Review by Julie Gardner of "Skail" by Richie McCaffery

"Skail" is an old Scots word meaning a scattering or dispersal. This information is provided in the back-cover blurb, where we also learn that "the poems in this pamphlet take place in the aftermath of a pandemic, and in the dissolution of a long-term relationship."

The first two lines of the title poem – an especially strong piece – suggest the supernatural, perhaps hinting at threat: "The night before Halloween, he came to her in sleep, / called out her maiden name, with a cancerous rasp." But this ghost comes not so much in anger as exasperation: "He could wait no longer, it’d been 15 years already / of dilly-dally-hanging-onto-daddy’s dust." Her indecision is swiftly rectified. She involves "the great grandkids / he never even knew" who use "little grain scoops" to scatter her father’s ashes in plant pots and they leave out a "tot of his favourite whisky … to slake his thirst." 

"Little grain scoops" will not be enough. The third and final stanza returns us to the woman and then, as if mirroring the first stanza, to the intangible, the supernatural. Despite the apparent abandon of her actions, we see how keenly she feels the loss:

         But the bulk of his ash was left to her, and went
         headfirst into the remains of the vegetable bed.
         And though it was a wet night, the dust cloud of him
         hovered under the streetlamp, as if getting its bearings.

Perhaps "The Lucky Penny," one of the later poems in the pamphlet, is about the same extended family. It begins: "When you were wee, he brought back a lucky penny." Once washed, however, it is revealed to be a Victorian gold coin. That the finder has not recognised its worth is ironic, given his repetition of the well-worn maxim: "Find a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck." This failure to recognise good fortune, is, we learn in the final stanza, characteristic:

         Over the years you’ve watched your mother’s profile
         change, caring for grandkids and holding the house
         together as he aged too, cursing a life of misfortune.
         He never knew he held gold in his hand. Still does.

The poems in this slim pamphlet avoid first-person narration, perhaps signifying a desire not to claim self-importance but to draw attention to the complexity of what it is to be human. It risks seeming disingenuous, however, especially in poems that seem to evoke the ending of the long-term relationship referred to in the blurb. In "Scrap," for example, we read, "Her last words to him were written, not spoken, / a paper cut severing them and their fourteen years." And in Cicatrix, "He never heard the wind changing. / Before he knew it, he was out of the frame." The distance between speaker and poet seems small, only the pronoun holding them firmly apart. All the poems feel natural and honest, though, the speaker assuming the role of an unobtrusive observer who reports what he sees with compassion and humour. 

In "Bolt," a man gets off a bus and is "dazzled by a camera flash." He wrongly assumes a group of teenagers have taken his picture and is about to confront them when he is saved from humiliation: "the ordnance of thunder blew them all / out of their skin." The poet trusts his reader to work out what has happened. The final lines of the poem roll together the teenagers, the man, the poet, and his readers:

           That’s being human
           one instant so full of self, the next
           made to feel like no-one, nothing.

This acknowledgement of vulnerability is a thread that weaves through the poems.

About the reviewer
Julie Gardner is studying towards a PhD at Nottingham Trent University, focussing on Silence and Voice in the poetry of Vicki Feaver and her contemporaries. Her poetry pamphlet Remembering was published by Five Leaves Publishers in 2024.

Review by Claire Cox of "Dear Life" by Shanta Acharya

As Maggie Nelson writes in On Freedom: ‘The question is not whether we are enmeshed, but how we negotiate, suffer and dance with that enmeshment.’ The conundrum of how best to live a life bounded by deep pain on one side and soaring rapture on the other lies at the heart of Shanta Acharya’s latest collection Dear Life. From its beguiling front cover – a ghostly blossom, ambiguously emerging or receding in the gloom – this collection grapples with archetypal concerns of light, darkness and exquisite beauty. The author’s elevated yet earthly contemplations on mortality loom large from the first poem ‘Being Alive,’ with its description of undiagnosed disease and resultant physical and spiritual pain, to the final eponymous poem ‘Dear Life,’ in which the struggles and wonders of living are said to exist within the independent agency of the author’s own words. 

Unafraid to explore the inevitable elements of suffering we encounter almost daily, Acharya probes the lived realities of solitude, grief, heartache and dislocation with startling imagery. Physical, emotional and spiritual sensations in ‘Loneliness’ are likened to ‘menacing lions,’ ‘blister packs of agony’ or a ‘professional assassin.’ The devasting loss of her brother, Susanta Acharya, forms a complete section of its own. Here, the terrible storm that overtakes us as we accompany a loved one through their final days – the assault on belief, grief’s uncertainty and the arbitrariness of loss, are articulated with aching self-awareness. Yet, even in such a raw, depleted state Acharya's imagination and luminescent cosmology enable these poems to vibrate with a wonderment for life. The omnipresence of love, divine and familial, is fixed as the ultimate universal truth despite the difficulties of holding on to that faith in the most testing of times; times that give rise to the hardest questions:  

          … Is life a series of random outcomes?
         And we humans here merely to add meaning?

