Review by Lisa Natasha Wetton of "Saint Of" by Lisa Marie Basile

Summer, religion, chapels, rebellion, shadows, hunger, repentance. Want, ruin, longing, desire. Foster care, women’s refuge and a whole lot of yellow ...

In "Saint of Abandon," Basile writes, 

         At least without light you have purpose. 
         Without light you are always in a state of seeking - 
         or is darkness light waiting to be born?

This collection carries the weight of healing in its expression. I find clarity here, that the author has made darkness her friend. It is familiar and she identifies and finds her purpose through it. Profound and sophisticated turns of phrase depict a time much older than the hand that wrote them. The poems read as partly autobiographical and deeply suggestive of a child lacking love, who finds her way.

My initial response was that there were a lot of Saints to contend with. 

From the start there is a melancholy about the writing. We dive immediately into losses and carnage in "Saint of Origin": "I tend a lesion. I house a doom that has no exit." There is, however, some hope that comes through and a sense of embracing life and blossoming in the "gardenia for miles." 

There is a sense of transience in "Saint of Unbelonging," as the author describes herself as the sand in the hourglass, watching herself dwindle. There is a sadness of life’s impermanence.

"Saint of Poverty" revisits the "dark mass" and the journey is marked by repetitive reference to darkness. There is hurt and fear, all delivered through questions. "Saint of orphaned girls" suggests a violence and subservience. A clear reclaiming of self, moving through foster care in a system that has not nurtured the narrator. 

Throughout, there are glimpses of beauty, which often contain yellow, and are always fleeting and wistfully lost. There is a recurring abyss and years where love has been missing, a search for identity and need for something solid. Foundations are clearly absent from the life that unfolds in the pages of Saint Of. Although quite gothic, the humanity and sensitivity in the words are a kind of appeal - a recognition of self-destruction and an unsatisfied soul who has to keep moving to see beauty in the world.

In the depths of despair, I found humour and a love for Summer. A carnal aspect, tainted by judgement, filtered through the air of religion and prayer. There is a reason that Saints feature in every title. The narrator does not consider herself one at all. In fact, she is the wretch. 

"Saint of blight" suggests death. By this point, I feel connected and Basile’s tendency towards darkness is freeing somehow, preparative in some way. For these things come to us all and she articulates it with ease: "The maggots roosting in the hollow." Such deep sadness seems effortless. I respect that. The skill in her words is profound. In "Saints of Salvage" I get a sense of emptiness, as the narrator attempts to pack the void of grief with "libidinal" lust and adventure. In "Saint of Approval," she writes,

          Being good 
          isn't the only way to be good. 
          Let the dark particulars, too, be dowsed in light.

This lost child, turned vivacious, captivating woman, does all that she can to ease the sorrow of abandonment, yet still nothing quite fills that void. And so, she turns to her creativity as saviour and writes to save herself. Her work is truly inspiring. 

About the reviewer
Lisa Natasha Wetton (aka Lisa Life) is a regular contributor to the English pages of L’eco de Sitges, Barcelona. She is a Creative Artist, Coach & Hypnotherapist. She is collaborating on new writing projects with American Author Will Bashor, with whom she will be refining a draft of her first completed book, It’s all Made up – A Guide to Spirituality from a Working-Class Girl. With a twenty-year history working in Dance & Theatre and based in Barcelona for the past six years, she is happy to be delving into the world of words. See: www.newlisalife.net and www.equilibrium-events.com.

You can read more about Saint Of by Lisa Marie Basile on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "raw content" by Naomi Booth

 

Naomi Booth’s latest fiction is a profound and visceral journey into the terrors and fears of new motherhood. This topic is not entirely new territory for the author. Her post-apocalyptic novel, Sealed, centred on a condition that seals people in their own bodies. Booth may have shifted genre, but she revisits and reworks some familiar themes, here: the fear of losing control, bodily imprisonment and strange, otherworldly compulsions. 

The premise is a straightforward one. The novel’s narrator, Grace, reads and edits legal case files, updating judgements with speed and accuracy. This is a world she fully controls, far away from the Colne Valley landscape of her childhood and backdrop for the infamous Moors Murders. It is only when Grace finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, she is forced to accommodate both boyfriend and newborn into her life. 

Almost immediately, Grace’s imagination begins to concoct a series of nightmarish scenarios in which her newborn, Rosa, suffers all sorts of horrific injuries and deaths: ‘The tiled hallway is a long way below us and the distance makes me feel woozy. The ground floor seems to accelerate away from us. I watch Rosa spill from my arms ... I hear the sick sound of overripe fruit splitting against a hard surface.’ Other, equally gruesome fantasies are presented, usually involving everyday objects and people: kitchen scissors, phone chargers, cleaning products, cigarette lighters, boiling kettles and even visiting family members; all become viable threats. Booth’s skill here is that she employs the present-tense mode to have us believe these episodes are unfolding in real time. Grace’s visions and reactions - which are genuine and all-consuming to her - become that for the reader. This is further amplified by the fact that Grace and Rosa are never apart – seen in the infant’s all-consuming need for milk – and provide the novel with some of its most arresting descriptions of physical and emotional, two-way dependency: ‘Half-blind, she gasps all night long, searching for me with her mouth, searching for me with her tiny broken cry, never settling out of my arms.’

Structurally-speaking, the narrative moves smoothly between present and past timelines, helping the reader uncover Grace’s repressed, family history and the reasons for her current behaviour. Here, the landscape comes to fore, the open moors charged with an ancient power and expansiveness, a world removed from the claustrophobic interior of Grace’s home. 

raw content is a highly charged, often terrifying, examination of how parenthood can transform both body and mind.  Booth’s message appears to be that none of us are safe: what constitutes the everyday, the knowable, can suddenly become one’s worst enemy, making raw content a timely reminder of the fragility of contemporary existence and a book that stays with you, long after its final page. 

