Review by John Goodby of "Friends of Friends" by Geoff Sawers

Friends of Friends is a series of connected, overlapping, parallel and divergent tales. These are narrative fragments - though without the bittiness that might imply. They range from single sentence flash-fictions to three or four page short stories. Each has its own coherence and narrative logic. Occasionally, two or three are related to each other in sequence. Usually, the linkages are more fugitive. A number of named characters re-appear – 'Sandra' and 'Nush' are in two tales, 'Nicky' in three, 'Mabel' in four, and so on. Recurring themes range from trivial to sublime: rain, buses (or forms of public transport), libraries, apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic landscapes. Scenarios repeat themselves, too; perhaps the most persistent is that of people who were separated in early adulthood, meeting up in middle-age, and trying to deal with the odd mixture of knowing and not-knowing, intimacy and distance, which colours and shapes such encounters ('The clutch bag' is one example). Ours is the age of Friends Reunited, Facebook, social media. This is now a common experience; we have become used to it, but it is relatively new and unprecedented, and no writer, as far as I know, has responded to it as variously or as imaginatively as Sawers. 

Friends of Friends is not set in the present; it is not 'set,' in any fixed sense, anywhere. In historical terms it jumps about, particularly at the outset, with tales in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century settings ('The Ticket' is explicitly set 'in 1859'), recounted in vaguely appropriate pastiche styles, as in 'Constance,' 'Green Eyes,' or 'Home from China'; socially, we could be dealing with countesses or beggars; territorially we might be in MittelEuropa, Spain, the USA, although it is predominantly England. The pastiche is a little contrived, deliberately it seems to me, because Sawers is concerned at all times to prevent us skimming, slipping into the complacency induced by naturalistic styles. In generic terms Friends of Friends is more wide-ranging; the first tale, 'The tree half in flames,' takes its title from the episode of a half-burning, half-verdant bush in The Mabinogion, there are Märchen elements in 'City Air,' and Irish legend in 'Yoss and Finn,' a brief, wittily-told encounter with the Salmon of Wisdom, while 'The Translators' reads like a parable by Zbigniew Herbert. 

Like the styles, the generic mix is often unstable; the nineteenth-century mode of 'City Air,' for example, has a counterfactual history in the form of an invasion of Britain by Russia and France, and 'The Ticket,' in a quasi-SciFi aside, tells of colliding galaxies. 

As all this may suggest, the liberties taken with fiction verge on poetry. Prose poetry in English, as many critics have observed, can tend towards pawky charm and rather voulu symbolism. Sawers's semi-disjunctive framework and disconnective practices mitigate against these dangers. The tales are often dreamlike, and hardly ever explicit - dénouments are partial or ambiguous, but always precise. The temptation is to use adjectives like 'Borghesian' or 'magic realist' at this point. But for one thing, so many stories are rooted in specific British realities: a student union building, a number 17 bus, Oxford Road. For another, the pieces often break into 'real' poetry; there are moments of genuine metaphorical power and originality, as in the close of 'In Blue': 'An electric river runs through her and it circles us now like a halo around the moon on a frosty night, and an odd delight begins to burn in my fingertips. I am caves of ice, I am the sun cracking ice in mid-afternoon, I am the jostling, lacerating glassy plates pressing up against the lock gates. Rivers never reach the sea. You haven’t heard me before.' 

Even the titles of the tales can be poems in themselves: 'After you die, you will never have loved me.' Sawers is a poet, too, in his ability to quickly conjure up mood and atmosphere, but lest this seem an over-Romantic definition, he is alert to the weight of words in a contemporary, experimental way. It's no coincidence that the opening sentence has mayflies 'sawing in the air,’ in a play on his own name, or that we find Sandra waking up to find herself 'a pear. Maybe a bear. She felt comfy in her new pelt ... she didn't miss having a waistline.' The humour of the waistline line is evident throughout; Sawers is a gifted comic writer when he wants to be. It is a sign that Sawers is a genuine writer, not a re-treader of old ground. This doesn't apply simply to mainstream fiction, but to modernism; a woman who wakes up and finds herself a pear is clearly a descendant of Gregor Samsa, but her metamorphosis does not lead to the angst and anguish in Kafka.