         If there’s a force for truth and justice, enlighten me
         so I may make sense of this unbearable darkness of being? 

However, in this paradigm of mortality’s most profound challenges, Acharya is not without wit and effervescence. ‘Dressing Up In Lockdown’ is a sumptuous reminder of the beauty of levity. A celebration of incandescent bounty, revelling in for-best saris, jewellery and perfume, this sonnet radiates joyous indulgence and acts as a shimmering bubble, glistening and fragile in the face of enforced isolation. This sonnet is also an example of the impressive level of formal awareness that is evident throughout the collection. In addition to being one of several sonnets in Dear Life (indeed the second section of the collection is composed entirely of six sonnets), ‘Dressing Up In Lockdown’ shows examples of the particularly deft use of enjambment that serves to propel the writing and add a frisson of revelation at line-break level. Examples here include: ‘lounging / in pyjama and dressing gown,’ ‘of not being / touched’ and ‘Unable to ignore their / pleas.’ As a technique, enjambment is used to great effect not only across the collection’s line breaks but also operates across stanza breaks with confidence and panache. This from the couplets of ‘Afterwordsness’: 

          … Setting up
          home beyond the seven seas, building bridges in space 

          and time, I keep an open house, furnish it with song – 
          invisible guests come in and out it will.

Also of note is the collection’s use of repetition, most evidently in the extensive use of the ghazal. As a form traditionally associated with the expression of physical and spiritual love and longing, it is a particularly apt vessel for the thematic ruminations that run through this collection. The ghazal, with its repeated end word or phrase, enables a multi-faceted exploration of key philosophical considerations. Looking at some of the ghazals’ titles, which also serve as the repeated end word - ‘Secrets,’ ‘Find Me,’ ‘Existed,’ ‘Change,’ ‘Solitude’ and ‘Exile’ - gives a sense of the collection’s underpinning concerns. In a formal development, the poem ‘If’ also uses anaphora’s repetition at the start of each three-line stanza, in addition to epistrophe at the end of each tercet, which repeats the phrase ‘we would not exist.’ The regularity of this pattern throws into high relief its sole variation, that of the last tercet, which creates an abrupt and portentous shift:

          If greed and ignorance, pride and power
          stand in the path of enlightenment and realisation– 
          we will cease to exist. 

Again, in ‘Grant Us’ the repetition of the phrase ‘Grant us the wisdom’ at the start of each four-line stanza enhances the earnest prayerfulness of this poem and serves to illustrate the interrelationship between theme and form that is so intricately crafted across this collection.  

At its strongest when engaging with the nuance and possibilities of the lyric voice, Dear Life also includes empathetic forays into adopted persona and accounts of parallel experiences. In ‘Allepo, My Allepo!’ it is the beleaguered city that speaks. In ‘She Remembers,’ Hindu epics are revisited; ‘The Tree Huggers’ narrates a bloody incident in Indian history. Culturally eclectic, spiritually profound, this collection is equally adept at drawing on Catholic, Islamic, and Hindu traditions as well as classical mythology and Greek tragedy. The result is a deeply textured, deeply considered, and deeply felt exploration of and for humanity. Perhaps the most enduring truth within this expansive yet intimate collection lies in the poem ‘We Are All Returning.’ Written in memory of the author’s brother, it resonates powerfully in its universality: 

           The most revolutionary thing one can do in the worst 
           of times is to live and love to the best of one’s ability. 

Here is wisdom, hard won and transcendent.

About the reviewer
Claire Cox is co-founder and Associate Editor of ignitionpress, winner of the 2021 Michael Marks Publishers’ Award. She has a PhD (Royal Holloway) on poetry and disaster. Her poems have appeared in Primers: Volume Five and other magazines and anthologies. Claire was also the winner of the 2020 Wigtown Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize. 

Review by James Nash of "Remembering" by Julie Gardner

This is a tender and moving collection celebrating and memorialising two lives, the poet’s mother and her own husband, but succeeding, as all good poetry does, in finding universal truths about our common humanity and shared experience of loss.

Deftly constructing a history for her mother who died at forty-seven, and recording the emptiness after her husband’s death, these are quiet but truthful poems that bind us into the ordinary, but somehow extraordinary, emotional textures of human lives, and show us how we survive in the aftermath of tragedy.

This is from ‘Moving On’:

          After the van had gone
          I mopped the kitchen floor
          then went upstairs, stood awhile,
          as empty as the house itself.

Julie Gardener is a fine poet, content to let her readers ‘join up the dots’ if you like, but also happy to acknowledge the influence of other poets like Grace Nichols and Jacob Polley. She is playful in terms of form in ‘Rondo,’ riffing on nursery rhyme (a motif which appears in several of these poems), but ultimately what we have in this fine collection is a poet using simple and gracefully chosen words to explore the territory of memory and grief. The almost Wordsworthian reliance on everyday language gives these poems an emotional reach and power that is refreshing and unusual.

