Review by Rennie Parker of "Saltburn" by Drew Gummerson

Drew Gummerson is evidently a writer from the "more is more" school of creativity, like a speeded-up Dickens with additional body-parts. If the phrase can be made more inclusive, with ideas springing off from ideas like a hi-energy trampoline school, you can bet this author will be on it. For example, he need not say that the University holds its Innovation Fair in the "hired-out" waiting room of the railway terminus, for the simple reason that it must be hired out if it is normally the waiting room, but does it matter? No, because the story rushes on to the next gleaming sentence and the hired-outness serves to illustrate how triple-layered everything is in Saltburn-world. 

Everyone here is on the make. If it moves, you sell it or hire it, because otherwise someone will be selling or hiring you instead. And underneath the relentless bonhomie there's a current of barely suppressed rage at how society has turned out. For example, there's a boardgame comes with "bonus points for disposing of homeless people or setting fire to food banks," although the game itself is based on the 1970s hit "Mousetrap," judging from the description. So it's something nostalgic and sweet, followed by something that kicks you where it hurts; Gummerson knows how to deal both sides of the coin. And he's not bothered whether you find his characters pleasant or not - the somewhat off-colour second son of the glove manufacturer is the sort of person who'd be best avoided on the train, and his eventual paramour Captain Nemo could have done better, methinks.

I loved the evocation of a rundown seaside environment, because we've all been to a version of these places, most likely on a budget childhood holiday. It's the world of McGill postcards garnished with Gillray sentiments, and it's resolutely set in the past, no doubt to encourage our belief in some of the magical-realist events and allegories. If the pricing is judged around the newly decimalised coinage in 1972-73 and all the older ladies look about as appealing as Ena Sharples, it's not so surprising to find a mermaid at work in the penny arcade and to discover that the local nuclear reactor is powered by ex-pit ponies. It's safely in the past, where anything can happen. Sometimes, I feel the author writes things just because he can (for example, his intonation shifts unexpectedly into a hardboiled American phase at one point) and maybe there's an added homage to one of his literary heroes. I'm enjoying the ride, but I would like to see what happens when Gummerson harnesses his writing elan to something where he isn't burning through his subject matter at such speed.

However, don't do what I did and return to the book after a few days away. I've got too many questions. Why is this character collecting underpants? Why is Sven called Sven? Have I missed something? Why does everyone have a Binatone TV? And even though the New Puritan Party attempts to ruin everyone's lives, even if your guesthouse is nightly paraded-past by convicted penitents on their knees, there still might be too many bums and willies for some readers. I suspect I'm not the ideal reader Gummerson was thinking of when he wrote -  or rather, ran gleefully after - this book. The imagination behind this must look like Dinsdale's Joke Shop in the Hepworth Arcade in Hull. I've never read anything like it. And you won't either, which is why you should hie down swiftly to the nearest not-mega-retail-outlet and book an excursion to this most unusual resort. But don't be fooled by the cartoon framing, and be aware that some of the images might be close to the bone.

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 more about Saltburn by Drew Gummerson on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Jonathan Wilkins of "Wild Boar" by Hannah Lutz, trans. Andy Turner

Ritve is looking for wild boar.

Glenn is looking for happiness.

Mia is looking after her grandfather who is suffering from Alzheimer’s.

All are living by the forests of Småland in Sweden.

The forests of this Småland are home to a growing population of wild boar that were once on the verge of extinction. Ritve is searching for them, but never seems to have any success in finding them. He sees their destructive nature and chases sightings, but to no avail. Why is something so plentiful continuously out of his reach, but seen by so many others?  

Mia wants her grandfather to remember his past, but continually fails even though she has brought him back to his childhood home. Her love and devotion towards him are clear, but it makes no difference. Age has taken its toll and it can never be reversed.

Glenn is an ordinary man with simple ideas and tastes who just want to be happy. He has found his love and his true nature. But will it be enough? His job is only a means to an end. He does not relish it, but he does seem to welcome life and wants to get more from his surroundings and relationships.

