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.

Review by Christine Hammond of "The Iron Bridge" by Rebecca Hurst

One of the first things you notice in Rebecca Hurst's The Iron Bridge is the overriding density of the work - sometimes weighed down by a self-imposed desire for accuracy in recollecting / recording, sometimes liberated enough to allow the light in. Much of it does overtly take on the mantle of a log-book / field guide of sorts, somewhat indicated by the titles of the first and last sequences: "Mapping the Woods,” "An Explorer’s Handbook." 

The writing is sensitive and immersive, using nature to observe and interpret, as in "Banksy Wood" - provoking a sense of loss yet never becoming overly sentimental: "It could be a metaphor, but for now it’s just a place, raw as a skinned knee." "The wood floor is anvil-hard. Gone: bluebell bulbs, litter fall, mycellium’s soft web." 

          Gone: chewy mounds of moss, hart’s tongue, clumps of hard fern, bracken,
          Walks past. Licked clean by Baba Yoga’s broom. Swept
          downhill to the stream.

An enjoyable  feminine voice and experience is present, blending and embedding everyday items, activities and experiences with nature, for use as metaphors:

          What stirs the blood?
          Not tea and muffins
          Not tatting and quilling.
          I like to wrestle. I like the heavy lifting
          The hard-work of shaping and making ...

          I love you because loving you 
          Is not light work, not woman’s work.
          Yet it is the patch I have been given.

There are also typesetting novelties to negotiate – partial right-hand justification ("Wone"), landscape layouts ("And then we saw the daughter of the Minotaur," "The Needle Prince") as well as a liberal amount of prose / prose poetry /reflective story pieces and writing presented in numbered paragraphs. 

Get ready for an adventure that combines both town and country, home and abroad – take a backpack and a compass and be open to discover new things.

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.