This is from ‘For Arthur’:

          Widow sounds so sad and slow
          and I am neither, though I will
          forever wish you here.

The photograph on the front cover of the poet’s mother is blurred; the poems inside reclaim the misty lives of those who have gone before, mother and husband, and prove again and again that art can construct great memorials. The gift of this brilliant collection is that it allows us to connect to our own loss and mourning, our own ‘remembering’ if you like.

About the reviewer
James Nash is a poet based in Leeds. He often writes in the sonnet form and his next collection, Notes of Your Music, will be published by Valley Press.

Review by Jonathan Wilkins of "Mo(u)rning Rituals" by Heidi Slettedahl

This book is what it says, carefully hidden by brackets: a mourning for lost children, a mourning of the past.

Mo(u)rning Rituals is a heart-wrenching collection of poems that opens up the visceral hurt of childlessness. The directness and lack of flowery language open the reader up to the hurt and the challenges that the writer faced in a world fraught by the frailty of the body.

Slettedahl’s poems do not, however, wallow in self pity. Rather, they are real, they are funny, they are what they are - an exposé of the feelings that she has as a woman who does not have children but has a burning desire to do so, only to be defeated time and time again by her own body. We see the child that will never be there, we feel the heartache, the absence, the love that would have been showered upon the child if only they had existed. 

The poetry brought tears to my eyes; the sadness is ingrained in the writing. And there is more here too: the loss of the author's father, and her lost friendships. Loss and mourning pervade these pages.

But is the "Morning" a sign of hope? We can only hope so.

These are cathartic poems that hopefully bring some peace. For the reader, they fill us with pain and loss and empathy. We are there. We can share the grief and agony. Of course not completely - but the beauty of the words allows us an insight into her world. This is a world we need to understand as we face our lives and our own problems. These poems make us feel like we are not alone. 

About the reviewer
Jonathan Wilkins is 68. 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 and Warwick Universities. 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 more about Mo(u)rning Rituals by Heidi Slettedahl on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Maria Taylor of "Grief's Alphabet" by Carrie Etter

At its heart, Carrie Etter’s fifth collection Grief’s Alphabet poignantly explores the loss of the poet’s mother and describes the impact of bereavement. Yet Etter’s collection is also as much about death’s antithesis – it is a celebration of life and the love which binds parents and children. 

This is not a collection which shies away from the painful aspects of grief. Etter’s poems have a piercing clarity about the rawness and truth of grieving that I admired very much. In terms of form, there are a great many prose poems and pieces which work with the white space of the page. In "The Last Photograph," Etter works with the "golden shovel" form to recreate a poignant moment between mother and daughter:

"Smile" I said, positioning the camera for
the last time. You turned slowly; you
struggled to smile, the lamplight a halo, cultivation
of a minor saint. 

The poem is accompanied by a photo of "Modie," Etter’s affectionate name for her mother. I found myself going between reading the poem and looking at the photo and thinking about how "the strength" Etter’s mother took to "lift her face" is a key image in terms of describing the final shot. Etter is unafraid at exploring the more difficult aspects of grief, those in which the grievers somehow blame themselves for the pain of the final days: "Blame this photo on the love or the / selfishness of daughters before they meet the dark."

Etter’s poems have a pinpointed quality at placing the reader in the immediacy of the moment. In "Homing," Etter writes about a trip to see her mother, where the pair are reunited and their close relationship is instantly rekindled: "If rain fell, we lingered, enchanted in the rooms where it could best be heard." The "rain" here works as a cocoon, a natural shield in which mother and daughter enjoy a comfortable companionship: "… we talked like this for days. I was that red cardinal on the white lawn, easy in brightness, except I was two: we."

Grief is often bittersweet; interspersed in this collection are poems of deep love. "An Adoption in 360°" takes us back to the beginning of the "two" as mentioned above, becoming "we." There is something incredibly tender in how the poet describes the day of adoption:

From the front, she carries a swaddled infant,
And both the man and woman’s bodies curve to shield it,
Though it is April in Illinois and the day mild.

From either side the three are one. 

I loved this collection. I found it compelling and have already read many of the poems several times. The inclusion of photographs also heightened my relationship with the poems. Etter has succeeded in writing a deeply personal collection, which at the same time is notable for its lyrical precision and variety of poetic styles when thinking about grief in all its different guises.  Grief’s Alphabet is a deeply memorable and evocative poetic tribute. 

About the reviewer
Maria Taylor is a British Cypriot poet and reviewer. Her latest collection is Dressing for the Afterlife (Nine Arches Press). She has been highly commended in the UK Forward Prizes for poetry. She also works as Reviews Editor for Under the Radar.