Wild Boar is narrated by three very different characters who have come from afar to the isolated community of Småland.

Wild Boar is a poetic masterpiece about animals and people and their different places in a destructively changing ecosystem. The denouement of the book is tragic and compelling as we are shown than none of us can escape the world in which we live. It will take its toll.

Written beautifully, and translated with what we can only assume is infinite care, Wild Boar looks at our past and our future, the planet's past and future and, in the end, it doesn’t appear to hold out much hope for our future.

About the reviewer
Jonathan Wilkins is 69. 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 Wild Boar by Hannah Lutz on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Colin Dardis of "Boy, Mother" by Caroline Bracken

Winner of the 2024 Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Prize, Boy, Mother is a sequence of poems exploring a mother’s relationship with her son, who has a long-term mental illness. However, this is not just the typical unconditional familial love of devotion and sacrifice. Rather, Bracken displays the interplay being the wellbeing of mother and son, as set up in the opening poem, "Amor Matris": "Some / children / are easy / to raise … // Some / mothers / are easy to love," going on to give the exceptions of herself and son. We see this uneasy symbiotic relationship throughout the work: "he gains ten pounds    you lose ten," "both he and you will be judged," "I carried him under my skin for 293 days safe in amniotic fluid." The mental wellbeing of one is wholly reliant on the other: the mother to know that the son is safe and well, and the son to have his mother fight on his behalf for access to care and the safety of home.

"Admissions" catches the interminable horror of hospital waiting rooms with wry observations: "greasy Hello magazines show Princess Diana alive … a half-full water cooler   no cups." We find similar trivialities in "Black Coat," where the mother frets over the suitability of a coat to be worn to her son’s possibly impending funeral. The mind goes to curious places in times of stress, but to hint at such whimsy in times of suffering without underplaying the suffering itself is remarkable writing, reminiscent of David Sedaris or Henry Rollins.

A number of poems are set in admission areas, anonymous waiting rooms, even police stations, Bracken expertly capturing both the clinical boredom of inactivity and the uneasy anticipation of bad news. Constantly, we are reminded of the mother’s helplessness, her sanity at the whim of a medical examination or a police search.

          A stranger will tell me
          he is either dead or found
          I have rehearsed both
          during six weeks
          of fluid dread
          ("Ballast")

Where these poems excel is that, although obviously written after the event, the reader feels right alongside the mother as she waits for the news, any news, sharing her concern and her fears. "Eyewitness" and "Mental Health Act" dissect and distil each action and thought slowly, drawing out the gamut of feelings and sensations, allowing space for the reader to enter the thought process.

Judge of the Poetry Business prize Jane Clarke, in her blurb for the collection, notes the collection's "innovative poems," although there is little that could be considered as breaking new poetical ground. Bracken prefers extra spacing between words or line breaks to do the work of commas and semi-colons; at times, punctuation is dispensed of altogether, causing a double-take in the reading of some lines that could have benefited from clearer intervals. To be generous, such form could be said to be representative of the frantic minds of both mother and son, where in the moment, thoughts and expressions are not precisely and neatly expressed, but tumble out in a cacophony of worry or illness. However, at times, the omission inhibits rather than elevates the writing.

The collection’s closing poems shift away from the turbulence and trials of disappearances and medical interventions to something more akin to normalcy: a shared coffee in a cafe, a trip to Marks and Spencers, the mother showing her son how to construct his hair into a man-bun. All of these little events are shown to be hard won, even fraught – "your leg shaking my hand shredding napkins," or the marvelling of the son successfully navigating a self-check out with ease by the overly-anxious mother – but come as blessed reprieve after the early tribulations.

Admittedly, this reviewer is not a parent, so outside of these poems, it would be hard to imagine the natural concerns and heartache that a mother or father may go through with a child. However, it is testament to the willingness of Bracken to be open and shame-free in sharing her concerns that Boy, Mother makes it a little easier for this reviewer to envisage such. Overall, this is another fine collection reflective of the usual high standard from the Poetry Business, and one to be sought out by all.

