Review by Jessica Mookherjee of "Darling Blue" by Sarah James

Darling Blue is a poetry collection that creates its own world. We follow a woman through galleries and paintings, gradually discovering who she is and what she is doing in this world of art galleries, secret trysts and obsession with a man whom she names Blue. Paintings become ways of understanding what she cannot understand directly. We begin, as she does, to search for Blue everywhere.

Halfway through the first section of Sarah James’s Darling Blue, I realised I had been reading it wrongly. I had been judging the poems one by one: some I admired, others seemed more conventional, accomplished ekphrastic poems. But suddenly I found myself wanting urgently to know what happened next. I was reading a poetry collection as if it were a novel. And that was when I understood: the collection is the poem.

James is particularly good at allowing later poems to alter the experience of her earlier ones. The book is a palimpsest: meanings are written over but never completely erased. Walter Crane’s Neptune’s Horses recurs throughout. Initially its untameable horse offers an exhilarating image of freedom. Later, after the narrator admits that she failed to escape Blue’s grip, the same image cannot mean quite the same thing. By the time she becomes "More Than Neptune’s Horse," we’ve travelled too far with her to accept untameability quite at face value. In that way, the collection itself becomes an artwork.

The narrator repeatedly understands herself, only to understand herself differently several poems later. She leaves her younger self behind, then acknowledges: "I am no longer her, / and yet, part of her is still me."

Looking is one of the collection’s central actions. James’s narrator doesn’t passively describe paintings; she interferes with them. She wonders what their women are really thinking and questions the stories art history has given them. In If they looked more closely, Waterhouse’s Juliet is no longer necessarily dreaming of Romeo. Her blue necklace can be "clutched / and fingered," but beneath it is the woman’s own "unquenchable" redness. Gradually a colour grammar develops. Blue is the lover, but also something unknowable; red belongs increasingly to the narrator, full of body and appetite.

As we read the book, it begins to teach us how to read it. It’s an elegant lesson in what a whole collection can do, rather than simply being a series of competent or excellent poems. Darling Blue gives us ekphrasis, yes, but as an act of creating a woman’s inner life: we want the paintings to decode her. Then there are prose-poem heartbreaks when reality crashes in, and the epistolary poems addressed to Blue. These three registers - ekphrasis, prose poem and epistolary - become part of the narrator’s own construction. 

I came to trust the narrator’s contradictions. She stops writing to Blue, then writes another letter. They feel less like unreliability than the ordinary instability of the stories we make about our lives.

Another theme is power. The power relations are complicated. Blue has the wife, home and public life, while the narrator receives fragments: hotel rooms, disappearing messages, postcards from paintings they have seen together. In one of the saddest passages, she arranges those postcards in her flat: "A collage of our time / together, without us in it."

Yet she is not simply Blue’s victim. She looks at him, anatomises him, makes him into material. "In my head now, at least, I make him my muse instead," she says in the poem "Questions."

There are revelations about who she is which make the construction of the collection suddenly feel inevitable. I don’t want to give too much away, but her relationship with art is more than that of an interested observer. Meaning accumulates in the spaces between artworks. The collection is also an exhibition, and we walk through it with her.

The later poems deepen the book considerably. Blue begins to disappear. Blank space appears, and so do a son and another man. In "A father," love consists of wiping noses, holding sick bowls, scrubbing vomit and helping with homework: not romantic spectacle but attention and repetition. In "Unstoppable," the narrator turns from paintings "behind glass / and framed with dead wood" towards her living son, whose eyes contain "whole worlds / which haven’t yet been painted."

But James doesn’t make domesticity the cure for dangerous passion. In "Before something burns or bursts," after John Collier’s Priestess of Delphi, the woman is again incandescent, surrounded by red, suspended in "all / possible futures." By now the intensity that once seemed to belong to Blue looks as though it may always have belonged to the narrator herself.