You can read more about Grief's Alphabet on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Colin Dardis of "No Small Thing" by Trevor Conway

Trevor Conway opens up his third collection with an engaging essay, expanding on the themes of the book, serving as an amuse-bouche for what lies within. In the world of post-pandemic literature, Conway realises that we have all been forced to look inwards, spending more time in the house, shut off from others. Naturally, what arises are the themes of home and family, and chiefly for Conway, the new arrival of a daughter. Imagine Bill Bryson’s At Home, exploring the dichotomy of the home and all its trappings, but told through the intimate prism of a small (and often sleep-deprived) family. 

One of the highlights of the collection is the personification of certain rooms in the house, given voice to comment on their nature, and the comings and goings of the people who use them. These poems are rich in humour and fancifulness: we find a hallway that feels neglected because it’s only used to get from one place to another; it is rarely the desired destination. Elsewhere, an attic ponders on its quietude, whereas the bathroom sees all manner of private horrors. 

Le Corbusier’s Five Points of Architecture states that "a house is a machine for living in," and so we find ruminations on laundry, child-rearing, cooking, cleaning and other domestic demands. It is within this endless machination that Conway gives us his richest descriptions: minced beef cooked until "all its red head are dulled," "nappies full as the shell of a snail," the emptying of a wheelie bin "taken like fish in one gulp," or a television set that "jabbers like a senile uncle." There is beauty in mundanity here, and Conway excels as reimagining these tasks through language into things of affection and astonishment.

The daughter poems show us a sense of fragility: "Oh, Man" muses on how some men struggle with fatherhood. "Baby Steps" marvels at the child "coming to terms | with the new physics | of her body machinery," but fears what new dangers walking will bring. Hope for the future also arises, coupled with the uneasy undercurrent of knowing that no future is wholly secured, the shadow of the pandemic looming over the years ahead.

         Other images we have yet to see:
         a schoolbag tight like a barnacle to your back,
         the jagged, crayon scrawl of your name,
         your face womaned in make-up.

It is a testament to Conway’s effectiveness that this reviewer – childfree and with no desire to rear – found the tenderness and devotion inescapable. 

There is the occasional poem outside of the home, of airplane flights, of ruminations on Galway city and a new beginning in Catalonia. Yet it is the scenes that take place inside the familial four walls that come across as most personal. No Small Thing lives up to its title, showing the reader that the apparent microcosms of daily life are a huge part of our being and our identity, and that fatherhood has brought with in a new appreciation of these "houses shared like simmering saucepans | of routine, belief and ritual."

About the reviewer
Colin Dardis is a neurodivergent writer, editor and sound artist from Northern Ireland. His most recent book is with the lakes (above/ground press, 2023), a series of twenty-five poems loosely connected by the theme of water. His work, largely influenced by his experiences with depression and Asperger's, has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and USA.

Review by Katherine Gallagher of "Unmothered" by A. J. Akoto

   

This debut-collection from Black British poet A. J. Akoto is a book of deep feeling ‒ poetry that demands to be thought about, and read aloud. It is resonant, deep-voiced with pauses: poems that question, echo back; theatrically haunting and laced with reverberations that linger.

Akoto’s masterful and resolute poems about her unresolved arguments with her estranged mother bring to mind a line from Lavinia Greenlaw's "Prayer" "for those trapped in another’s gravity." Mother and daughter, the two are trapped, intertwined, without hope of escape. The poems, resilient, despair-biting, fiercely-knowing and uncompromising, speak with the demeaning ferocity of all the "unmothered" mother-daughter alienation that has gone before.

Images of myth, primarily Medea, tantalise and predominate, reminding the speaker of her fate. Kevin Threlfall's ominous cover design, Darkness Follows, sets the pattern, the paradox of this young woman "unmothered," "undaughtered" –  indeed, this is the way it goes:

          A return. Not of last year’s summer,
          but the sense of those simmering

          childhood hours spent reading 

          under the light of solitude.

          Cool relief of those hours free

          from the prickle
          of her shadow along the wall.

- "Return of Summer"

The protagonist imagines a wished-for escape but the "prickle / of her (mother’s) shadow along the wall" is mostly there, reinforced by a dread of "haunting" and "ghost-flames," to be reckoned with.

It is an approach-avoidance conflict writ large. In the poem, "Who is to be saved?" Akoto suggests "It’s a difficult decision, / but all the same, my mother / does what she does best: saves herself. / ... Years later, she comes back, / closing out light behind her. / A shadow crosses my heart / a spider-skitter-scattering / along the muscle of my being." One thinks of reconciliation but no, the poem continues, "She also needs my darkness. / ... When I landed in the dark, / I stayed there. Yet / she holds out her hand / and I’m hers again. Even when / she recoils at my mangling, / because some bones do not heal. / and some hurts set themselves wrong, / I’m still hers." So they hold each other "trapped."

