the creature dies.’ These poems, offering no resolution, are powerful, understated, affecting. What emerges is an intense realisation of the fragility of our human condition. 

About the reviewer
Shanta Acharya’s recent poetry collections are What Survives Is The Singing (2020), Imagine: New and Selected Poems (2017) and Dreams That Spell The Light (2010). Her doctoral study, The Influence of Indian Thought on Ralph Waldo Emerson, was published in 2001 and her novel, A World Elsewhere, in 2015. Her eighth collection of poems is forthcoming in 2025. The author of twelve books, her poems, articles, and reviews have featured in various publications. Her website is here. 

You can read more about Between A Drowning Man by Martyn Crucefix on Creative Writing at Leicester here.

Interview with Louise Peterkin

Louise Peterkin is a poet and editor from Edinburgh. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including Magma, Finished Creatures, Poetry Wales, The North and One Hand Clapping. She is a recipient of a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust. She is a poetry editor for The Interpreter’s House. Her first collection of poems The Night Jar was published by Salt in 2020 and she is currently working on her second. 

You can read more about The Night Jar on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Interviewed by Jonathan Taylor

JT: Your collection, The Night Jar, opens like a Pandora's box, full of "gorgeous paraphernalia." Why did you choose this opening image, and what do you think it tells the reader about the collection as a whole?

LP: The Night Jar is comprised mainly of poems that take the form of dramatic monologues. There are lots of characters in there – some based on real life or historical figures or ones already established in literature, popular culture, mythology. Some are of my own invention. I liked the idea of a poetry collection as a figurative receptacle which could be opened to unleash the stories into the imagination of the reader. I tried to focus on individual hypotheticals in the hope of investigating universal themes – love, repression, envy, desire, religion, sexuality, obsession. 

The collection starts an untitled poem from the perspective of a collector. The first line is "I open the Night Jar." The insertion of this poem was partly inspired by Anne Sexton’s Transformations, her dazzling revision of the Grimm fairy tales. That collection has a prelude poem, "The Gold Key," in which Sexton employs the voice of an archetypical "gather round the fire, our story begins" narrator. I tried to do something similar with The Night Jar – take on the introductory voice of the collector. And the nocturnal imagery within that poem indicates that the collection as a whole will have something of the dark or the numinous about it. 

A significant inspiration for me in informing the concept and to some extent the tone of The Night Jar was my fondness for compendium horror movies from the Seventies. Films like Tales from the Crypt and Dr Terror's House of Horrors which would usually consist of five macabre stories with a wraparound or run-through thread of a stranger bringing individuals together (the stranger usually turned out to be some sort of incarnation of the Grim Reaper come to round up their souls for moral transgressions). I’m also keen on The Night Gallery (probably an instinctive influence going on there with the title). This anthology TV series was the follow up to The Twilight Zone and was presented by Rod Stirling in the guise of an art gallery curator – at the start he would show these paintings which represented the creepy stories about to be broadcast. The Night Jar could be seen as a compendium, an anthology of strange and unsettling stories.

JT: Given the opening image and various recurring motifs and characters, The Night Jar is an unusually cohesive collection, which implies various overarching narratives. How did you conceive the collection? Did you write individual poems, and then common ground emerged gradually, or did you conceive it as a whole from the start?

LP: I was lucky enough to win a New Writers Award in 2016 from the Scottish Book Trust. Part of the awards package was a mentorship with Bloodaxe poet Cheryl Follon. We decided early on that my aim was to develop the poems I had written into a full collection to submit to publishers. Cheryl recommended that I should try to apply some thematic cohesion to the poems, to think about how the collection could be viewed as a whole as well as a series of individual ideas. I started to think about what the poems had in common. 