Angst and anguish there is, however, as in any genuine art, but it's of what we used to call the postmodern variety. This is a term that was overused for a long time. But it's wholly applicable to Friends of Friends, which ticks all the boxes; along with stylistic pastiche, generic hybridity, ontological uncertainty and linguistic self-consciousness, we get explicit finger-pointing, as when a 'panning camera comes to rest' on a discussion at a nineteenth-century dinner-table. The criticism of such writing was often that it was heartlessly playful. But that isn't the case here. Despite its fragmentariness, Friends of Friends has real heft: the whole is more than the sum of its brilliant parts. Large issues are raised, subtly yet powerfully, occasionally outcropping as questions - 'How can we resist the marketisation of ourselves?' – but usually by implication. At its heart is that old universal, namely a keen awareness of the brevity of life, and hence the urgency to connect, create,  be aware of others and other life-forms. Mayflies, traditional emblems of the brevity of life, 'swarm in the morning' in the opening story and return to 'swarm in the evening' in the penultimate story. The very final tale, a coda (we have passed through the wood to a mythic sea-shore), is another reverberating miniature which punches many times above its weight, an enigma I won't ruin, except to say it finds the words that 'don't mean anything' but are nevertheless, 'a path, a boardwalk,' for its readers.

About the reviewer
John Goodby is a poet and critic, and Professor of Art and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University. His new biography of Dylan Thomas, co-authored with Chris Wigginton, has just been published by Reaktion Books. 

Review by Rachael Clyne of “Identified Flying Objects” by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs

The poet draws on the prophet Ezekiel to help him make sense of his situation, having been immobilised by a broken leg. He searches both himself and society for understanding. Ezekiel is best known for his wild visions, like the valley of "Dem Bones" resurrecting themselves and a possible Alien landing (as in the title poem). Written during the period of the Israelites’ captivity in Babylon, Ezekiel blamed their plight on corruption and lack of faith in God. Not one to mince words, he railed against the people and their leaders. 

Bartholomew-Biggs uses quotations from Ezekiel to create contemporary narratives. He too comments on corruption and politics, with echoes of Eliot in his scenes set in London. "Maiden Speech" draws on Ezekiel’s admonishment of the ruling factions of his era. "Internal Exile," "Migrant" and "Bitter Almonds" suggest both refugee experiences and also illness as a form of exile. Images of scorpions and almonds evoke biblical and Middle Eastern origins. "Bitter Almonds" is set in English lanes and churchyards and opens with: "He didn’t know they grew in England." The almonds, while found by a church, are seen as malign, foreign and not to be touched.

The poet explores many routes for answers: flat earth theory, social injustice, refugees and  climate collapse. "Forthcoming Events" describes how pessimistic prophecies are repeatedly ignored and influencers opt for self-preservation, rather than taking unpopular measures that could avoid catastrophe: "We arrive where we have never been / and find ourselves still there."

I find his collection skilfully written in a spirit of human enquiry, which never strays into didactics. I enjoyed its range and wit. I know Michael as the editor of London Grip, an online journal that is generous in its support for poets and am glad to be introduced to him as a poet.

About the Reviewer
Rachael Clyne is a retired psychotherapist who also published self-help books. In her youth, she was a professional stage and television actor. In later life she began developing her poetry and has since been widely published in journals and anthologies. Her prizewinning collection, Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams 2014), concerns our broken connection with nature. Her pamphlet, Girl Golem (4word.org) explores her Jewish migrant heritage, and, in her latest collection, You’ll Never Be Anyone Else (Seren Books 2023), she expands on themes of identity to include childhood heritage, relationships and LGBTQ+.