This amazing book Unmothered continues along this pattern – with light and shade but mostly dark, an exhaustive white heat of reciprocal anger, love, recriminations and sadness. I can imagine it as a theatrical piece, perhaps as a monologue with musical backing, or a presentation of assorted moods and voices, again with music. Akoto has a powerful presence and has presented an extremely powerful range of poems where the reader is continually returning to the question: Who is to be saved?

About the reviewer
Katherine Gallagher is an Australian-born North London poet. Her sixth full collection, Acres of Light (Arc Publications, 2016) – 'a joyful rinsing of the senses,' Alison Brackenbury – follows her Carnival Edge: New & Selected Poems (also with Arc, 2010). Carol Rumens chose her 'The Year of the Tree' for The Guardian’s Poem of the Week. 

Review by Jo Dixon of "To 2040" by Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham’s latest collection, To 2040, follows close behind [To] The Last [Be] Human (2022), a tetralogy composed of four earlier collections, spanning 2002 to 2020. Both collections, published by Carcanet, immerse the reader in a world on the brink of collapse, but also a world that still holds wonder for its inhabitants. Robert Macfarlane’s introduction to [To] The Last [Be] Human suggests that the task of the poems in the tetralogy ‘are of record as well as of warning,’ a description that holds true for To 2040. 

Graham’s political / personal odes in this collection elevate the environmental crisis of the near future and the crisis of her own illness. Often, destruction and beauty co-exist within a few lines: 

         Breathe. Yes 
         the drought is everywhere out there
         but in the night

        the stems of stars mist-up
        just enough for u to recall
        when there was 

        humanity, humidity, & the stars

        dangle, sting. Ah there is
        no return 
        is there.

(‘Dusk in Drought’).

Even as the stars stir our hearts, we are stung by knowing that this is just a memory. Tellingly, there is no question mark here, our fate is sealed: ‘there is no return / is there.’ Yet this is not a collection of unrelenting gloom. The poems are invigorating in their formal inventiveness and precise use of language. The surprising lineation, extension of white space, erosion of words (you/u) and accretion of phrases have the effect of tuning us into Graham’s mind; we follow her thoughts as she wrestles with our wilful destruction of the earth, shot through with images of hope. The closing lines of the final poem, ‘Then the Rain,’ encourage us to ‘touch, touch it all,’ and in this last act of connectedness, Graham hints at a way back. 

About the reviewer

Jo Dixon’s collection, Purl, was published in 2020 by Shoestring Press. Her poetry and flash fiction appears in a range of journals and anthologies. She is Lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort University, Leicester, and lives in Nottingham.

Review by Kathleen Bell of "Thorpeness" by Alison Brackenbury

In Thorpeness Alison Brackenbury’s poems explore rural life with love but also a strong awareness of struggle and hardship. A poem about her grandfather, 'Shepherd Brackenbury,' set in lambing season in the 1930s, ends with the tender, warning couplet:

          Best shoes scratched by rough straws, I learnt love meant
          Not glances, silky curls, but blood’s raw scent.

There are celebrations of achievement but also references to the limitations imposed by class and poverty as in the reference in 'Fern' to the old man 'who would have gone / to "Grammar," if they could have bought / a crested cap, soft shoes for sport.’ There is also the satisfaction of rebellion in 'Meeting 1919' when the returning soldier, Brackenbury’s Great Uncle Sidney, tells the lady of the manor 'I’ve not come home to be bossed round by you.'

Women’s domestic achievements and heritage are celebrated alongside the work of male farm labourers. The sequence 'Aunt Margaret’s Pudding' rejoices in the work of Dorothy Eliza Barnes, the poet’s grandmother who had been a professional cook before she became a shepherd’s wife. One poem recounts how she would provide sandwiches of 'home-cured bacon and white bread' for the unemployed men who tramped across England in the rain, searching for work. The sequence concludes not with the rich and heavy sweetness of cakes, puddings, curds and pies but with the salt of samphire, gathered hazardously on the dangerous Lincolnshire shore.

This combination of comfort and danger, risk and hope is characteristic of the poems in this collection. The six-line poem 'Sunday on the Coach' demonstrates a time of peace while hinting at its fragility:

           It is June. Tall grasses nod. On the back seat
           the last baby has hiccupped into sleep.
           No one swears, nobody phones. The south wind whistles
           white motorways of cow parsley and thistles.
           A helicopter hangs, but does not strafe.
           This afternoon the innocent are safe.

For all its focus on the vivid and the particular, Alison Brackenbury’s beautifully crafted poems often seem to hint at something just out of words' reach. It is therefore fitting that the final stanza of the final poem looks both toward an unreached Thorpeness and to something further beyond:

           In tall streets, low clouds press. 
           Three swallows snatch
           a gust, a breath, last fly.
           Small voices catch
           land’s end, storm’s edge, whirl high
           far, far beyond Thorpeness.

About the reviewer

Kathleen Bell is the author of two recent poetry collections: Do You Know How Kind I Am (Leafe Press) and Disappearances (Shoestring), both published in 2021. She also writes fiction and, on occasion, teaches creative writing and leads workshops.