Near the end, "Restoration" gives us the narrator at her most knowing. Paintings fade; restoration uncovers details but cannot return an artwork to its original state. "Some loves can live on, undamaged, beyond their initial context,” she concludes, “but it takes more than just a shared passion."

In the final poem, "My last unsent letter," Blue is summer sky, lake and sea, shared now with the man with whom the narrator has made another life. But I don’t entirely believe her, and I don’t think the collection requires me to. "I still carry a small flame of you with me," she admits. Even the title "My last unsent letter" makes "last" feel provisional. Which of us has been left untouched by the people we have loved?

Then comes one of the book’s most satisfying returns. Up close, blue is "distance’s illusion." The sea that Neptune’s Horse appeared to drink at the beginning was never something that could be swallowed or possessed.

So Blue does not disappear. Nor does the woman who wanted him.

I finished the book thinking about the whole thing rather than individual poems: about what had happened to me as a reader while moving through its paintings, and how differently I understood the first pages by the time I reached the last. The collection is the poem. And it is a very good one.

About the reviewer
Jessica Mookherjee is the author of three poetry collections with Nine Arches Press, Flood, Tigress (shortlisted for Ledbury Prize) and Notes from a Shipwreck. Her fourth collection Universe is an Animal is due for publication in November 2026 with Nine Arches Press. She’s also the author of Desire Lines (Broken Sleep Books). She works in public health and lives in Kent. 

Review by Margaret Royall of "Rain Falling" by Sarah Leavesley

Rain Falling is a stirring long poem, a battle-cry for action from humanity. Sarah’s innovative formatting of  her urgent message is astonishing in its very complexity. It is a poem sequence formatted in the shape of capital letters which spell out the title ‘Rain Falling.’ The poems forming each letter reveal the ravages of climate change on the planet, the extinction of many species, the neglectful role that humans have played and continue to play by their systematic failure to act effectively to halt the impending doom.

This is not an easy or comfortable read, requiring the reader to decipher the various ‘codes’ which the author employs. For instance, the first poem, formatted in a capital R shape, turns into a spectral poem where the top circle of the R joins onto the /\ shape and then reads backwards, mirroring the words above, perhaps throwing our culpability back at us. 

In the final G poem, the words at the base appear to be a jumble until you realise that they are repeated higher up but with some missed out and rearranged, so the reader has to figure out how they were first used and what changes have occurred. This unravelling suggests a parallel to the unravelling of the planet. Links in the eco chain go missing and humans are not effecting a lasting repair, which results in the chaotic weather we are now experiencing and the loss of species.

The author employs stark imagery to drive home her message: striking phrases such as 'raindrops ... falling like a skipped heartbeat,' 'ice as saving Angel,' 'slick with equilibrium,' 'nothing grew from the underbelly of our thundermakers,' 'reality’s overshimmering,' etc.

Rain Falling is a highly accomplished chapbook, intelligent and convincing. If the reader were ever sceptical about climate change, this will convince him/her to think again, and more than that, to act now, before it is too late.

About the reviewer
Margaret Royall has published five books of poetry and a memoir. Her work has appeared in print, online and in anthologies and has won or been listed in competitions. Her collection Where Flora Sings (Hedgehog Press 2020) was nominated for the Laurel Prize. She leads a Nottinghamshire poetry group and co-tutors a Hebridean writing retreat. Her next collection, Toccata and Fugue (Hedgehog Press) is due out in 2023. Website: https://margaretroyall.com/ Twitter: @RoyallMargaret Instagram: @meggiepoet

Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic" by Sarah James

The front cover of Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic by Sarah James makes it very clear that much of the material found within this poetry collection is going to deal with impact of living with type one diabetes - charting what it feels like to have to continually deal with the highs and lows of living with the condition.  

