Review by Tracey Foster of "The Gallows Pole" by Benjamin Myers

Much has been written about the pros and cons of using slang in fiction. It's a difficult act to pull off, if your audience cannot understand or interpret the meaning behind the text. I had also heard about the strange phenomenon of how the brain can interpret written phrases even when the key vowels are removed, an exercise that is fun to do, but not something I would attempt to do in fiction. These doubts were in my mind as I started Myers's book The Gallows Pole. His protagonist and narrator speaks directly to us in Yorkshire dialect, written as heard and without punctuation. The first few words were hard to transcribe, but then it was like a lightbulb had gone on and I could suddenly, fluently read the strange words: "In the fyres of the forges in the Black Cuntry was where I first herd tell of coinin where I learnit a little bout chippin and clippin swimmers where I learnit bout the yeller trade and the work of them men that darest do."

Myers delves into the true history of the Cragg Vale Coiners, led by David Hartley, a notorious rebel who enlisted a gang of weavers and land workers to clip coins and defraud the Crown. An offence punishable by death, they worked in secret and avoided detection because of their remote settings in the Yorkshire hills. Using historical facts and court transcripts he weaves a narrative about a group that unleashes a reign of menace onto the local communities, who are caught up in their practices. The events that lead up to the capture and resultant hanging of the gang leaders is fast paced and gripping and involves a cat-and-mouse chase with an excise man and the law.

Dark and gritty, Myers's novel uses a wealth of guttural language to convey the destitution and desperation that led to the necessity for an illegal trade. Clipping real coins and shaving off small particles, they would melt down and repress the metal to create forgeries, passing them off in trade within the local communities: "The night came in like a bruise of purple and blues and then finally griped so tight that the sky was black and broken by the weight of time pressing upon it. Dawn would melt the night in fading yellows but for now the sun seemed like an impossibility; a dead concept. A foreign country."

Myers's skill for evoking place with pathos and descriptions of the dark vales led him to be awarded the Roger Deakin Prize in 2017 for writing about "natural history, landscape and environment." It also secured the Walter Scott prize in 2018, leading to a TV adaptation by the director Shane Meadows. Critics described the book as "a roaring furnace of a novel." The author's childhood in suburb of Durham was uneventful but allowed him the freedom to explore and, as he described, he "spent a lot of time climbing up trees or trespassing on roofs." This familiarity with nature seeps through the novel as his excise man roams the valleys in the dark, catching whispers from taverns and firelight from hidden forges. He keeps his narrative in tune with the earth, that eventually gives up its secrets: "Autumn arrived like a burning ghost ship on the landscape’s tide to set the land alight. The fires of the trees’ turning spread far across the flanks and the ravens took flight to the highest climes as leaves fell like flung bodies. September had long slipped away. It was a charred thing now. Gone."

Myers is no stranger to beautiful prose: his poetry collection Heathcliff Adrift from 2014 also used the moors to ground human emotions, allowing them to resonate with our earthy instincts:

To the sky

we ran
and fell
the heather our mattress
the worms our witness –

young lungs burning.
Wet-backed,
soil soaked
mulch-coddled, copper puddled.
Dirt giggled and dizzy.

Fists of earth
raised, thrown –
fecund confetti
for a future union.
The rustling of life.

Several passages of The Gallows Pole could also be read like poetry, finding a turn of phrase to turn the ear. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys historical fiction but also relishes beautiful prose and is loath to sacrifice one to suit the other. Myers’s visceral novel pays due homage to the trope of dark novels from God’s own country. 

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

Review by Debasish Lahiri of "Endless Present: Selected Articles, Reviews and Dispatches, 2010-23" by Rory Waterman

Criticism, like poetry, cannot be written at arm’s length. At least not the best. The critic has to suffer the imperilment of the artist: enjoy a brief triumph, endure a trudge through morass. Not full of platitudes, yet not bereft of sympathy either, the critic must realise that the poet’s plod can become a flight at the turnpike of the next sentence, or a flight can slam into a ‘concrete’ end, just as easily. Rarely do critics keep the faith with poets, all the way. Nor do they often take a step back to roll their eyes and have a good laugh, about poetry and attempts at the ‘poetic.’ 

By contrast, Rory Waterman does take a step back, and he also keeps the faith. An accomplished and distinct voice in poetry himself, Waterman takes to criticism with the same honesty, courage and an eye for the original and powerful that characterises much of his own work. 