Review by Neil Fulwood of "Radical Normalisation" by Celia A. Sorhaindo

Here’s roughly the first half of "Poetic Turn of Events," the compact, bristling, self-questioning opening poem in Sorhaindo’s astonishing collection:

        Today, The People are giving back,
        mirroring, throwing light, honest
        feedback to The Poets; uncovering
        cryptic metaphors; deciphering line
        breaks; telling The Poets exactly what
        they feel-think of them & their loopy
        poetic turns …

It’s what I’d be tempted to describe as a game-changer, except the game is barely yet afoot, and Sorhaindo has another 90 pages to deliver - 90 pages in which the poet challenges herself as rigorously as she does her readers; in which soaring intellectualism and street patois exist side by side; in which womanhood jostles with race, cultural heritage, self-interrogation and the sheer defiant act of surviving.

Poems on the aftermath of a hurricane and the rebuilding of a community are delivered in clear-sighted and stringently unsentimental terms, while a questing and experimental sensibility is apparent in pieces such as "Un-Set Binary Bits - Lingua Franca" and "animula : rapture of an Introverted Narcissist," where Sorhaindo seems to be testing the boundaries of the page itself, never mind the flexibility of the words thereon.

Radical Normalisation fuses linguistic fireworks and a freewheeling imagination, tempered by the poet’s awareness of the weighty responsibility of her craft, and is unlike any other collection I’ve read this year. 

About the reviewer
Neil Fulwood lives and works in Nottingham. He has published three full poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It, Can’t Take Me Anywhere and Service Cancelled, and a volume of political satires, Mad Parade, with Smokestack Books.

Review by Gary Day of "The Past Is a Dangerous Driver" by Neal Mason

 

We live in a world which tolerates the past only as costume drama. Politicians, business people and management theorists are always urging us to ‘make it new.’ So it’s a delight to alight on a poet who understands that we can’t shake off the past as easily a dog does water. Neal Mason’s appreciation of this simple truth is one of the many riches of his collection. His poems, with their often striking images and subtle rhymes, feelingly explore the contradictory nature of the past, how it is both remote and ever present; how can it unfold like a rose or go off like a bomb.  

‘Lineage’ explores the speaker’s relationship with a man who may or may not have been his father. It is family drama, history and detective story, pulsing with conflicting emotions and packed with memorable and haunting phrases: ‘I accelerate through gaps / in history’s traffic to the cottage whose shell / lies in the future where it fell.’

‘Reflected on Water’ is a journey along the Thames with the speaker encountering key figures and events from British history. It teems with allusions and illustrates one of Mason’s themes, that a present without a past is like a world without gravity. Time travel is the subject of ‘The Stratagem,’ a poem that mixes up past and present in disturbing ways, all the more so because of its elegant setting. Sometimes Mason adopts the persona of inanimate objects such as nitrate or trees and imagines how they might view their part in history. My favourite in the collection is ‘The Museum of Lost Art,’ a witty, moving piece on what can never be retrieved: Venus’ arm, the library of Alexandria.

Mason riffs on Eliot’s Four Quartets but his focus is on the many faces of time rather than its redemptive properties.  

About the reviewer
Gary Day is a retired English lecturer. He is the author or editor of a dozen books including a two volume history of modern British poetry. He had a column in the Times Higher for a number of years and has been actively involved in amateur theatre for many years.

Review by Sue Mackrell of "House Work" by Khadija Rouf

In House Work, Khadija Rouf evokes the seismic shock following the birth of a first child: ‘After the baby everything changed. / My body rebelled against me, / I was no longer myself … Our home felt unchartered then. / Her in my arms, / trying to re-negotiate each room slowly, / realising I knew nothing at all’ ('After'). She captures a familiar moment of overwhelming panic: ‘Among mountains of washing / the only things moving / were my terrified eyes’ ('13 Ways of looking at a washing-machine').

There are so many moments of recognition in these poems; I had my own children in the 1970s and now watch my own daughter navigating the same but different waters. But there is more here than the kitchen sink; Rouf places the minutiae of household routine into its universal context as the 'domestic becomes cosmic' and 'galaxies swirl under beds' ('The formation of dust'). She writes beautifully of erotic tenderness, the loving chaos of family life and the warmth of female friendship. There are seahorses, snail shells, and 'tip-of-the-nose prints / from marvelling at a sunset or a starlit night' ('Window pane'). 

But in 'Femme Maison 1945-47,' Rouf responds viscerally to the anguish expressed in the paintings of Louise Bourgeois: ‘She is me. / What was once a woman / is now naked, torso and bare legged, / conjoined with a house … Will she be herself once more, one day? I need to know.' 