The characters in the poems are often confined – in an asylum cell, in a convent, in a boarding school, in one poem inside the belly of whale. Or else they are stuck in a circumstance they cannot get out off: domestic grind, toxic relationships, some sort of psychological malaise or monomaniacal commitment. They are looking for some form of escape or autonomy or transcendence. If the speaker of the poem is not the captive, then they are the captor – they seek to coerce and possess but end up being the architect of their own discontent. It helped me to employ a congruence and give a shape to the process. I would write a poem and think Oh that could go in The Jar. Yes, that one's for The Jar! I didn’t restrict myself to writing solely monologue, character-based poems but that was what I was drawn towards. Some things were working on a subliminal level – it was only after I read through the poems grouped together, I realised how many motifs there were throughout that implied enclosure: trunks, boxes, gates, keys.

JT: As I say, the collection is full of vivid characters, some of whom recur (such as Sister Agnieszka). Many of the poems are, in a sense, character sketches. How do you view the role of character in poetry?

LP: It probably comes down to my own personal tastes. When I was in my late teens and really getting into contemporary poetry, the ones that appealed to me the most were ones where the poet would assume the voice of another person. I loved Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife which consists of poems spoken from the perspective of wives and mistresses of real life and fictional men throughout history, or male characters inverted into female ones – "Mrs Midas," "Queen Herod," etc. I savoured Margaret Atwood’s monologue poems, especially her longer sequences like "Speeches for Dr Frankenstein" and "Half-Hanged Mary" which allowed for an abundance of luxurious and unusual description and detail. 

Early on, I had attempted to write confessionally but always felt inhibited and stifled. The poems I was writing felt a bit off - inauthentic, affected or stiff.  Discovering monologue poems by other poets helped me towards the realisation that you didn’t have to write directly about yourself or your own experience. This went a long way in unfettering my own practice. By removing the speaker’s voice from my own in the main, I felt less impeded by the uneasiness or self-consciousness tied up with issues of autobiography and identity. I could explore some dark and complex emotions and themes with a greater measure of abandon and fluidity. It’s a creative mind trick I play on myself but it works. And in turn, it helps with the enquiry of the self, that process and catharsis. Because I’m in the poems too though separate from the narrator – my anxieties, my preoccupations – they are in there.

JT: What many of my questions so far imply, I suppose, is that there's a strong relationship in your work between aspects of storytelling and poetry. Do you see yourself as a storyteller? And how do you see the relationship between what you're doing in The Night Jar and, say, fiction?

LP: I do see myself as a storyteller or, on occasion, an interpreter of existing stories. But the medium of poetry is where I feel most at home. It’s the scope for imagination and invention the art form allows coupled with its command for discipline. The sententiousness inherent in the practice forces me to refine and distil my ideas and my language. I have attempted to write short fiction in the past but I always felt it was florid and overwrought. This pained me because the fiction I enjoy the most applies an economy of language and a continence to make it compelling or imminently readable. 

Also, I just take a lot of pleasure and satisfaction from the devices in poetry which differentiate it from prose. I don’t write formal verse so it is important to me to apply the mechanisms which give my poems music - assonance, consonance, half-rhymes, and the application of metre which, without adhering to a strict form, lends an intended rhythm and movement to the free verse.

JT: Do you see yourself as a surrealist? There are definitely surrealist elements in many of the poems, and a virtuosic playfulness in the way you use language. How do you see the relationship between your poetry and surrealism?

LP: I would say probably not. The situations in my poems can be surreal or fantastical or outlandish for sure but I think that fact that they are compelled by a narrative drive pushes them more in a linear direction or grounds them in some way. I strive to convey a clear and vivid story for the most part.

Perhaps the storytelling characteristic of my poetry is at odds with Andre Breton’s assertion of "the undirected play of thought" as basis to surrealism but certainly a lot of the images I have in my poetry come from a reflexive place. I think that some of my similes could be pegged as a bit weird but I’m fine with that because in order for an image to appear to the poet there has to be a cognitive association which in turn gives it validity or a truth – those automatic allusions or visual connections the mind makes. 

