Review by Christine Hammond of "A Dress with Deep Pockets" by Jen Feroze

Winner of the 2024 International Book and Pamphlet competition, this beautifully crafted collection is an homage to love, shared experiences and the unique joy of female friendship. You sense the purity of captured moments that become the life-defining journey markers our human psyche searches for and longs to plot, both for meaning and posterity.

In "Hare Girl" reminiscence is powerful, but never heavy or overburdened by sentiment. It is this lightness of touch that characterises much of Feroze’s work, as seen here in the last two verses moving the highly tangible real-life images to an almost ethereal disappearance at the end, likened to the swiftness of a hare through the trees. 

From this, we have some understanding of a transition from the personal qualities and actions of people that leave a short-term impression, to longer-term, deeply affecting and treasured memories. 

         We went camping in each other’s gardens.
         starchy tents and popcorn and stolen vodka.
         I found her before dawn dew-soaked,
         curled in the long grass and defiantly shivering. 

         That was years ago. Sometimes she writes me letters,
         Sends sage and rose petals, chips of crystal 
         That I line up on my desk as I think of her:
         Sleek, fleet, disappearing into the trees. 

A recurring theme, we can see it again in "Selkie." Here, another friend (Stacey) is compared to the mythical, shape-shifting creature that is a "selkie" – capable of shedding its own skin to transition between seal and human, in and out of the water. Again, the poem moves seamlessly from everyday observations to an exceptionally powerful nothingness, just a slick in the water leaving a marbled imprint "soft as a sigh."

          I’m sitting in a damp towel
          Watching Stacey shed herself in the water …

          … And Stacey is untethering,
          wetsuited in the dawn fog.
          Her recipe for spinach pancakes,
          stubby coloured pencils, the persistent ringing
          in her ears. Her Gwen Stefani impression,
          nervous driving, impulse to stroke every cat,
          the way she sits in galleries,
          magnetised. All of it slicks the water,
          A marbling soft as a sigh.

A Dress with Deep Pockets is a highly enjoyable, immersive and poetic reading experience. Events and interactions rooted in the everyday are effortlessly noted, articulated and committed to a precious memory sub-strata. Thus, their value is identified as something of lasting beauty.

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

Review by Tracey Foster of "Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy" by Martin Gayford

At least they can't cancel Spring was a refrain coined by David Hockney in 2020 when he found himself locked down in Normandy, surrounded by his newly acquired orchard.

Gayford, who is the art critic for the Spectator, had a long relationship with Hockney that went back over 45 years. Having previously written two books together, History of Pictures and Secret Knowledge, the pair were in constant communication before the outbreak of Covid-19. Sharing images, thoughts, connections via emails and post, the impact of lockdown was to become a focus during the subsequent isolation of the artist in his new studio, a converted barn. To use Hockney’s favourite word, they had a good natter. The premise of this book is to explore that period and the outpouring of landscapes that came from confinement, whilst making connections between other artworks and theories and the fragility of the human race. While we were condemned to sofa surfing, team meetings, home schooling and baking bread, Hockney and Gayford looked closely at our relationship with nature and the art of sitting still and noticing every detail about us.

We have lost touch with nature, rather foolishly as we are part of it, not outside it. This in time will be over and then what?

This chimes with the mood of the period, when we quit our confines for daily walks and began to turn to nature for relief. Finding solace in the sunsets, wellness in our woodlands, we, like Hockney, looked at the details around us. Back when the mortality of our existence was a daily bulletin, Hockney was aware of his presence and role as an observer and recorder of life. 

I've witnessed quite a few changes in the art world and you know, most artists are going to be forgotten. That's their fate. It might be mine too. 

The landscapes he drew with pencil, paintbrush and iPad were simple marks and dots of colour but conveyed the freshness of nature unfurling in a time of great immobility. The inevitably of Spring, nature's great drive to procreate and live, was a reminder of our raison d'etre when we needed it most. 

This book is a great commentary on the lockdown of 2020, seen through the eyes of two people. Their conversations and discussions traverse art, opera, food, postcards and fairy tales. This is a roundabout ride of ideas and ideology, focusing on themes close to the artist’s heart: colour, shade, time, perspective, water and nature with reference to those who influenced him most, Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, Hokusai and Rembrandt. The book is punctuated throughout with glorious images that pay homage to the skill of the mark maker and a visual history of time, weather and viewpoints.

I last saw a Hockney retrospective in 2012 at the Royal Academy of Arts, A Bigger Picture. Although I was aware of his large portraits, California pools and Wolds landscapes, it was his pencil sketches that fascinated me most. His draftsman skills are imbued with sensitivity as he layers up marks to create texture and depth. This was at the forefront when I read this book. The Normandy iPad sketches he created with a bespoke painting app use similar marks and movement to convey the cherry blossoms, riverbeds and pathways surrounding the farm.