Relationships are redefined: 'A man and a woman are equal / For a time. / Then, a woman and a washing machine are one' ('13 ways of looking at a washing machine'). Life is dominated by the tyranny of sorting bins, cleaning toilets, preparing a meal before work, ‘in time credit for once’ ('Cooking'). 'Hoovering / is an act of violence, Amazonian, full of fury' ('Hoovering'). A 'woman in Derby goes on rampage, / sucking up objects in her path, / …psychologists try to explain the trend, / but have to admit, they just don’t know' ('Hoovering II'). A chasm of misunderstanding opens; there is 'scrapping over the division of / labour.’ Rage over an un ironed skirt explodes, and ‘You stand in wonder … Somewhere the skirt still lurks, creased and ready’ ('Skirt').  

Rouf reserves her astonishment for the women who were ‘…so angry with Selma James / All she said was, imagine if housework were paid? ...  this work done for love / somehow discounted, not seen as toil / [but if] caring would have currency / …We could speak invoices, take time owing’ ('For Selma James'). Perhaps the most powerful poem in this collection is ‘Minding:’ ‘We budget for someone to look after our baby…’ Its repetitions convey the anguish of leaving a child with a stranger, for money, ‘praying to God, / the hand over, praying that she will not hurt my baby, / Transactions of love and care, the split inside, the ache so I can work, the unnamed cost of wanting both.’ 

In ‘Unattainable,’ Rouf writes: 'Serious: the work for which I am paid is cerebral, muscular…Valueless – the work for which I am unpaid / is expected.’ In the 1980s as a divorced single parent and a student, I was told by a male lecturer my place was in the home looking after my children, while women lecturers were introducing me to Betty Friedan, Adrienne Rich, and Selma James. 

Rouf prefaces this collection with one of James’ most famous quotes: ‘By demanding payment for housework we attack what is terrible about caring in our capitalist society.’ She founded the International Wages for Housework campaign in 1972 arguing that women’s unwaged work should be paid for by governments, but it attracted a great deal of hostility from those who feared women would be institutionalised in the home, and other women’s groups focused on fighting for the right to work outside the home and equal pay. Now in her nineties, James is still campaigning and writing; in a recent interview she said, 'I never understood that argument because women were already institutionalised in poverty in the home. Women were dependent on men.' It was a time when I had to get my husband’s signature on a rental agreement and women relied on their husband’s NI contributions to fund their pensions – many women are still suffering the consequences of that.  

In 2020 James wrote: ‘Especially since the Covid19 virus hit, it is undeniable that waged and unwaged carers are front line, and that we rely on them for survival.’ Rouf’s thoughtful and cogent poems contribute to a long and continuing tradition of making the personal political. 

About the reviewer

Sue Mackrell’s poetry has been published in a range of print and online publications including Diversifly (Fairacre Press), Agenda Poetry and Ekphrastic Review. She has an MA in Creative Writing (Loughborough) and taught there for several years. Retirement gives her time to write, indulge grandchildren and enjoy her garden. 

Review by Cathi Rae of "Cliff Notes" by Kathryn O'Driscoll

In a spirit of full and frank disclosure, I have on occasions competed against this poet in various slam poetry competitions and she has completely annihilated me. Hardly surprising given that she is the UK Slam Champion 2021/2022 and represented England at the World Cup of Slam 2021.

She is an extremely well-regarded slam and spoken word poet. This collection is her first (and I am quite confident, not her last) page poetry collection. She has made the sometimes-difficult transition from performance-based work to the page with absolute assurance and skill whilst still retaining her own strong, unique, and important voice.

This is not an easy collection. The introduction contains two pages of potential content trigger warnings, and much of the subject matter challenges the reader, but it is a challenge that will make the reader a better person.

Her poems include pieces on serious mental ill-health, suicidal thoughts, bereavement, poverty, and loss, but this is not a diatribe or obvious polemic; her work is nuanced, painfully honest, well observed and quite simply beautiful.

And yes, of course, her work is angry - there is much to be angry about a system where mental health care is a postcode lottery and where people struggling to live with chronic health conditions are condemned to state-sanctioned poverty. But she never writes anything that doesn’t use language adroitly to express these ideas and personal experiences in anything less than stunning poetry.

The collection ends with “Peony-Bruised,” a short poem which seems to suggest that there is hope and beauty after all:

           This city is a bruise I keep pressing upon
           so I dip myself under and ask the petals
           to tell me their first memories.
           Rain
           they say.
           Rain.

           And then, how we grew.

About the reviewer
Cathi Rae is a poet/spoken word artist/slam poet and community educator. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester and is currently funded by M4C to work on her PhD, creating collaborative poems with marginalised individuals.

Review by Laura Sygrove of "WITCH" by Rebecca Tamás

           when the witch first met the devil the devil was 
           a beautiful man and a beautiful woman 
           the devil had long eyelashes and a body that was hard and soft 
           at the same time so that you wanted to hold him 
           and also be held by her …

WITCH is an exploration of feminine power and masculine beauty, of the complexity of human beings (and non-human beings). Tamás’s poetry is gender-fluid, poignant, risqué, and raw. She writes with a duality akin to Anne Sexton; with the tenacity and vigour of a woman force-fed with falsehoods, reborn in vomit. The Witch is liberated of mind, body and spirit. The Witch is full of fire, full of life. The Witch is in all of us, if we dare to delve deep enough. 