The poems that deal directly with what it felt like for the author to be diagnosed at the age of six are incredibly thought-provoking and moving. In ‘Admitted Nov 30, 1981, age 6: diabetes mellitus,’ James recalls the painful experience of teaching her 'fingers to force the need deep into an orange … First an orange, then my leg / The world shrinks, small as this sphere.' Whilst in ‘Diabetes’ unwell of Night Hypos,’ the child is plagued by 'Flesh sweats and shivers, the brain quakes.' To show the shifts in high and low blood sugar levels, the poet has individual words and phrases scatter and then re-configure towards the end of the page in rigid, claustrophobic constriction.

James proceeds to map her journey with diabetes and the route to some sort of acceptance, within herself, first and foremost. Intriguingly, this is coupled with a second narrative: that of a dead sister whose life ended as the younger twin’s began. In ‘Not quite the changeling,’ James admits 'I was born from my dead sister – embryo berthed in her water-logged lungs, bones moulded in her absence.' For the poet, that point in time when she came into the world comes to signify that moment for all of us when the path we are on hints at what could be or might have been: the possibilities of other selves and other identities. In ‘Constantly Reliving,’ we learn 'The girl who isn’t my sister / won’t stop laughing / at the narrative she’s made of me.'

James is an extraordinary poet. She is often wildly inventive but also respectful of traditional forms, imbuing each of her poems with a confessional tone that is reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Carol Ann Duffy. Like the very best of the female poets, she examines what it is to be a modern woman and alive to the potential of life, employing unique methods to share her experiences with those willing to listen. James herself notes in the ‘Foreword’ to the collection, ‘Diabetes happens to be one ghost implicitly looking over my shoulder when I write.’ The power of this collection is in the fact it uncovers and dissects the ghosts that haunt not only James, but each of us – shaping our nightmares as well as our dreams. 

About the reviewer     
Paul Taylor-McCartney has recently completed a PhD in Creative Writing with Leicester University. His research interests include dystopian studies, children’s literature and initial teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in a range of notable UK and international publications including Aesthetica, The Birmingham Journal of Language and Literature, Education in Practice (National Association of Writers in Education), Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine and Dyst: A Literary Journal. He lives and works in Cornwall.

You can read more about Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic by Sarah James on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Sarah James of "Dressing for the Afterlife" by Maria Taylor

Even just a few poems into Maria Taylor’s Dressing for the Afterlife, I realise there are many options for how to approach this collection, many themes and threads that I can trace through it.

The opening ‘Prologue’ gives us dressing for the afterlife as learning to 'breathe again,' having stepped into the moment where 'you ended a former existence / and zipped yourself into the unknown.'

The examples of possible outfits to wear hint at the poems to come, as does the opening poem ‘She Ran’ with its list of things run past, the poet having taken up running at the age of forty. This culminates, as summer turns to autumn, with:

          I couldn’t get as far as I wanted.
          The lights changed. My ribs, my flaming heart
          and my tired, tired body burned.

In many ways, the following similarly beautifully pared, moving (and also at times humorous) poems enact and extend this opening, taking the reader through personal past experiences. Some read like the poet’s own; others feature advice, adopted voices and celebrity lives. The book closes with a counterpart to the opening poem ‘Woman Running Alone.’

Afterlife here is not what happens after death but the afterlives within this life, especially women as they age. 

          In summer I was a night-blooming flower.
          By autumn I was a hangover. Winter made me
          a Wall-Street Crash.

I used the word ‘personal’ earlier but this collection is personal in a universal sense, borrowing others’ clothes (experiences) and drawing out wider similarities and significances. This poem, 'I Began the Twenty-Twenties as a Silent Film Goddess,' is a film star talking (in industry terms), but it’s the continuing experience too of many other women now.

For me, Dressing for the Afterlife is also about finding, or reinventing, an individual’s sense of ‘self’ against this and many other backgrounds.

          I trespassed.
          At night I found myself ice-skating
          into someone else’s life.

I can read this poem ('Awake in His Castle') in a Bluebeard sense, but I feel it also chimes at a real life level – in trying to establish and make sense of individual identity, power dynamics and dangers at play all around us.

