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. 

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. 

Review by Doryn Herbst of "The Headland" by Abi Curtis

This is a speculative novel running along two timelines: the aftermath of the Great Storm in southern England, 1987, and events that unfold several decades later.

Delores, a painter, has been unable to produce anything for over a year. She decides to move permanently to her summer studio in the Headland, a coastal community of free-spirited artists, fishermen and tourists but overshadowed by the nearby nuclear power station. 

The morning after extreme weather ripped across the South, Delores walks along the shingled beach near where she lives to assess damage and to check up on her friends.

She stumbles across a piece of driftwood, utterly beautiful, smoothed by water and smelling of sea salt. Preparing to take her find home for the garden, Delores sees something strange sheltered inside a crevice resembling a mouth in the wood. The something is plant-like, animal-like, energy-like, a ball of pulsating colour, and alive. Delores feels a connection to the creature but wonders whether it has emerged as a result of the storm, radioactive emissions or a mixture of both.

The driftwood is installed on her living-room table. Delores subsequently develops an emotional relationship to the being inside, calling it Violet. Her new companion becomes a source of power which fuels inspiration and a phase of prolific creativity follows.

Approaching forty, Morgan is at the Headland, the place of his childhood summers, to tie up legal formalities and attend his mother Delores’s funeral. Her solicitor gives him a box of documents and a letter from her explaining its contents and their importance.

Morgan’s girlfriend is pregnant but he doesn’t feel ready for this next phase of his life. He does not know who his father is and hopes the box will contain information about this stranger. Instead, Morgan uncovers other secrets within the pages of a journal his mother kept following the Great Storm.

At the core of this captivating story is the experience of loss and of being lost, the devastating consequences of grief and the process of healing. The narrative also explores the yearning to belong and the need to understand the past in order to encompass the present. Questions about fundamental beliefs challenge lineal notions of time and space and suggest the relationship between the two may not be what we imagine.

About the reviewer
Doryn Herbst, a former water industry scientist working in Wales, now lives in Germany. Her writing considers the natural world and themes which address social issues. Poetry in print and online includes work in: Osmosis, The Storms, The Wild Word, anthology – It’s not SYMPTOMATIC It’s Systematic. She is a reviewer at Consilience.

You can read more about The Headland by Abi Curtis on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Rebecca Reynolds of "Write Cut Rewrite" Exhibition at the Weston Library

"Kill your darlings," enjoined Stephen King, talking of the need for writers to cut words which may have taken hours to develop. This exhibition of writers' editing processes at the Bodleian's Weston Library gives evidence of such murder through manuscripts, jottings and notebooks.

So what "darlings" do we see here? Opening the exhibition is a twelfth-century manuscript, The Ormulum, commenting on the Bible in early English. This is a literal cut and paste – one page trimmed to a third of its size, overlying another with almost every line heavily scored through. "For a notebook which is almost a thousand years old it looks surprisingly modern because it features so many crossed-out passages," says the label.

Yet why do crossed-out passages look more modern than the finished product? Because they show a common human impulse to revise, with its hesitancy and changes of mind, in a way that the fixed final text does not? Doodles in Shelley's notebook, displayed here, also seem strangely modern. Perhaps it is use of the pen rather than fixed type which makes them seem more human?

Also included are three wonderful sheets of witty lines kept in reserve by Raymond Chandler for his detective novels, marked off in pencil after being used. Unused was "I left her with her virtue intact, but it was a struggle. She nearly won."

Editing materials are important. Unlined notebooks allow Alice Oswald to do the swirling coloured sketches which she then tries to translate into words. Le Carré‘s drafts are handwritten, then typed up, then the typescript is cut up again and stapled between further handwritten parts.

Sometimes little is edited – Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism has one large manuscript page with just one correction. Were the robust rhyming couplets a confident guide, so little revision was needed?

And what of today’s untraceable electronic editing? A digital display shows "Cuttings," a poem by Fanny Choi, where one can track the electronic editing process – "every keystroke, every pause, every typo, every half-developed idea later abandoned." This is a fascinating exhibition with an excellent mixture of writers.