Hockney finally left his Normandy studio at the end of 2024 and moved back to London. Failing health in his late eighties has drawn him closer to amenities and available health care. A prolific artist who has worked every day since turning sixteen, and who painted the mantra Get up and start work straight away on his bedroom chest of drawers, is not due to stop work soon. We can only wait to see what becomes his next muse. 

Everybody's looking at the same picture, but they don't see the same thing. We see with memory. 

About the reviewer
After a long career as an Art and Design teacher, Tracey Foster 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, The Haiku Foundation, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, Cold Moon Journal, Madswirl, Five Fleas, the Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site The Small Sublime found here.

Review by Julie Gardner of "Skail" by Richie McCaffery

"Skail" is an old Scots word meaning a scattering or dispersal. This information is provided in the back-cover blurb, where we also learn that "the poems in this pamphlet take place in the aftermath of a pandemic, and in the dissolution of a long-term relationship."

The first two lines of the title poem – an especially strong piece – suggest the supernatural, perhaps hinting at threat: "The night before Halloween, he came to her in sleep, / called out her maiden name, with a cancerous rasp." But this ghost comes not so much in anger as exasperation: "He could wait no longer, it’d been 15 years already / of dilly-dally-hanging-onto-daddy’s dust." Her indecision is swiftly rectified. She involves "the great grandkids / he never even knew" who use "little grain scoops" to scatter her father’s ashes in plant pots and they leave out a "tot of his favourite whisky … to slake his thirst." 

"Little grain scoops" will not be enough. The third and final stanza returns us to the woman and then, as if mirroring the first stanza, to the intangible, the supernatural. Despite the apparent abandon of her actions, we see how keenly she feels the loss:

         But the bulk of his ash was left to her, and went
         headfirst into the remains of the vegetable bed.
         And though it was a wet night, the dust cloud of him
         hovered under the streetlamp, as if getting its bearings.

Perhaps "The Lucky Penny," one of the later poems in the pamphlet, is about the same extended family. It begins: "When you were wee, he brought back a lucky penny." Once washed, however, it is revealed to be a Victorian gold coin. That the finder has not recognised its worth is ironic, given his repetition of the well-worn maxim: "Find a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck." This failure to recognise good fortune, is, we learn in the final stanza, characteristic:

         Over the years you’ve watched your mother’s profile
         change, caring for grandkids and holding the house
         together as he aged too, cursing a life of misfortune.
         He never knew he held gold in his hand. Still does.

The poems in this slim pamphlet avoid first-person narration, perhaps signifying a desire not to claim self-importance but to draw attention to the complexity of what it is to be human. It risks seeming disingenuous, however, especially in poems that seem to evoke the ending of the long-term relationship referred to in the blurb. In "Scrap," for example, we read, "Her last words to him were written, not spoken, / a paper cut severing them and their fourteen years." And in Cicatrix, "He never heard the wind changing. / Before he knew it, he was out of the frame." The distance between speaker and poet seems small, only the pronoun holding them firmly apart. All the poems feel natural and honest, though, the speaker assuming the role of an unobtrusive observer who reports what he sees with compassion and humour. 

In "Bolt," a man gets off a bus and is "dazzled by a camera flash." He wrongly assumes a group of teenagers have taken his picture and is about to confront them when he is saved from humiliation: "the ordnance of thunder blew them all / out of their skin." The poet trusts his reader to work out what has happened. The final lines of the poem roll together the teenagers, the man, the poet, and his readers:

           That’s being human
           one instant so full of self, the next
           made to feel like no-one, nothing.

This acknowledgement of vulnerability is a thread that weaves through the poems.

About the reviewer
Julie Gardner is studying towards a PhD at Nottingham Trent University, focussing on Silence and Voice in the poetry of Vicki Feaver and her contemporaries. Her poetry pamphlet Remembering was published by Five Leaves Publishers in 2024.

Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "Brilliant Blue" by Karen Stevens

 

Karen Stevens’s debut collection transports the reader straight into her fictional world with a tag line that sounds both like a warning and an invitation: "Welcome to the infamous Duncock Estate." In nine tightly structured and beautifully written stories, she conjures a coastal council estate that hums with life: chip-shop queues, neon-slick pavements, gossip passed over fences like contraband. The world is so sharply etched that you feel the salt sting off the Channel each time you turn a page.