You can read more about Identified Flying Objects by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Jane Ramsden of "Untangling the Webs" by Joy Pearson

There could not be a more perfect title for Joy Pearson's debut novel than Untangling the Webs, as a sign of what the reader can look forward to.

The spider's spinning ability has long been linked with our weaving, knotwork and net-making history and so, by extension, with creation myths and story-telling, because they all weave their own artistic world. Joy Pearson exemplifies this analogy through the skilfully woven, multi-stranded tale of her characters' inter-connected relationships and dilemmas, with a mystery at its heart. 

Symbolically, spiders and their webs exhibit many traits, including resourcefulness, cunning, intrigue and deceit; but also fortune, feminine patience and wisdom. It's all in here. This is a novel that extols the value of strongly-wrought (particularly feminine and feline) friendships, and pair-bonding in all its partnered and familial forms, but there are also less pleasant "trickster" characters too. As in African folkloric "spider tales," their inclusion can teach a moral lesson.

The romantic entanglements range from blossoming, flourishing, kind, caring and sexual love to splits, misunderstandings, naivety, downright deception (including "bits on the side"!), a smattering of fetishism, callousness and even brutality, and the sadness of absence, loneliness and loss. Pearson has mastered the art of reader engagement by creating not just a convoluted plot and sub-plots, but characters you care about and can identify with. You want to know what will happen to them next and ultimately (I couldn't guess!). This is the author as the spinner and weaver of destiny. The novel is a literary dreamcatcher, the symbol styled on a spider's web. 

Did I mention there are mysteries in this book? I especially like how seemingly small details are incorporated into the book - seamlessly woven almost in passing - but born of the author's observation of environment and nature, and her experience of life. There are some lovely incidental descriptions - she is clearly a gardener - but watch out for the occasional pithy one-liner summation of a situation, such as: "Emotionally, disappearance was a powerful weapon." "The one who leaves is not the one enduring the silence."

As the novel closes, some things seem to be working out ... or do they? No spoilers here! The reader is left suspended like a spider, hanging by a curious thread. But it is a thread connecting this debut novel to its eagerly awaited follow-up.

About the reviewer

Jane Ramsden obtained a BA French/German Combined Hons from London University, with a strong vocation to put something back into her own city. She retired as an LGO after 30+ years at Bradford Council. She assisted her partner, David Tipton, in the running of his small poetry press (Redbeck). He was a published poet and novelist. Her claim to fame was editing Cat Kist, the Redbeck Anthology of Contemporary Cats. She and David also produced Spirit of Bradford,  Poems for the City's Centenary and an anthology of British South Asian Poetry, as well as publishing many individual poets. She is a lifetime cat rescuer, qualified reflexologist and folk singer. 

Review by Jonathan Wilkins of "Schrödinger’s Wife (and other possibilities)" by Pippa Goldschmidt

 

This is an extraordinary, inventive canon of work, made even more incredible in that all the stories are so unusual, so challenging, as they reflect a scientific bent from a female perspective. The forgotten female in so many cases.

Indeed, the intriguing title Schrödinger’s Wife (and other possibilities) is in itself a beguiling introduction. What will we discover when the book is opened? What will the first page tell us? In this case will the "wife" be alive or dead as per Schrödinger’s Cat conundrum? Indeed who does the "wife" personify and what do they represent?

In this collection of short stories we are led on a journey through the worlds of laboratories, observatories, hospitals, and even into outer space, discovering the stories of women, be they scientists, technicians, or doctors, as they deal with interrogating so many amazing adventures in modern science.

We watch as Margaret Bastock discovers the impact of genes on behaviour while facing up to anachronistic attitudes in the labs. 

We meet the nuclear physicist Lise Meitner who discovered the secrets of nuclear fission even as she escaped from the Nazis and how she had to put up with the most demeaning of new workplaces in Sweden. Demeaning because she was a woman. 