Write Cut Rewrite is at the Weston Library, Oxford, until 5 January 2025.

Photo by Ian Wallman

About the reviewer
Rebecca Reynolds has worked as an English Language teacher and as a museum educator at the Victoria & Albert Museum and Reading University museums. She completed a Research Masters in Literature at Liverpool University in 2023 and is considering undertaking a PhD in either Literature or Creative Writing. She blogs here.

Review by Tracey Foster of "The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience" by Jennifer Higgie

The act of self-reflection is an indulgence and one that women throughout history have seldom had the opportunity to do, more often being the object of scrutiny and worship by the male gaze. Women who flew contra to convention, female artists who rebelled against stereotype and chose introspection over objectification, have their unique stories told in this book: "A painting is a pause in life's cacophony. It does not demand conversation or justification. It does not hector her. She has stilled herself for it. It cannot and will not tell her what to do. She controls it. She concentrates, her paintbrush in hand, the mirror close by. She is defiantly, splendidly, bravely, heartbreakingly, joyously alone."

Higgie takes us on a tour of time, place, social expectations and gender battles to uncover the lives of women who dared to paint, despite objections and difficult circumstances. Reading from our present perspective, it is hard to imagine women artists being rejected from academies, refused from attending life classes or painting their own bodies, their work spurned and excluded from galleries. They often worked in secret, hoarding their work and making a record of their life for themselves only. Painting was a deeply personal act, which involved recording every stage of an aging process and for some their downfall into obscurity. Very few women made it to recognition and success. Many of these names are not known to the public and Higgie takes time to give them their due: "She looks at herself in order to study what she's made of, to understand herself anew and, from time to time, to rage against the very thing that confines and defines her."

Recent technologies have enabled wrongly-attributed works to be recognised as works by women painters. The catalogue of once-unknown artists is expanding and allowing us a better understanding of the challenges they overcame and the prejudices they faced. History is told in words and more often written by men allowing this gap in our knowledge to happen. Many of our well-known masters had patrons who bought, displayed and championed their careers. This was highly unlikely to happen if the painter was female; she was more likely to be derided for shunning marriage, motherhood and domesticity. Only two of the artists explored in this book have found recent recognition: Frida Kahlo and Artemisia Gentileschi. The rest are ours to discover. 

Most of us have some knowledge of the pain and suffering that Kahlo had to overcome after a serious accident on tram as a young girl, the endless operations, miscarriages and consequent body-disfiguring impacts on her female from. These experiences are embedded into her visceral paintings, blunt self-portraits and graphic imagery. Gentileschi too had to overcome the horrific experience of repeated rape by her art tutor and endure a seven-month trial where she was tortured to prove her innocence. This manifested in her allegory paintings of religious scenes, often reinterpreted from the female perspective. To view these artworks without prior knowledge of the life experiences of the painter is to only half see them. With this book we begin to peel back the layers of each image and understand it better: "A painting will always reveal something about the life of its creator, even if it’s the last thing the artist intended. A self–portrait isn’t simply a rendering of an artist’s external appearance: it’s also an evocation of who she is and the times she lives in, how she sees herself and what she understands about the world."

In her chapter aptly named "The Liberating Looking Glass," Higgie explores the development of self-reflection. A relatively modern invention, mirrors were a luxury item; made from highly polished volcanic glass, they were like gazing into black water. Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed with mirrors, both as objects and metaphors and said: "The mind of the painter should be like a mirror which always takes the colour of the thing it reflects." What such an object meant for a female artist was freedom; the ability to paint in isolation, have an ever-ready muse and to take time to become proficient: "A self-portrait is not only a description of concrete reality, it is also an expression of an inner world."

These stories are fascinating; 500 years of decadence and revolution, nobility and poverty, art movements and politics. You do not need to be an art lover or an art connoisseur to appreciate tales of women battling against the odds to create a realistic image of their own identity. In a time of the ubiquitous shared selfie, we need to understand the huge challenges these women overcame, in capturing a single expression that was often hidden from the public for decades. As Alice Neel writes, "When you're an artist, you're searching for freedom. You never find it because there ain't any freedom. But at least you search for it. In fact, art should be, could be called 'the search.'"