Another reading of the collection, not unconnected to that above and completely fitting with running, is the sense of everything in continuous flow. Water is a recurring image. 

‘The Floating Woman’ is a memorial to Lauren Stephen, half-sister of Virginia Woolf. The poignant Ophelia-like imagery has death / suicide as a sense of ‘returning’ to water, and life as rivers poured over the narrator. Everything feels fluid, form-changing, transient. This also applies to language: 'how every word / turned into water.'

Meanwhile, in 'The Fields,' 'rain dissolves / a  landscape you thought familiar' and the poem observes 'your place in this world an ever-shifting thing.'

Flow is present too in life’s dance and our steps of learning: 'We dance to learn about a part of ourselves / books can’t teach; it’s what our parents expect' (‘Learning the Steps’). In this case, that includes the moves of old island lives and leaping like salmon (water and flow), 'trying to catch scent of home, / as music pours through speakers like flood.'

It’s also in the passing and nature of time:

         People vanish into thin air every single day,
         even ghosts fade in time ….
         You’re no different. Look, here’s your own reflection.

More than this though, it’s in the pace of the lines, the use of recurring motifs, choices of line-breaks and punctuation, including the end of ‘Mr. Alessi Cuts the Grass.’ Here, a noise like a neighbour pushing 'something larger than dreams / over concrete' expands into a whole poem that ends on the full-flow leaving open of all possibilities of 'but for a moment –'

That the final poem of the collection ends with a similar dash is even more significant in these terms, as well as inviting the reader to re-submerge themselves in the collection, re-reading for more possibilities.  

Other strong elements for me in Dressing for the Afterlife include romantic hopes and family love, and with them the sense of belonging, or not belonging (as present in some of the poems already quoted).

In ‘The Distance,’ the narrator’s family can’t get the hang of England, as lives are scattered into flats, people calling to each other from balconies instead of olive groves:

         Years later I throw open my windows to rain
         knowing my aunt’s echoes won’t travel the distance,
         I’m here, I say to water, can’t you shout any louder?

Meanwhile, in ‘Role Model,’ famous and seemingly glamorous potential role models are rejected for the woman next-door with 'a walk that says I know where I’m going.' 

And yes, all these loop back and together with the elements of water, dance steps, the essence of ‘self,’ the nature of life, society and time: 'Maybe time moves like a figure of eight, / surging forwards then back on itself' (‘Loop’).

That poetry can, maybe even has to, exist outside of time is evident hopefully in the scope of what I’ve already quoted. Imagination does too and this is inherent in many of Taylor’s poems here, including those that place deft light-hearted observations side by side with sharper emotional insights and lines.

In ‘Hypothetical,’ the 'conversational frolic' of a friend asking the narrator if they’d sleep with Daniel Craig is a wonderfully humorous poem. But it also speaks to the nature of the world we live in with its sometimes obsession with celebrity-status and lives turned into public drama.  ‘How to Survive a Disaster Movie’ is similarly deliciously light-toned yet profoundly chilling. 

These are some of the ways I have read this collection. The beauty of strong poems is that they leave space for the reader to find their own truths in them, having given the images, ideas and narratives to do this with. This sense of multiplicity of paths and routes – in life, identity and reading – is most explicit in ‘Choose Your Own Adventure,’ another poem that is simultaneously funny and heart / dream-breaking.

Reading and re-reading Dressing for the Afterlife, I’m struck by new and different striking images, lines and resonances. Each time, now matter how deep these may cut, I come away with a sense too of exhilaration, much like the woman of the closing poem:

          The rhythm fills her with flight – 
                                            and her wings,
                                                   what wings she has –                             

About the reviewer
Sarah James/Leavesley is a poet, fiction writer, journalist, photographer and editor, who also runs V. Press poetry and flash fiction imprint. Her latest project is an Arts Council England funded multimedia hypertext poetry narrative > Room. Website: www.sarah-james.co.uk.