We meet a worker at the CERN laboratory who will not allow her photograph to be taken. Why is this? Another mystery.

Scientists from the old East and West Germany experience the fall of Berlin’s Wall while stationed on opposite sides of Antarctica and we read their unusual responses to it.

And we meet Schrödinger's wife who finesses his theory to get her revenge on her adulterous husband. 

One amusing story centres on a scientific theory who fusses, ironically, about the outlandish idea that it might actually be discovered by of all things, a woman. 

And through a piece of toast we are able to investigate the history of the universe.

Goldschmidt allows us to enter into the lives of real and imaginary scientists, and the world behind their discoveries - a world where women, despite their ability and achievement, are so often sidelined or ignored whilst the male of the species takes the laurels. Science seems to be a world where women are constantly having to prove themselves and their theories because they are women. Has this changed?

Through these beautifully crafted short stories we see this idea challenged through humour as well as searing critique. We can see the realities that women face and can only hope that works like this will chip away at the misogynistic attitudes that some scientists still harbour today.

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.

Review by Elizabeth Chell of "Just This Side of Seaworthy and Other Poems" and "Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Poems" by Cathi Rae

 

Cathi Rae’s collection of poems Just This Side of Seaworthy explores the complexities of ageing and mental illness and the forging of new identities in a world where expectations are unforgiving. 

Rae's style is accessible. Her words speak the truth all "women of certain age" must confront. Her poems are not maudlin. They are introspective and deliver a positive acceptance and are celebratory of the aging process. Her poems are layered; on the surface they are what they are, but the underlying emotion and evocative imagery make them extraordinarily good. 

These poems also explore death and other topics. "Single handed," a biography of her father and family dynamics, would not sit out of place on a shelf with Duffy and Heaney.

What I admire most about Cathi Rae’s poetry is her masterful structure and the subtlety with which she conveys emotion. In her poem "When Our Bodies Become as Linen," she eloquently juxtaposes the durability and fragility of linen with the ageing process. This comparison illustrates how, much like linen, we possess an inner strength that endures even as our exterior fades with time. Cathi’s poem "Wednesday night is women’s night – remembering the 1980s," with its thoughtful structure, captures the essence of a girls' night out dancing around handbags with friends, not caring which side of the bed we got out of. Rae's poetry is sometimes raw, sometimes harsh, yet remains consistently honest and exquisitely crafted.

Rae's collection Rock Paper Scissors, as Cathi explains in her introduction, had a starting point: "Tell me about your life." The poetry encapsulates the voices of individuals Cathi encountered during her PhD journey. Her poetry delves into the complexities of mental health and mental illness, addressing the numbing effects of medication. It made me laugh and cry. The beauty of her work is how she encapsulates the ordinariness of mental illness - how it can take anyone prisoner. This challenging yet vital subject, often shrouded in secrecy, is brought to light through Cathi’s work, which fosters open and candid exploration of mental health from a fresh perspective.

This collection of voices, vividly expressed through Cathi’s unique poetic style, will resonate with everyone. During the 2020 lockdown, many of us experienced anxiety, and the most vulnerable often lacked a voice. Cathi’s poetry effortlessly provides a platform for these feelings of inadequacy, addressing an ever-present issue. Mental health is a universal experience, affecting us all either directly or indirectly. We should celebrate it as an intrinsic part of being human. Cathi’s poetry makes it clear that mental health transcends age, gender, and race.

If you appreciate these latest collections of Cathi’s work, I would also highly recommend her earlier poetry collection Your Cleaner Hates You and Other Poems. 

About the reviewer
Elizabeth Chell is a full-time teacher with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester.

You can read more about Cathi Rae's Just This Side of Seaworthy and Other Poems, and Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Poems, on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

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 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.