What makes these stories sing is the way Stevens pairs raw circumstance with a fierce, steady compassion. Her people have worries that could crush them, yet they keep reaching for connection, however fleeting. The prose itself flashes, but there’s precision beneath the sparkle. Sentences are lean, images exact; a chipped sink or a scrawl of graffiti serves as both social backdrop and inner weather report. You sense the author’s quiet fascination with ephemera: half-heard remarks or slivers of stored memories resurfacing in adulthood. Each becomes a seed that flowers briefly on the page before drifting off, leaving ripples in the reader’s mind. In "Where You’re Heading," the narrator remarks, "Thing is, Owen, since the dream I can only imagine you in space, and that’s how I want to keep you – hanging in blackness and ready to sing for me."

Running through the collection is a clear conviction that short fiction can do something uniquely powerful with brevity. Stevens trusts her readers to make imaginative leaps, to stand in the little gaps she leaves and feel the full weight of what isn’t said. The result is exhilarating: every story closes like a camera shutter, but the after-image lingers. In another moving story, "The Vigil," Stevens’ precise handling of atmosphere, setting and character is evident: "Already, the impression made by the old man’s body would be less distinct as snow fell soundlessly on snow."

Brilliant Blue is, above all, generous. It insists that hope can survive even the toughest postcode; that humour finds its way into the room, uninvited, whenever people gather; that ordinary lives are anything but. Step onto the Duncock Estate and you’ll leave painted the brightest, most unforgettable shade of blue.

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 a wide range of print and electronic form. His debut children’s novel, Sisters of the Pentacle, was published by Hermitage Press (2022) and fiction titles he has recently worked on as commissioning editor have won multiple regional readers’ and publishers’ awards.

You can read more about Brilliant Blue by Karen Stevens on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Nina Walker of "sum of her PARTS" by Laura Besley

In sum of her PARTS, Laura Besley provides us with a beautiful series of briefly illuminated windows - vignettes that offer glimpses into the moments of intimacy that make up a life. Besley writes tiny, furious fiction concerning an increasingly fractured world. Each story acts as part mirror, part shard, as cutting as it is revealing. This sentiment is perhaps embodied best by "shattered," in which a self-hatred over physical appearance culminates in a speaker smashing a mirror and stating, "with the shards of glass / I give myself a new face." 

Besley gives a new face, not just to the nameless speaker of "shattered," but also to the presumed limitation of flash fiction. Her creative approach to the visual presentation of flash fiction gives the collection a strong visual identity, a new face. Utilising poetic lineation techniques, Besley’s work shatters and reforms our presumptions about the form.

The collection is carefully threaded together by a series of intimacies, perhaps most centrally the intimacy one must have with oneself. In the refined and precise prose that is present across all four of her published works, Besley presents the reader with moments of physicality that ripple out beyond the pieces' short word counts. Often, the body of the speaker is positioned as an object of discussion, like a museum exhibit - an object transformed by a thread of absurdism that contrasts with the collection's physicality. In one story, the speaker is transformed into a trumpet, in another, a character grows an extra arm to hide their face. Bodies in Besley’s work are central yet malleable. They are expressed through a series of familiar quirks and fault lines, "thick middles," "haggard faces," and "bruises" that can become beautiful or bizarre at a moment’s notice. When reading Besley’s work, one is left discovering, through her typical sharp and wise immediacy, a new strangeness within oneself. 

In one of my favourite stories from the collection, "fractured," Besley writes:

          the doctor says "We’re going to need to take a
             consent form." I sign. "If you could just remove your
                bruises, multiple, along the collar bone and across the patient’s back
                   home, he might be awake, be wondering why I’m not
                      there is a bed ready for you now." I don’t

Here, the body, while still central, is cut in two by the story's perspectives. The lineation is cleverly used to construct the patchwork of the patient as observer and subject. "Patient’s back" flows cleanly into "back home," as if the thoughts of the patient effectively interrupt the clinical observation. Time is clipped and stitched as the request to "remove your bruises" merges observable reality and individual desire for escape. A clashing moment of exterior reality and interior doubt culminates in the piece's final unfinished fragment, "I don’t." The final line, when read within the context of a domestic abuse victim refusing the (albeit limited) protection of the hospital, is haunting. The lack of a concluding full stop implicates all the possible moments this patient may inhabit after this one, leaving the ending of the piece jagged and frayed.

In just thirty-four pages, Besley draws us into a network of bodies, thoughts, and conversations, always, as flash necessitates, with scant context. Yet the brief nature of each piece illuminates just how interconnected we all are, each jagged edge implicating a matching edge that may yet lie beside it. The sum of the collection's parts is a moving and sharply observed portrayal of the complexities of embodied life, where one must place gentle intimacies right alongside painful metamorphosis and absurd possibilities. 

About the reviewer
Nina Walker is a first year PhD student at the University of Leicester studying the impact of digital technology on the contemporary American novel. She also co-runs the Leicester based creative writing group Amateur Hour. She enjoys writing poetry, reading speculative fiction, and pub quizzes.