WITCH gathers modern musings on the natural world and the occult, amidst an air of apathy and cultural malaise (as in 'WITCH GOVERNMENT' and 'WITCH EARTH'), tackling subjects of inequality ('WITCH AND THE SUFFRAGETTES'), alienation, damnation ('WITCH TRIALS'), morality, and acceptance ('WITCH AFTER'). Tamás conjures spells and hexes for political change, for agency, for mysticism and reality. She speaks directly to women, with their 'soft bodies and hard placards,' and to men who embrace and embody this dichotomy. 

WITCH is profane, carnal, lyrical, and lilting. Tamás conjures hypnotic rhythms which slice through the rigidity of regulated verse, and bares all to the reader – 'legs open to the sky.' Tamás details the Witch’s intimate relations with the Devil-made-flesh, her romance with 'petrol station boy,' and her immaterial exchanges with God. Similarly the Witch undergoes a series of interrogations by an omniscient figure. What do we learn from these interactions? That we have little time on this earth and that there is no 'just' way to live.

A daring debut, Tamás’ poetry-turned-spell book is a call to arms, and to expression without restraint. This crude and wonderful collection consults history and myth for guidance, encouraging love and light in its discussion of tragedy and loss. WITCH is ephemeral and everlasting; it lives on even after we turn its final pages. Unabashed and unafraid, Tamás burns the Witch, bathes in her divine light, relinquishes control, and refuses to be silent:

the wind rubs away their voices
they sneak them back.

About the reviewer
Aspiring screenwriter/writer for video games/graphic novelist, Laura Sygrove is ambitious and indecisive. She graduated from the University of Warwick with a degree in Film and Literature, and is currently studying a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.

Review by Lee Wright of "Some Kind of Ghost" by Mike Barlow

You don’t necessarily need to be a champion of poetry in order to appreciate this new collection by Mike Barlow. To a certain extent there are a lot of false hang-ups linked to poetry. Some readers can feel beaten before they have reached the second page. Where Mike Barlow is concerned, however, and this collection in particular, there is no “beating around the bush.” He is good at describing what he sees with minimum fuss. In his latest collection from New Walk Editions, Barlow slows everything down into basic language and everyday emotions. 

A former winner of The National Poetry Competition, Barlow's poems have staying power: 

Ella who finally left home at sixteen with nothing 
but a pocketful of change and the rag doll of her childhood. 
May she find the latchkey in her purse one day 
and courage enough to use it.

Poems that are about the most honest of moments:     

With my scars,
tattoos and broken teeth
I’d have been a son my mother feared for. 

For some, writing poetry is a form of therapy. Not so with Barlow. With these poems, it is as though we are all family members, gathered around a death bed, only this will be a New Orleans jazz funeral, with trumpets and dancing and multi-coloured parasols and handkerchiefs twirled in the air.  Barlow’s gifts are on full display here, as he cuts the body loose:

So I slow down, tip-toe the long hall to the scullery. 
And there’s Aunt Dora washing plums. I knock 
on the old plank door and hold my breath. 
She’d always ignore me when she knew 
I was making things up but this time she turns, 
hands me a bowl of glistening Victorias to stone. 

Barlow does a good job of showing us what others are thinking: 

Les, fitter who didn’t fit, chucked the factory job, his mates, 
the lies and moved away where he could be 
Lesley. Shaven legs, coiffed hair, skirt and blouse, 
the bare truth of lipstick and mascara. 
A shout for her, a shout for her.    

All the poems here (even the ones that shouldn’t work, like "There’s that scene in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest where McMurphy first realises the deaf and dumb Chief Bromden can hear and speak") have a deceptive ease about them. They can be at times sombre, yet they still leave you itching to read them again. 

It is true that all poems should make you think. And that is something which resurfaces again and again over the nineteen poems. On a deeper level, the pamphlet could be seen as a meditation on what life is like for the people left behind after the death of a loved one, squeezed between ordinary observations like in the poem "Encounter," which opens with a quote from a plaque on a bench in Drinishader, on the east coast of Harris, in the Outer Hebrides: "On this bench 22nd October 2008 Angus Forbes proposed to Athlone Findlay in the rain." What follows is a masterful poem about sweethearts, that was fuelled by a chance encounter while walking through a park. 

But what is the trick to good poetry? Barlow himself tells us the trick in one poem: "The trick? The trick’s to keep it simple." And by sticking to that rule, he has fashioned a collection that will leave any aspirant poet wishing that they too might be able to achieve similar with mere words.          
  

About the reviewer

Lee Wright was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire in 1980 and has been writing both fiction and non-fiction since 2008. He is taking an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.