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, 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 Sally Shaw of "Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay" by Jeff Young

Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay is a mixture of memoir and storytelling, by Jeff Young, published in 2020. Jeff Young is a playwright, screenwriter, writer, lecturer and broadcaster.

The hardback edition dustcover has a sepia photograph of two young children stood in the doorway of a terrace house. They seem to be looking out for someone, leaving or returning, I’m not sure. Jeff Young steps out from his family home to journey through the streets of Liverpool, his childhood, and life. The purpose is to find and preserve Liverpool. The book has seventeen chapters. As I’m reading, it occurs to me that these chapters are vignettes, and for a moment I’m reminded of Sandra Cisneros’s The House On Mango Street. I know I’m not on Mango Street: it’s the beauty of the writing that grips my hand ensuring I don’t get left behind.

The opening chapter "Gutted Arcades" provides a wonderful insight to why Young is on this journey: "My mother liked to trespass - she didn’t call it trespassing, she called it having a nose. We’d have a look round the Corn Exchange or go up the back stairs of an insurance building, slip into the Oriel Chambers and sort of just … breathe. We were breathing in Victorian dust and the pipe smoke of Dickensian ledger clerks; drinking in the shadows and gloom and beams of light." In these few sentences I can see the awe and wonderment Young has for his mother, I sense her wit and love for the heartbeat of Liverpool. I have a glimpse of Young’s ability to form a link to people of the past, present and future - that the ghosts are held in the very structure of a city for all to see should they choose to. 

Throughout his journey, Young bumps into many ghosts, too many to name here: "When I was seventeen I picked up a copy of Malcolm Lowry’s Ultramarine in a bookshop in Exchange Station - a station used by Lowry, en route to Norway in 1931 - and I discovered that Lowry had been a haunter of Liverpool’s streets and cinemas, too." Chapter by chapter, the reader follows Young through Liverpool, his childhood, adulthood, reflections trying to make sense of it all, with each step meeting family members, childhood friends, buildings, colourful characters real and imagined. 

What becomes apparent is the gradual disappearance of Liverpool, through buildings destroyed, redeveloped or left to decay. They’ll remain invisible if people forget, have no history or relationship with the place they call home. Young’s writing enables the reader to be part of his journey to find himself within the streets, buildings, sights and experiences of Liverpool. 

Ghost Town is a treasure chest of what it is to be human, community, family and the beauty of memories. Young shows me the complexity of memories, how through life one gathers them, some belonging to you while others are on loan from writers, musicians, artists, buildings, and family. They aid an understanding of self and life events. I found some of the stories within the chapters complex, others upsetting; some made me smile, others held the wonder of childhood. The last three chapters for me are outstanding. In "The Haunted Lullaby," Young writes of an experience where dreams and  his imagination merge with raw reality - how this has impacted his writing and has never left him or Liverpool. "In some ways, I think this is what made me a writer; it’s the origin story for the way I see and hear Liverpool. Elsie’s lullaby seeps into the city, haunting it, disturbing it, creating endless, turmoil. It’s beautiful and strange." The last chapter is magical and moving, Young’s description of searching for the "Stanley Park treasure-tree" is enchanting and leads the reader into knowing his sister Val who lived in a treasure trove house. I will say no more, so you can discover the wonder of Val, Liverpool and Jeff. The vignettes will never fade from my memory and I hope neither will Liverpool. 

About the reviewer
Sally Shaw has an MA Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. She writes short stories and is currently working on her novel based in 1950s Liverpool. She sometimes writes poetry. She gains inspiration from old photographs, history, her own childhood memories, and is inspired by writers Sandra Cisneros, Deborah Morgan, Liz Berry and Emily Dickinson. She has had short stories and poetry published in various online publications, including The Ink Pantry and AnotherNorth and in a ebook anthology Tales from Garden Street (Comma Press Short Story Course book 2019). Sally lives in the countryside with her partner, dog, and bantam. Twitter: @SallySh24367017

Review by Tracey Foster of "All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything" by Claire Harman

 

Written in the centenary of the death of Katherine Mansfield, this book looks to explore the short life and short works of this writer. She lived with the shadow of TB in her lungs but the desire to taste and feel everything: "The passion I feel, takes place of religion - it is my religion - of people - I create my people - of ‘life’ - it is Life."