I think that your term "playfulness" is perhaps more key to my writing. I really enjoy wordplay and take pleasure in the licence poetry gives you just to enjoy language. My poems tend to be quite rich so I try to temper this with humour. I enjoy cooking and I like keeping lemons to hand in the kitchen as the sharpness cuts through the unctuousness of dishes – I try to use dashes of humour in a similar way in my poetry. And the poets I admire the most usually have a certain mischief and energy, and are quite audacious in their imagery – people like Jen Hadfield and Jane Yeh spring to mind. 

JT: As well as surrealism, there's a gothic aspect to many of the poems, or perhaps an uncanny element. How do you think this element of the poems arises? Is it to do with the subject matter you choose, or the language, or something else?

LP: I think perhaps its more to do with the subject matter and this probably just comes down again to my tastes – my sheer affection for horror cinema and literature and the macabre. The supernatural, the uncanny have always held an appeal for me, anything that gives you the shivers in movies, in fiction. I’m not so interested in real-life accounts of the paranormal – maybe I’m too sceptical. I’m not sure that you have to believe entirely or even a bit in order to be fascinated by the subject in fictional representations. There is much capacity in horror cinema or literature for the study of psychological or sociological demons. 

I would probably agree that I am interested in conveying a gothic atmosphere in my poems, with their heightened energy, and in their relaying of the tropes of cinematic and literary aesthetics – the mad scientist's lab, the Victorian asylum. As a child I loved looking inside things. Whenever we went on a family trip to some heritage site and there was a lighthouse or a tower, I was always despondent if we couldn’t look inside. I loved the idea of the interiors of mansions, castles, dolls' houses, of the lairs of villains in movies and TV. This probably translates in some of the poems in The Night Jar – a concentrated interest in setting a scene with detailed description. 

JT: All of the poems in The Night Jar are fascinatingly varied in terms of form and layout. I really enjoyed this aspect of the poems, and felt that the forms really suited the varied subject matter, and different characters. How do you go about negotiating that relationship between form and content?

LP: I think that often the disposition or circumstance of the narrator is the preliminary point for me. I’ll give a few examples, citing individual poems. 

In "Sister Agnieszka runs away to the circus," I wanted to imbue the poem with a breathless quality to convey the frenetic and joyful feeling of breaking free. That poem runs in a long column of free verse with no stanza breaks. But within this I also tried to apply a rhythm and musicality that would infer the acrobatic movement of trapeze and also the rapid-fire tempo of circus music. Conversely, in "Sister Agnieszka addresses the poor and the needy" where the character is repressing licentious feelings for a gardener, the timbre is different – austere, haughty – and so it made sense for me to split it into stanzas for a more controlled effect. 

"The King who Ate Himself to Death" is essentially set out as a list of meal courses. I use anaphora – each line starts with the child-like defence of "But …" - and the poem becomes both a menu of food descriptions and a list of justifications for the narrator’s excess. 

In "The Snow Queen's factory," the musicality is deliberately subdued to create an anesthetizing effect – the lines do not run into each other and are intended to appear like something that would be chanted, perhaps even mumbled. The poem is a fable but supposed to imply real-life malaise, disconnect caused by work routine or domestic drudgery, a maternal remoteness, perhaps even a form of perinatal depression. Though there are few half rhymes throughout the poem there are references to bells, echoes, mantras – it’s like a nursery rhyme learned to be recited in parrot fashion, a mode of living to be repeated without feeling. 

I try to be true to my instincts while mindful of my craft, to use technique accordingly and consider the importance of shape and white space in poetry. The original format of "Notable Globsters," a cryptozoological poem, was laid out like a Wikipedia page with certain words highlighted in blue like hyperlinks but this wouldn’t have been feasible in a printed book. Probably just as well. I can go a bit far sometimes. 

JT: You weave stories around all sorts of real-life (and made-up) characters in The Night Jar. Who do you think are the main people (real or fictitious) who stand behind the collection? Who are your main influences?