About the reviewer
Colin Dardis is the author of six poetry collections and four pamphlets, most recently with the lakes (above/ground press, 2023) and What We Look Like in the Future (Red Wolf Editions, 2023). A neurodivergent poet, editor and sound artist, Colin is co-host of the long-running open mic night, Purely Poetry, held in the Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast, and editor of the poetry blog, Poem Alone.

Review by Gary Day of "Nothing Louche or Bohemian" by Tina Cole and Michael W. Thomas

It’s an interesting title. One that turns its back on the sordid and the unconventional but what does its face toward? The answer is local social history. This is very much a volume of people and places that the authors have known. 

Tina Cole and Michael Thomas are too experienced to fall prey to nostalgia or sentimentality. Instead  we are treated to a series of poems that are clear-eyed, gritty and authentic. Cole's "Intoxication" acknowledges the continuing lure of the artistic world while being wise enough to know that poetry only flourishes if it remains close to its roots. Thomas achieves a similar effect in "Sally Riordan." 

Both poems exemplify how each poet riffs off each other. The result is a beautifully textured collection, full of vivid evocations of characters, scenery and a vanished way of life. An example is Thomas’ "Unmapped." A once well-known landscape has become strange to itself and those who used to walk its ways. Memory is in danger of disappearing. The language of the poem is representative of the volume in its precision and invention: "tree-tops net the seasons / in stars of summer blood / and Christmas pearl." Cole’s "Local Vagrant: Dudley 1960s" is equally arresting, the subject's frailness brilliantly and economically conveyed by the phrase "knitted shoulders" while his position on "the ledge of what is now and what / was then" could serve as an epithet for the entire selection. 

There’s an element of Lennon and McCartney in the poems of Cole and Thomas; the same eye for the telling detail and a feeling for the oddness of the ordinary. There are also strains of lyricism but these are kept in check and are felt all the more poignantly for that. The fusion of personal life and social history makes this an unmissable read.

About the reviewer
Gary Day is a retired English lecturer. He has had poems published in Vole, Ekstasis, Acumen and The Dawn Treader. His "Anne Bronte's Grave" was highly commended in last year's Artemesia Poetry Competition. 

You can read more about Nothing Louche or Bohemian by Tina Cole and Michael W. Thomas on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is wisdom, hard won and transcendent.

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

Review by Peter Raynard of "Year of the Rat" by Charles G. Lauder, Jr

Dual heritage poets often explore the meaning of home, as a way of understanding their life. Lauder did this most eloquently in his debut collection, The Aesthetics of Breath. Originally from San Antonio, Texas, he now resides in the English countryside, where home and family are central to the poems in his pamphlet, The Year of the Rat.

A domestic scene is set in the opening poem (an ode to piano makers, ‘who were once all over London, names no one remembers’), as the family is getting new piano, a pre-loved baby grand, ‘as if finding a lost soul a new home.’ And there are other poems of everyday life with the accident of an elderly grand/mother, ‘your eyes and forehead red from kissing the floor,’ and the wonderful final poem, ‘In search of silence’ (yes please), with its rhyming couplets and Lauder’s skilled employment of the viscera that surrounds them:

         like a chrysalis or fox carcass,
         their creaking, crying cranes to swallow
         me within the hedges tender shadow
         layered in ash leaves and badger shit.

I guess one thing the bucolic and city environments have in common is the preponderance of rats (poor Birmingham, in the UK). Emily Dickinson referred to the rat as the ‘concisest tenant, who pays no rent.’ A bit like my adult sons. The Chinese calendar’s Year of the Rat describes the mammal as quick-witted and resourceful, and that is certainly the case with Lauder’s experience of them.