Mansfield pioneered "fragmented narratives" of so-called "small things." The immobility she faced through frequent bouts of illness slowed her to a pace of stillness, into a space of noticing. She found joy in the small, the personal, in intimate human interactions. Using notes from her diaries released posthumously, against her wishes, this book exposes the details, desires and delicious nuggets of her thoughts and experiences. We delve deeper into a fascinating life: living in many countries, Mansfield was friends with D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf; she had many lovers of both sexes, a hushed pregnancy, and an affair in Paris in the height of WW1; and she even dabbled in walk-on parts in the early movies.

In this book Harman hand selects just ten short stories, unpicking the layers and running a real-time narrative of her life at the time of writing the piece. This gives the reader a valuable insight into the facets of life that affected and shaped the author. Her expedition into Māori territory in 1907, as only one of four females, was daring and enlightening for an eighteen-year-old girl in Edwardian times, but it gave her first-hand experience of the native peoples of her New Zealand home. 

Going out alone at sunset to admire the sunset she wrote about "the long, sweet steel-like clouds against the pale blue, the hills full of gloom, a little river with a tree beside it, burnished silver like the sea." Into this scene slipped a beautiful Māori girl, "her charm in the dusk, the very dusk incarnate." This material was later utilised in her short story "How Pearl Button was Kidnapped" and although the word Māori is never mentioned, the protagonists are dark in contrast to Pearl's white skin and blonde hair. Mansfield draws on the reader's prejudices of "others" and the use of an unreliable, infant narrator, allowing this piece to explore our fears and assumptions about race. This use of a third-person voice, allowing room for personal interpretation and allusion worked well for Mansfield and was adopted in other works to great effect.

Her marriage and the many relationships that Mansfield had through her life were a great source for her stories. This was a topic she dipped into in several pieces. All Sorts of Lives investigates one particular story, written in 1915, just weeks after she had made a reckless rendezvous in occupied territories to meet her lover, Francis Carco. "An indiscreet Journey" is a comment on war but with a unique female perspective.

Mansfield uses a mix of tenses to describe the journey into a war zone, so we get a real-time narrative of the character’s thoughts and emotions on seeing the effects of war. Never published in her lifetime, the posthumous piece gives an insight into the writer’s life. whilst in Paris, she experienced the first bombing raids of Zeppelin airships and later wrote: "The night was bright with stars … I never thought of Zeppelins until I saw a rush of heads and bodies turning upwards as the 'Ultimate Fish' passed by, flying high with fins of silky grey."

The contextualising of this story in relation to Mansfield’s life makes it even more poignant. She had also recently rekindled a relationship with her younger brother "Chummie," who then enlisted and went off to France. This closeness was short-lived as he was only there a few days before suffering a fatality when demonstrating a hand grenade. The shock of losing her brother so abruptly must have given an extra dimension to the horrors she witnessed in Paris and gives us a new perspective on the internal monologue of the character in "An Indiscreet Journey."

Harman also provides fascinating insights into the sour relationship Mansfield had with her loyal companion Ida. The dog-like devotion she held throughout the rough friendship and poor treatment at Mansfield's hands became the kernel of her story, "The Daughters of the Late Colonel." Mansfield wrote it at the end of her life, suffering in great pain. In a flurry of activity, she finished it in the middle of the night. Calling Ida to make them both a cup of tea she said, "Shall I read it to you? It's about you." A story about coercive control, lost youth and regrets, highlighting the inaction and loss of confidence that continue long after the control is gone, is not a complimentary piece to write about her most faithful friend, housekeeper and nurse: "She gave me the gift of herself ... I ought to have made a happy being of her. I ought to have proved my own worthiness of a disciple - but I didn't."