LP: Sister Agnieszka was inspired by a story a friend from work told me. She attended a Catholic School in Poland and one of the nuns who taught her and was extremely pious and charismatic suddenly upped sticks in the middle of the night and it was all very mysterious. I sort of fill in the gaps and set her off on a series of adventures – four poems about her appear in the collection and this allows me to indulge (even though I am agnostic) a fascination with Catholic iconography. It also permits me to mitigate the themes idea of religious or patriarchal oppression with a bit of fun and sex and escapade. Interestingly, afterwards I found out that Sister Agnieszka is the name of a character in some Agatha Christie novels – I didn’t know this at the time, I was looking for a Polish name with a certain number of syllables and I chose that one. It’s quite a coincidence!

Many of the poems are inspired by characters in film or by my love of cinema - Indiana Jones, Bond movie henchmen, Hitchcock. I have a poem about Renfield, the institutionalized disciple from Dracula. I am attracted to the idea of villains probably, or those who are vilified justly or unjustly; those considered misfits or outsiders.

Some are inspired by fairy stories I loved when I was a child – The Snow Queen, Hansel and Gretel or sometimes they have a basis in mythology. The real-life figures I include were usually inspired by articles I read about them which had stayed with me for one reason or another. “The Interview with the woman who trepanned herself” was inspired by an interview in Vice magazine with an advocate of self-trepanation called Amanda Feilding. The poem assumes the voice of the interviewer but is not based directly on the Vice interviewer – I assumed the journalist's voice so the poem could explore the themes of creative frustration and writer’s block. 

I have never visited the US but I believe that some of the poems are inspired by and set in a sort of imagined Americana, one learned second hand through the landscape of cinema or American Gothic literature by Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Shirley Jackson. And some of the characters could be viewed as a subversion or extension of the femme fatale archetype in American film noir or old Hollywood notions of the bombshell. 

I love music and growing up I always was drawn to artists that incorporated an element of conceptual performance or played with the idea of identity – David Bowie, Debbie Harry, Kate Bush. I actually think that the song writing of Kate Bush inspired my writing almost as much as other poets have because the way she would take and existing piece of art – a novel or a film as stimulus and then create something that was so entirely her own. I found that thrilling and inspiring. 

JT: What are you working on at the moment?

LP: A second poetry collection. I’m still working on the structure but I think it will be split into three parts – the last of which is a narrative sequence of poems concerning a writer recovering from a breakdown who takes on a residency in a house on the Suffolk coast. The house is haunted by the spirits of two nefarious Victorian illusionists and Vaudeville entertainers. So yeah, leaning into my eerie obsessions once more but I want the collection to examine the themes of mental illness, addiction, dysfunctional relationships and the writing process itself – its potential for healing and harm as you retreat into an inner world. 

The overall arching theme of the collection will be divergence and conflict in personal relationships and within the self – our tendency towards self-sabotage and self-destruction. Having kept the voice at the centre of my poems at a comfortable distance for so long, in my new poems I find that I am balancing the fictional projections with a somewhat more personal aspect – it’s tricky and frustrating and a bit frightening but I hope it allows me growth as a writer. It’s going at a glacial pace. I will be finished in about twenty years at this stage. I need to get some momentum going. 

About the interviewer
Jonathan Taylor is the director of Everybody's Reviewing. His recent books include the short story collection Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023) and the poetry collection Cassandra Complex (Shoestring Press, 2018). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. 

Review by Christine Hammond of "The Night Jar" by Louise Peterkin

The cover art of Louise Peterkin’s The Night Jar sets the tone for a collection that is stylish and understated, yet beautifully theatrical. 

Be prepared for the poems to take you on a Carroll-esque transport of delights. Like Alice, you’ll experience a colourful cast, often led by women appearing to  inhabit the interstices of fantasy and reality. Yet somehow, no matter where the dramas are played out, they remain elegantly embedded in the relatable, ordinary script and emotional spectrum of our daily lives. Lives that include love, faith, relationship ennui, sexuality, freedom, joy, disappointment, longing, ambition, loss and escape from routine oppression. 