Endless Present is Waterman’s selection from fourteen years of engagement with the craft and art of poetry. One should consider the introduction to the collection as the sixty-eighth essay in it. It moors his art of reading and criticism in the vicissitude of his life, the vagaries of time, the lucky breaks and occasional epiphanies of growing up. Waterman shies away from being the omnipotent absence in his criticism. Rather, he puts himself right in harm’s way as a poet and reader while writing about the poetry of others. In a way his introduction chimes, uncannily, with the text of the eulogy delivered at his father’s funeral (later published in the PN Review). 

Waterman emerges as someone who is prepared to wrangle with his own choices and preferences, to be refreshingly not sure, and to let it all play out, in public, in his reviews and longer essays. An expanse of writing that has Philip Larkin and Daljit Nagra, the late 1950s and the second decade of the new millennium as its landmarks of space and time, Waterman’s collected criticism is endlessly present. It offers a view of where he sits (when critical writing about poetry has elsewhere become an anonymous exercise in intellectual generalisation) and writes words neither salaried, nor pensioned. 

About the reviewer
Debasish Lahiri is an internationally acclaimed poet. He has published eight collections of poetry, the most recent being Legion of Lost Letters (Black Spring Press, 2023). Lahiri is the recipient of the Prix du Merite, Naji Naaman Literary Prize 2019.

Review by Peter Raynard of "After the Rites and Sandwiches" by Kathy Pimlott

 

Kathy Pimlott’s heart-breaking pamphlet, After the Rites and Sandwiches, portrays the impact of her husband’s sudden death from falling down the stairs of their home. In the aftermath, the reaction and readjustment is immediate and ever-present.

In an early poem, "No shock advised," short, punchy lines put you under no illusion as to the enormity of the event.

          It’s cruel work
         To kneel down
         and hunch over
         a so-familiar body at the foot of the stairs

But even then, when the defibrillator says, "no shock advised" and it’s apparent that there is nothing to be done, "still the sweet mad hopeful brain insists it will be okay."

The pamphlet is both a portrayal of grief and biography of a marriage. Tears become the episodic outpouring of emotion, almost carrying the weight of a seizure: "It’s impossible to foretell what will provoke tears, the sort that well up and tip over while you hold onto the kitchen sink waiting for them to subside."

Grief is also full of surprises, one of which is guilt: 

         Forgive me, I’ve laughed,
         glided lightly round garden centres, sipped fizzy wine
         with friends, sorted out edge pieces of puzzles.

Grief may not have feathers, but it does have a long tail; for although her husband is gone his presence remains, in objects, memories, as well as his ashes, and knowing what to do with them. In "Death Admin I," "Your demise constitutes a quarter off council tax, removal of a vote you seldom cast." Then in "Death Admin II," when collecting his ashes, 

        It shouldn’t be a surprise, the weight, the quantity.
        Not knowing what to expect, I take a pink rucksack, 
        carry you again, all down Holborn on my back.

Pimlott beautifully crafts the poems, with a matter-of-factness laced with incisive metaphors, which detract from the possibility of being overly maudlin. 

There is also dark humour as she almost parodies self-help, in titles such as "How to be A Widow," "Death Admin I & II," and in the final poem, "Coda: Tips on avoiding the offered consolations of Religion and Therapy": "If it’s Religion, it’ll spot you, even when you’re crouched low behind the credenza," or: "Therapy requires acuter acting skills. Better pretend you’re a dog (a Dalmatian, the least intellectual)." Also in the poem, "What I do with you now you’re dead," Pimlott writes: "in a laughing panic, [I] dumped a quarter of your ashes and ran away, the illicit thrill exactly what you would have wanted."

After the Rites and Sandwiches is a stunning biography of a marriage and its aftershock, that will stay in the reader’s memory long after the book is laid to rest.

About the reviewer

Peter Raynard is an independent researcher, poet and editor of Proletarian Poetry. His three books of poetry are: Precarious (Smokestack, 2018), The Combination: a poetic coupling of the Communist Manifesto (Culture Matters,2018), Manland (Nine Arches Press, 2022). A debut pamphlet (a heroic crown of sonnets), The Harlot and the Rake: poems after William Hogarth, was published by Culture Matters in September 2024.

