Review by Lisa Williams of "Gentle November" by Alan Edward Roberts

"He was a magician but not a very good one": this is a book seemingly at first about an affair. The couple have just eloped, but I wouldn’t file this under "romance." They masquerade uncomfortably as father and daughter. There seems to be very little excitement and not much joy.

The story, we discover, is about a woman on a collision course, her life a "runaway train of sad events" heading towards a waiting desert. Namibia, specifically the Skeleton Coast, beckons from a childhood map, a "turbulent flight" away on a "long-ago upstairs landing."

This is somewhere she’s dreamed about, but again she doesn’t seem to be enjoying herself. Things happen around her: life is out of her control.

We walk along a parched landscape of haunted trees and wrecked boats, the backdrop to a beautifully painful tale. This small volume is an intriguing story, one that pulls you in and demands to be read in one sitting. Gentle November is peppered with disturbing scenes and images and is skilfully haunting. We never find out the woman's name. This leaves a superb sense of unease, makes you feel like perhaps you weren’t paying her enough attention, and the story consequently lingers beautifully on, long after you’ve put the book down.

About the reviewer
Lisa Williams has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. She writes word-limited flash fiction, mostly drabbles - stories of exactly one hundred words. You can find her online @noodleBubble. 

Review by Rachael Clyne of "Lamping Wild Rabbits" by Simon Maddrell

Simon Maddrell is such an accomplished poet with an assured voice, it’s hard to believe this is his debut collection. He writes about growing up as a gay man on the Isle of Man, drawing from its natural landscape for his themes: "even a stone has a soft spot / a worn through hole after years / of attrition, a heart whose emptiness / is its strength." He refers also to the hag stones in Derek Jarman’s famous Dungeness garden; both Jarman and his garden provide a motif for Maddrell’s exploration of his own journey through the devastating losses of the AIDS epidemic and the added shame of being diagnosed HIV positive. Maddrell uses the analogy of wild rabbits as his central theme, successfully exploring the queer body in nature: whether feral, wild, hunted or ravaged by myxomatosis, it is easy to draw parallels. 

Maddrell plays skilfully with form, offering cleave poems and a redacted form using [      ] with only a scatter of words. He does not shrink from subverting an iconic biblical passage in his rewrite of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. In "1 Queerinthians 13," he takes the verses and applies them to queer men, drawing a counterpoint between love and shame, thus completing the sentiment with its shadow: "three things remained: love, hope, shame, these three. / The greatest of these was shame. // Shame is a darkness with no darker shadow / it does not envy, does not puff up, is not proud."

The genre of "queer poetry" is about disruption of form and subversion of poetic expectations. Maddrell is a poet who does this again and again, without falling into the trap of flippancy. His voice springs from a history of shame, struggle and painful loss and he emerges courageously and unapologetically himself.

 

About the reviewer
Rachael Clyne is a retired psychotherapist. Her prizewinning collection, Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams 2014), concerns eco-issues. Her latest (Seren 2023) is You’ll Never Anyone Else, which explores identity, migrant heritage, LGBTQ+ and relationships. She is on Bluesky @rachaelclyne.bsky.social and on Substack here.