In a four-episode vignette we are introduced to the adventures of a recalcitrant nun in "Sister Agnieska Runs Away to the Circus." Here, the Big Top is described as a "yummy mirage" and early on the skilful use of tense and double entendre convey the poem's "fallen" theme: 

          … the twirling, the leaping and the curving
          for the love of God, the love 
          of the falling …

          … You know now balance 
          is an act of sheer faith.

"Snake" is both visceral and anthropomorphic. It articulates the ending of a relationship, carefully planned and executed:

          No one suspected I could be so snakey..
          ... I was long gone.
          My skin like hosiery on the floor

The motif is extended with "snakey" witticisms and a well-placed dramatic exclamation:

          I nudged to the East with panache …

          ... there were clues …

          sodden shirts twisting 
          round my arm like a bracelet
          the spiced tomb of the laundry basket.

The bird image in the final verse is both delicate and self-contained, with a Haiku resonance that only adds to the sensory experience: 

         How lithe I am I have wriggled free!
         I hiss like Peter Lorre. A small bird
         fizzes like seltzer inside me. 

Peterkin’s debut is a fine piece of work. Intelligent and exquisitely crafted, the poems are highly visual and immersive. Reading them will leave you satiated, yet still looking forward to the next production. 

About the reviewer
Christine Hammond began writing poetry whilst studying English at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her early poems were published in The Gown (QUB), The Female Line (NIWRM) and Women’s News where, as one of the original members, she also wrote Arts Reviews and had work published in Spare Rib. She returned to writing again after a long absence and her poetry has been featured in a variety of anthologies including The Poet’s Place and Movement (Poetry in Motion – The Community Arts Partnership), The Sea (Rebel Poetry Ireland), all three editions of Washing Windows and Her Other Language (Arlen House). She has also been a reader at Purely Poetry - Open Mic Night, Belfast.

You can read more about The Night Jar by Louise Peterkin on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Jon Wilkins of "Sing me down from the dark" by Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana

How do you describe a ten-year stay in Japan, including two marriages, then a homecoming, and all the problems that cross-cultural relationships can bring? You write a poetry collection called Sing me down from the dark and this is just what Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana has done in an original and beautiful way.

This, however, is more than a mere collection of random thoughts and feelings. It is a complex series of emotions remembered in various poetic forms, each caught to highlight the poet's innermost thoughts and share them with us by laying herself bare to us, the reader. She exposes her own raw emotions and draws us into a period of her life that she has to share, to make sure none of it is forgotten and that every incident had a meaning, had a point in the schematic of her world.

It is a love story in all its forms, as wife, as mother, as woman. The banality of Japanese communal life is shared, with the expectations that come with it and we see how Corrin-Tachibana yearns to conform yet escape the life she finds herself in. What exactly does her life mean? Should she settle for what she has or should she take flight and find freedom from the suffocation she feels? The different forms her poems take seem to show this feeling that she is cornered, at bay, trapped between different cultures. Which should she choose? She tries each form, searching for an answer and by the end of the collection does she actually find what she wants?

There is a clash between East and the West, as Japanese and European cultures clash and merge as all the issues of daily life confront us. We are unsettled by the notion of being at home, and away from home, in love - finding true love in the birth of her son, but is this as totally fulfilling as it should be?

This is a wonderful collection. My eyes were opened to the Japanese culture and the way Corrin-Tachibana has tried to become part of it, while also resisting it as a way of staying true to herself. Enjoy the poems. You won't find anything like them for a long time. The poetic vision is perfect, we can all learn so much if we open up to her words and to her world. Corrin-Tachibana shows we are all the same, but all different. We can search for love but where do we find it? Can we ever find it?

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is 67. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s. Next year he takes up the UEA Crime Fiction Creative Writing MA. The game's afoot!