Review by Omar Sabbagh of "My Hummingbird Father" by Pascale Petit

In the later 1930s Ford Madox Ford was asked by one of his writing students, Robert Lowell, what the one essential need was for an aspiring writer. Ford said: "Memory." Oscar Wilde is famed for averring that life copies art, not the other way round. Both these insights are lived-out and lived-up-to in acclaimed poet Pascale Petit’s first novel, My Hummingbird Father.  

This is the story of the main protagonist, Dominique, a painter, and a story about the value of the imagination and its glorious inheritance. A story about how art redresses and redeems the seemingly insuperable vulnerabilities of being human. Indeed, to start: Chapter 29 of this compelling, moving book is titled "Two Dominiques," and my discussion centres on this doubleness, what Dominique thinks of at one point in the novel as "double exposure." 

In the "Prologue" we start with the "forest of perpetual childhood," "painting animals none have seen." Indeed, Petit as a poet is very well-known as a writer giving life and signifying sentience to the lives of and in the natural world, the rich and feral world of her good, longstanding wilderness. In this book, though we travel, transformatively, between her heroine, Dominique’s self-professed "blank childhood," her thinking of herself as having "died at six," her "forest of sleeping birds," "memories never to be remembered," and her later reconciliation with that fraught past. For she was also the girl through these traumas with "a crayon always in her hand," with a body that as this story fleshes out, "remembers her childhood," bodily (aesthetically), a woman for whom life itself comes through her canvases, "hungry for the truth."  And "hunger" is deeply apposite, in so far as it’s used both literally and figuratively in this novel, a novel replete with a rich and kaleidoscopic array of flora and fauna that act as both vehicles and tenors for how the tale is told. In short, this story is an adventure and a homecoming. A bad wilderness (Dominique’s harsh childhood) is exchanged through the process of daring to love again with a good one: she is loved and loving again in the Amazonian wilderness of the book’s final part, its "Epilogue."    

Architectonic aside, the lifegiving doubleness of this tale is also apparent in its style, a style much like the (mythopoetic) "rites" of passage of the Pemón people she visits in Venezuela, in her visits to the Amazonian wilderness. For instance, "Juan," her Amazonian guide, future lover, and future replacement for her now-dead father, can speak of his people dubbing rain "saliva of the stars," and (one of innumerable examples) Dominique can see her dying, breathless father later in the Amazonian trees, "a forest holding in its breath." The sensibility of the heroine (and/or her narrator) of this tale is oceanic, meaning all the elements of felt life, wild and tame and in between, interpenetrate continuously in its telling. The literal riches of wildlife described and descried also stand for and inhabit different metaphorical levels in the novel. This gesture of (freely) translating at least two levels of world is enacted on nearly every page: the Pemón speak of the "sky-forest" and the plain one, the "spirit world" and the "visible" one (like left and right hands), and via flashbacks and instinctual moves of involuntary memory, Dominique and her guiding narrator shuttlecock between literal, contemporary worlds and mythic and spiritual or imaginative ones, rendering this book in toto a paean to the empowering freedom of the imagination, epiphanic, transformative.  

Though hated by her (now-dead) mother, having a fractious relationship with her sister, Vero, bullied at school, near-suicidal later, Dominique’s primary antagonist is her father, whom she visits in the last few, dying years of his life, a man who had absconded from her childhood.  The "grey" Paris (of her childhood) Dominique visits is soon to be animated with colour, though, as much as the Notre-Dame she visits (which becomes "a new zoo") repeatedly, becomes a parallel of her Venezuelan wilderness. Two poles, again, but two welded in the end as one.

Her father is her hummingbird father. Another doubleness symbolizes here, too: the hummingbirds, we read, "pierce time itself." There are the cared-for hummingbirds (37 of them, Dominique’s age) of the ornithologist Augusto Ruschi and the deadened, heartless ones she finds among her father’s remains. Her father (abused in childhood, as Dominique was herself) represents the dead-end of temporality, a vicious cycle and re-cycling of immanent abuse – Dominique’s father averring at one point (ashamed) that one cannot change the past. The better hummingbirds represent the way that art and imagination can use the past as an opportunity for the future, redressing the beeline of mortality.