You can read more about After the Rites and Sandwiches by Kathy Pimlott on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Christine Hammond of "Citizen Poet" by Eavan Boland

Last week, Trinity College Dublin announced plans to re-name its main library after the highly acclaimed Irish poet, Eavan Boland. Consequently, it will be the first building on Trinity’s city centre campus to be named after a woman. This is a fitting tribute to a pioneer in literary feminism, whose relentless pursuit to revolutionise poetry would go on to provide countless opportunities for previously unheard women’s voices. 

This re-naming comes the month following publication of Citizen Poet (Carcanet). This collection of new and selected essays reveals the extraordinary commitment to writing Boland undertook over decades to argue the case about the artistic and cultural tradition of Irish poetry. Specifically, why it rendered women "the subject, rather than the object of the poem." Exposing the inherent bias and shortcomings of prior structures and formats, she showed how the literary culture, role and existence of poets, as well as the poetry itself, could not facilitate women who wanted to give expression to their everyday lives and experiences: "The Poet’s vocation – or, more precisely, the historical construction put upon it - is one of the single most problematic areas for any woman who comes to the craft. Not only has it been defined by a tradition  which could never foresee her, but it is construed by men about men, in ways which are poignant, compelling and exclusive" (from "In Search of a Language"). 

Boland writes: "I was still short of the exact words, the accurate perceptions. I still talked at night and listened with real excitement. And yet I was beginning to feel oddly stranded. Something was obstructing me, throwing me off course. I was between a poem – there, at home on the tablecloth – and the idea of the poet. I could control the poem, even though it was with half-learned and hand-to-mouth techniques. I could listen for, and understand, the idea of the poet I picked up at night in the conversations I heard around me, But the space between them filled me with an odd malaise. Something about it seemed almost to have the force of an exclusion order" (from "Turning Away"). It is almost impossible to equate with today’s Ireland the impenetrable landscape these compelling essays portray. We take for granted that women now have the intellectual freedom to write and publish poetry but for that, let us never forget the immeasurable debt of gratitude we owe to Eavan Boland.

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

Review by Geoff Sawers of "Pain Sections" by Paul Ilechko

Ilechko's first chapbook, Bartok in Winter (Flutter Press, 2018) was, as one might expect from the title, taut and spare with few words wasted; a book of clean lines and compressed, even drilled, language. Pain Sections is looser, more expansive – the larger paper format suiting the frequent use of very long lines – but continues the poet's searching investigation into the nature of the body as an unreliable medium, as both cage and vessel. A series of unspecified medical procedures are undergone; perhaps inevitably there is a yearning to escape at times, moments of panic, of surreal reverie, of frailty and fear. A poem that starts "A body drenched in joy / thicketed / and bruised / overwhelmed with pollen" ends with the lines "the iron-tasting leaves that still / eclipse / the lamp-lit room" ("Marrow of Purity"). If it was important for the reader to know the nature of these investigations, presumably we would have been told. But since that information is withheld it gives a weird, dislocated feel that I suspect is deliberate, since the very unreliability of the interfaces between mind and body seem to be the crucial site of much of the work's focus. Cancer is mentioned, but that appears itself to be a metaphor for something else.

At this point in the book there seems little escape: "and I wonder if / inside of each of us / there is only pulp / as inside each other / we liquefy ..." we read a few pages later ("Bruising"). The body is as tender as fruit; the natural world is a constant metaphor, with the erosion of coastlines mimicking the potential disintegration of a human body. But soon the possibilities of communication, especially in "Breath as Wave and Breath as Particle," begin to offer a way out of this stifling trap. At times we find what may be whispered lovers' dialogues, though the voices are unspecified and unsettling. Just as Bartok in Winter frequently switched voices within one poem, this book expands upon that technique and ends with a lengthy dialogue poem. If I have a real criticism to make it comes at this point as this fourteen-page dialogue, which seems to want and perhaps be able to resolve the tensions set up earlier in the book, is at times abstract or unfocussed. The most overused word – "leakage" – is still important however as it comes to emphasise the many unsoundnesses of the body. Even though this dialogue section contains memorable lines ("as light that flows through the cracks of our investment / I sold my waters for profit / I sold my light for kicks") it slips at one or two moments into bathos and could do with further careful editing.