You can read more about Sing me down from the dark by Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Jon Wilkins of "The Meanwhile Sites" by Pete Green

The Meanwhile Sites is a term, according to Google Books, "used increasingly by urban planners to refer to locations that are earmarked for future development, it is a book about places like this, and situations like this, and their relationships with people, and the oppositions of marginality against mainstream, renewability against finitude, utility against intangible value, and the changing forms of physical, cultural and psychological landscapes in a post-industrial age.” Quite a mouthful and perhaps the beauty of Pete Green’s work is that you don’t actually need the definition to understand their work as it is an obvious howl into the air about an increasingly globalised world that is attacking everything that Everyman would have stood for.

I admire Green's reminiscences of a life well spent, of a world abused, of a time when life was simpler, because the world was more simple. Their use of metaphor is stunning and in every poem we can unpick meaning and streams of consciousness as they remind us of what once was and of what now has become - the rewards for letting the developer march over us, the trader destroy our banks, the politicians who betray their promises.

These are very political poems that sweep over continents in their journey to show us what has happened through neglect and tolerance of the various political and economic processes put in place. "I am the king of Belgium" delivers us to exactly the world we have created, the world we have inherited - a world that we perhaps will never recapture as we seem to have gone too far. "The Money Tree" shows us what has been taken away, what society has lost and what can again never be recovered.

I love the experimentalism of Green's works; they give us diverse ways of promoting or pursuing a point. Not for Green a simple way - their work jumps out from the page lightly and dark, as nuanced and creative, their talent obvious and deep. Complex language, historical and literary references abound. Green shows that they understand what they are writing about. The reader can feel their anger, feel their regret.

The notes at the back of the book are useful as they show what inspired Green, though to see the finished article from the few words of inspiration is often a wonderfully mystic journey with a surprise at the end of each line, of each verse or stanza. Green challenges us. They demand that we think about their words. Their words implore us to think about the world we live in, a world that is gradually being taken away from us, a world that Green references from neolithic times to the present - a world where there is still some hope, but is there still time?

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is 66. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s.

Review by Jon Wilkins of "Scenes from Life on Earth" by Kathryn Simmonds

Saying that someone or something is clever is often seen as an insult, and a rather patronising one at that. But in this case, when I say that the poems of Kathryn Simmonds are clever, I mean it in the broadest possible sense. 

Kathryn Simmonds persuades us with her use of language and rhythm, appearance and tone, that her world is a world that we should enter. She draws us in with the simplicity of her writing, that disguises so many ideas and displays of talent.

We see the depth of her feelings for her mother. She mourns and we mourn with her as her pain surrounds us, dragging us into her words. These are words that envelop and create another world that we can co-exist in; a world that recognises bereavement, that shows us what loss can do, far beyond the immediate numbness and anger, but at least a measure of closure. Memories are combined with stories and images from her childhood that reflect so easily her love for her mother. Light touches shine in each poem as a remembrance is shared and happiness recalled. We see that one can move on towards, if not acceptance, a future that can keep the good things close to heart. Her poems are a celebration of life, a festival of death and an awareness of memory and how it is so important once a loved one has gone.

Some of her phrases are visceral. Others as delicate as silk. But they stick in our minds. Simmonds finds humour where we least expect it, beauty when we are looking into shadows. She observes life and death for us, as her imagination flies about her world - a world that becomes ours.

Life could be so complicated as could death, but Simmonds simplifies it and welcomes us with open arms. Witty and charming. Her good grace, her good humour overcomes sadness. The humour draws us in and wraps its arms about us. Her poem "Equinox" sums it all up so easily, so perfectly, and we can feel precisely what she means.

Kathryn Simmonds is so clever.

About the reviewer

Jon Wilkins is 66. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s.

You can read another review by Jane Simmons of Scenes from Life on Earth, by Kathryn Simmonds, on Everybody's Reviewing here.