About the reviewer
Dr. Paul Taylor-McCartney is a writer, researcher and lecturer living in Cornwall. His interests include dystopian studies, children’s literature and initial teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in print and electronic form, including: Aesthetica, The Birmingham Journal of Language and Literature, Education in Practice & Writing in Practice (National Association of Writers in Education), Dyst: Literary Journal, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, The Crank and Bandit Fiction. His debut children’s novel, Sisters of the Pentacle, was recently published by Hermitage Press.

You can read more about raw content by Naomi Booth on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Shanta Acharya of "Mind’s Eye: Notelets & Dialogues in Tribute to Paul Celan" by Carol Rumens

 

A poet who loves language, Carol Rumens resists attaching labels to herself. ‘Am I a poet?’ she asks and answers it thus: ‘I hope so but how can I be sure? I would rather describe myself simply as someone who loves language, and who tries to make various things with it – poems, chiefly, but also essays, plays, translation, occasional fiction and journalistic odds and ends. Poetry can sometimes bring these different genres interestingly together.’ I quote from her website. The author of twenty-four collections of poems in addition to fiction, drama, translation, poetry lectures, she has also edited anthologies and journals, not to mention her ‘Poem of the Week’ for The Guardian. It would be safe to say that language is her métier.

In Mind’s Eye, engaging in a dialogue with the life and work of the poet Paul Celan, she resurrects him from ‘the tomb of language’ by offering ‘a tribute that reflects on the fragility of life, the endurance of art, and the complexities of survival.’ As Celan pointed out, a poem ‘lays claim to infinity, it seeks to reach through time.’ Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest European poets in the postwar period, in his 1958 Bremen speech, Celan refers to himself as one who ‘goes toward language with his very being, stricken by and seeking reality.’  

In Animal People, Rumens altered our understanding of the scope of poetry, not just our appreciation of her work. Her poem, 'On Standby,' where having ‘tasted words,’ one is left in no doubt of her vocation. One of the epigraphs in Mind’s Eye is: ‘The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. The author stays with it.’ If the reader can join and stay the course, the poem finds company, a new home. Understanding the loneliness of a poem takes a special kind of empathy. The other is by Paul Celan: ‘But poetry too hurries ahead of us at times,’ from The Meridian Speech on the Occasion of the Award of the Georg Büchner Prize. In his speech, Celan points out ‘art forms the subject of a conversation that takes place in a room, …, a conversation that could go on endlessly, we feel, if nothing intervened.’ Something always does – from World War II death camps to pandemic hospital scenes in 2020. 

In 'Star,' about the need to hide the Star of David badge that Jews were obliged to wear during Nazi occupation, we learn how ‘the park-bench was half in shade, and roomy / enough to test the poem – the poem that’s with you // wherever you’re allowed to take nothing with you.’ In 'Corona to "Corona,"'  from Celan’s poem to hers, ‘in the wreathing of years / the word breathes differently – / a virus old as love and new as every / lover’s new mutation.’ Celan’s was a love poem: ‘We stand at the window embracing, they watch from the street: / it’s time people knew! / It’s time the stone consented to bloom.’ In her poem, 'Anniversary,' reminding us of Celan’s 100th centenary in 2020, Rumens writes: ‘Your April deathday fell, you weren’t quite fifty / and still the sun-prints travelled, still the petals remembered and novembered / all that had been golden in your time.’ 

The poems here are conversations, responses to Celan’s life and poetics. As she mentions in her 'Forenote,' the poems in 'Notelets are short letters to, or about Celan. They are not chronologically ordered, and only tenuously grounded in biographical reality.’ The second part, entitled 'Dialogues,' takes the form of conversations between Celan and 'an imaginary poem of his, un-titled and unfinished, but keeping him company during his last years of mental illness and suicide,' bringing new perspectives on grief, displacement, and the transformative power of words. The concept of this imaginary poem is just as powerful, if not more poignant, than Leonardo da Vinci working on the Mona Lisa till he died.  

In 'Dialogues,' the conversation between poet and poem reveal a wry sense of humour. 'In the Asylum' begins: ‘“Art as necessity is very bare” / you might have been thinking / when Poem interrupted: Speak, you also – / you – thin coat I wear / not quite to freeze my balls in No-one’s Where.’ This is not just entertaining with knowing interruptions, the last two stanzas leap from the verb ‘to swallow’ to an actual swallow. ‘God may have an eye, Poem said (an agnostic). / Not yours, not 20-20: not without brightness. / Here swallow this. // You hurled the empty glass. Poem flew, / a swallow. Rose and sank. / Some other spaceman raced himself to the moon. / You found the harp-string slackened.’ These poems transform and soar through the darkest of times.

In the words of Anne Stevenson, Rumens’ writing ‘testifies to the generosity of her imagination and to the persistence of her dedicated wrestle with words and meaning.’ Rumens’ richly layered poems are widely admired for their technical brilliance, subtlety of subject matter and intensity of thought. In Mind’s Eye, the conversation between her and Celan, the struggle between poet and poem, resonates with the reader. What emerges is an intense realisation of the fragility of life. I am grateful to Rumens for leading me back to her poems and that of Celan’s with a greater understanding and appreciation of the relationship between words and life.

About the reviewer
Shanta Acharya’s recent poetry collections are Dear Life (2025), 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. The author of thirteen books, her poems, articles, and reviews have featured in various publications and her poems have been translated into several languages. www.shanta-acharya.com