Nevertheless, Ilechko's unflinching attention to detail is at times startling; little curls of the romantic or lyrical never distract from his serious purpose. Small touches of very dark humour come through too at times. Looking back once more at his earlier book the themes were all there, but the language was archer, more stylised. References to various artists – Ryman, Borges, Hopper – seemed unnecessary when, in the latter two cases at least, their influence was quite plain to see. In Pain Sections, Ilechko's voice is much more assured, biting without being sarcastic, and unafraid to tackle the most difficult of themes.

About the reviewer

Geoff Sawers (he, him) is the author of several books including a collection of linked short stories, Friends of Friends (Diehard, 2024). He is a lone parent of a disabled child and lives in Reading, UK. You can read a review of Friends of Friends on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Review by Rennie Parker of "Maps of Imaginary Towns" by SJ Bradley

I wanted to review this book because I’m particularly interested in new work which comes from my ‘home district’ in West Yorkshire. The author has evidently worked in Leeds for a time, because one of the districts is mentioned by name, and some of the cityscapes are oddly familiar. In fact the location described in her standout story ‘Discrepancy Matrix’ sounds / looks pretty much like where I grew up, and it’s a pleasure to read how the accuracy and empathy depicted throughout is at once both beautiful and empowering. 

And that’s the thing about this collection; no matter how clueless or downtrodden her citizens may be, there is always someone, somewhere or something which makes the struggle worthwhile. These characters are not being written about from the outside: they are sat along with, interacted with, and lived through. Take, for instance, the hapless council workers in ‘The Gordon Trask,’ who are having their premises and jobs wrestled away from them by costcutting bureaucrats. Everyone knows that the game is up, but they hang in there grimly until the end because they fundamentally believe in what they are doing, with ‘all of it together and nothing lost, and equipment staying where you had left it.’ Now, as someone who’s had jobs similar to the one in the story, I can tell you it is so believable and on-point that it could have been me in the office.

Bradley’s clarity of style and naturalistic dialogue hides a substantial talent in the ‘less is more’ department. She hits on the exact word for describing how a neglected child takes an apple core from a bin -  the picture is completely there in the word ‘draw,’ from the slowness, the concentration and the delicate picking motion. After all, you wouldn’t want your apple to touch the bin on its way out. Meanwhile, the entire background to Tan’s life in ‘The Stonechat’ is indicated with an admirable brevity just by mentioning his robes, the name of his former cult leader and his agricultural work. We know, by the end of three short paragraphs, that he was enticed away from a shopping centre when he was very young, but this information is delivered casually in passing, and from his point of view, as though yes this is what happens to people round here. On the surface, this lost / found young man might seem vague and unprepossessing -  but at the end of three pages I was rooting for him as he attempts to rescue a live bird being used as a prize on a fairground stall. 

The author’s vision of the near future is only a continuation of the broken-down present, according to this collection. No, it’s not a world of whizzy gadgets, flying cars and unlimited media - it’s a grungey land of unwilling house shares, allotment co-operatives and low tech, definitely post-industrial and without any competent system in charge. I expect she’s right. At times, stories might have been continued past their natural closure - ‘The Stonechat’ mentioned above being a case of this, although I can see why the lower-key ending would fit alongside others in the same collection. 

And Bradley is very good indeed when hinting at darker overtones without going all out to depress the reader. For instance, domestic violence and coercion lies behind ‘Dance Class,’ but the protagonist and her daughter find redemption and care through the escape mechanism she initiates for herself. The focus is ultimately on the happiness of the child, who can at last run free in the garden. The same theme runs through ‘Harmony Grows,’ where a seemingly impossible situation for Harmony’s Mum becomes more bearable as she discovers her wider network and reaches a point of transformation by the end. In ‘Coming Attractions,’ the would-be actor runs the risk of being ground down by his job at Cineworld, with the claustrophobic presence of his fast-tracked partner Alan being part of the problem. But no, the fella wins out, packing his bags at last and heading for uncertain lodgings in London. He’s going somewhere, unlike the similarly trapped northerner Billy Liar, who never actually leaves. Bradley gives us hope under the desperate lives. It is possible, no matter where you come from.

About the reviewer
Rennie Parker is a poet living in the East Midlands, and she is mostly published by Shoestring Press. Her latest collection Balloons and Stripey Trousers, a nightmare journey into the toxic workplace, came out earlier this year. She works in FE and blogs occasionally here. She is also on Twitter/X and Bluesky.

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

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.