In the eponymous eight-poem sonnet sequence, we see ‘one large and one small / shield beneath gunera leaves / take turns / dashing for the tub of duck pellets.’ The comparison between city and country rat is summed up by Lauder as ‘country rats / are more genteel than their city cousins // they’re not in an alley biting through bags of rubbish.’ Their resourcefulness is evident in the ‘maze of tunnelling stretching / between the boiler house and oil tank.’ 

Having watched Lauder read at his launch, I know his poetry (and life?) is informed by Daoism. There are two touching poems from this belief system about his love for his wife and his family. ‘You are the Sun / radiating high overhead // I am Pluto / of the far, cold / surrounding edge.’

The final couplet of the pamphlet sums up this country life: ‘Here pheasants will build a nest / and wait and wait for the world to change.’

I must give a final nod to the publisher Blueprint Press. Based in the North East of England, they are a pamphlet publisher, showcasing poets between collections, and have already put out work by Fran Lock and W. N. Herbert. The pamphlets are beautifully produced in a minimalist style, so more power to them.

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 Year of the Rat by Charles G. Lauder, Jr, on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Lee Wright of "On Writers and Writing" by Henry James

The essays featured in On Writers and Writing span fifty years and include Henry James’ short reviews, obituaries, reflections on the works of other writers, and a few personal statements of principle. In these writings, he offers insights on both how to write and how to read. Edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize finalist Michael Gorra, this collection reveals how James honed his skills as a critic long before establishing himself as a novelist. The essays underscore the importance of criticism in shaping a writer’s craft. James critiqued the mistakes of his predecessors, hoping that by learning from them, he might one day get it right himself. 

In the opening essay of the book, "The Art of Fiction," Henry James uses English novelist Walter Besant’s lecture of the same name as a starting point for his own reflections on the art of fiction and argues that literature should either instruct or amuse. He does not mention Shakespeare, though, who challenged and delighted in equal measure, albeit not in novel form. There is an essay included on The Tempest in the latter stages of the book, though it stands out as one of the drier pieces in the collection. A more engaging piece is his review of Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, in which James describes it as a work "lacking in inspiration" and remarks, "For the past ten years, it has seemed to us that Mr. Dickens has been unmistakably forcing himself. Bleak House was forced, Little Dorrit was labored, and this current work feels as though it has been dug out with a spade and pickaxe." 

With the same metaphorical pickaxe, the then 22-year-old James continues, "It were, in our opinion, an offence against humanity to place Mr. Dickens among the greatest novelists. For, to repeat what we have already intimated, he has created nothing but figure. He has added nothing to our understanding of human character. He is master of but two alternatives: he reconciles us to what is commonplace, and he reconciles us to what is odd. The value of the former service is questionable; and the manner in which Mr. Dickens performs it sometimes conveys a certain impression of charlatanism."

The harshness of James’ language and the sweeping nature of his criticism are like the sting of a hornet. He doesn’t simply critique Dickens’ work; he almost entirely dismisses it as lacking genuine literary depth. He also calls George Eliot’s Middlemarch "One of the strongest and one of the weakest of English Novels," going on to argue that Eliot’s ambition is commendable but ultimately flawed: "The author wishes to say too many things, and to say them too well; to recommend herself to a scientific audience.” In 1885, George Eliot’s husband, John Walter Cross, published a semi-autobiographical work using extracts from her letters and journals, which Henry James later reviewed. James movingly notes that the letters and journals "are only a partial expression of her spirit." Another comment, though, seems to view womanhood primarily as a biological or physical condition, disappointingly implying that female authors, in general, may have inherent limitations or constraints due to their biology. 

Nevertheless, each piece evokes the sensation of sitting by the fire with James—a man shaped by his own greatest creation—breathless, just as his unnamed narrator is in the prologue of The Turn of the Screw. Not a word is spoken until the storyteller finishes reading the manuscript. At that point, we can choose to agree or disagree with the master.

About the reviewer
Lee Wright holds an MA in Creative Writing and is currently pursuing a PhD. His fiction and nonfiction have been published in Fairlight Books, Headstuff.org, époque press, and Cigarette Fire Literary Magazine.

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