The overall imaginative vision behind this rich and compelling tale is both a concrete journey of transformation and, through the riches of its lucid, dramatic, highly evocative telling, an allegory about what art is for. The wilderness of our wounds and suffering can be transcended by the loving care of the imagination – not as escape, but as the distiller and giver of the essence of flourishing human well-being.

About the reviewer
Omar Sabbagh is a widely published poet, writer and critic.  His latest books are Y Knots: Short Fictions and For Echo (Cinnamon Press 2023 & 2024). Currently he teaches at the Lebanese American University (LAU).

You can read more about My Hummingbird Father by Pascale Petit on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Rennie Parker of "The Apothecary of Flight" by Jane Burn

I was glad to receive this collection for review, and it more than lives up to the promise of Burn's first collection, Be Feared, her magnificent debut in 2021. While the first gave the impression of a poet fiercely fighting her corner and stating her poetic vision, the second shows her heading into a richly pastured garden of Eden where the fruits of practice and observation are hers to gather and enjoy. Best of all, do it loud: "You must not whisper   or mutter   or skein  but stand / With your poem loud and like a beacon   in your hand." "Say it strong …"

These lines from the title poem pretty much outline the poet’s position and set up what the reader should expect over the next eighty pages or so, because Jane Burn does not exactly hold back with the talent and the fireworks. When you want language to be glorious, this is how it is -  although the poems are difficult to quote from, because the effect depends on a cumulative build and the poets’ extreme ability to become other states. She climbs inside an eighteenth-century jar, observes her horse, identifies with a bear, sees everyday miracles, wonders about clouds: she goes to the Laing Art Gallery and concludes "the sun goes down alone / and doesn’t seem to mind," with the visit becoming a reflection on loneliness and belonging. In many ways, it is the act of poetry which brings her into belonging: time and again comes the reminder that poetry has "saved" her, including a personal account of the time when "that" teacher (the Miss Moss we all needed) opened the door into verse.

Sometimes, poems which are an expression of Language veer towards word-factory fallout and the kind of experimentation which other poets have to leave in their notebooks -  for example, "metapoem / iteration (Dickinson, 568)," where a few more clues would have been helpful for the reader. But JB is a daring writer, and this is what we need in the poetry universe, even though the reader has to catch up fast. And I am not sure that the "Ocular Map" is different from other poets’ definitions of visual and concrete poems, although the Note on pp.94-96 would suggest it is so. Plenty of us out here are used to reading poems in alternative ways, Jane!

My main concern would be for the person who stands behind the poetry. I would hope that people are mindful of her development as she pours herself into the work. Why? Because the arts world is profligate in its disposal of artists who are genuinely different and/or original in some way, and she has already foregrounded her neurodiversity / class-based position from the word go. At what point does the appearance of neurodiversity in poetry travel beyond the reader and into the hall of mirrors where only the poet can find her way out? When will we concentrate on poets and poetry instead of the "class" they come from? Does it matter, as a way of pinning "work" onto a "person"? Burn writes the kind of poetry which excites critical debate, and I would hope it is for the right reasons.

I am sure The Apothecary will be on many peoples’ Books of the Year list already, and the titles alone are enough to sell it to readers -  "Pantoum to Maud’s Absolutely Brilliant Door" being just one of the titles which make me want to read it; meanwhile the lines sometimes have the shock of cold water as the poet exhorts us to "Raise your voice  Speak the clarity of ice." If your book budget is limited and you can’t buy many collections per year, make room for a Jane Burn.

           

About the reviewer
Rennie Parker's latest collection is Balloons and Stripey Trousers (Shoestring, 2023). She was born in Leeds but lives in south Lincolnshire, and currently works for an FE college. Blogs here, daily nonsense on Twitter @rennieparker.

You can read a review of Balloons and Stripey Trousers on Everybody's Reviewing here.