Harman says, "Being able to take what you need 'from life' and avoid, or resist, overstating it is an incredible power for a writer, and one Mansfield made use of time and again." The subheading of this book takes the nub of this idea, The Art of Risking Everything. Mansfield herself said, "The truth is one can get only 'so much' into a story; there is always sacrifice. One has to leave out what one knows and longs to use." The extensive inclusion, therefore, of diary notes, personal correspondence, family photographs and period details in this book helps to retell the wider story of Mansfield's life and loves and the creation of her "little moments." 

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, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, Zine magazine and The Arts Council and she writes her own blog, Small Sublime here.

Review by Joe Bedford of "Hope Never Knew Horizon" by Douglas Bruton

Douglas Bruton’s novel Hope Never Knew Horizon connects three well-known cultural relics: George Frederic Watts’ painting "Hope," Emily Dickinson’s poem "'Hope' is the thing with feathers" and the Natural History Museum’s iconic blue whale skeleton. Bruton connects these disparate relics not just by interweaving their complex histories but through commentary on their shared theme of hope. While each of the three stories is presented separately, Bruton’s delicate and humane exploration of hope helps each story illuminate the others. His carefully-drawn characters act like museum pieces in a shared cabinet, revealing both their personal intimacies and the longer shadows of the nineteenth century under which they live and love. Similarly, the voices we encounter in Hope Never Knew Horizon, while sharing the page with familiar figureheads of the era like George Bernard Shaw and others, are largely those that popular history has left unheard: the maids, the artist’s models, the working people. In this sense, the fact that Bruton’s stories are not biography but invented fiction – with some liberties taken with the intimate histories of once-living people – invites a number of questions. To what extent can objects in museums or galleries successfully connect us with historical truth? Does our prioritisation of the "special" or "genius" work to obscure the uncelebrated "ordinary" in our history? And might hope as a phenomena, like Emily Dickinson’s quiet and forceful poems, be something we manufacture for ourselves? Bruton’s novel does little to answer these questions but it does show that to live among the relics of our painful and irrecoverable histories is itself to live in hope.

About the reviewer
Joe Bedford is an author from Doncaster, UK. His short stories have been published widely and have won numerous awards, including the Leicester Writes Prize 2022. His debut novel, A Bad Decade for Good People, was published by Parthian Books in 2023.

Review by Jonathan Wilkins of "The Calamity of Desire and Other Stories" by Judith Dancoff

I read this book in one sitting.

No, I tell a lie, part way through I had to email the author to tell her what a wonderful work she had produced. I’ve never done that before, but if you read this collection of amazing short stories you will understand.

This is a truly beautiful collection of stories, most of them part-inspired by artists and works of art. The one outlier is a tale surrounding Annie Oakley, re-imagining her life on a trip to Paris where we are able to discover the vulnerabilities of a woman who dragged herself from the gutter to being the world-famous markswoman of lore. This story delves deep into her upbringing and lifestyle while commenting on the morals of the time with criticisms of well-known contemporary artists. This re-imagining is so clever and takes a real talent - a talent that is replicated through the collection.

Many of the stories play on the emotions of the reader and allow us a vision that we would not have imagined. We play a part in the characters' lives and stories. We discover another life that Dancoff imagines, and who are we to tell reality from fiction? 

The way Dancoff can draw out the allusions and images she makes is nonpareil. She writes about the life of the Infanta, the subject of the artist Klimt, the work of Louise Moillon, a sitter for Renoir during the Dreyfus affair, a curator at a museum, and a Vermeer inspired artist searching for love. Each tale made me research the artists and artworks that inspired Dancoff, hence introducing me to another layer of interest. 

This window into another world is just one of the benefits of reading the stories. They are delightful. Poignant and revealing, in some cases enchanting. There is a wistfulness to many and diverse historical perspectives are showcased. A great deal of research has obviously gone into each story as each is grounded on fact. I thoroughly enjoyed The Calamity of Desire and wholeheartedly recommend it.

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.