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

Review by Kim Wiltshire of "The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey" by Tim Hannigan

 

Tim Hannigan is Cornwall born and bred and, like many of us brought up in ‘picturesque’ tourist destinations, he spent time working in the hotel sector as a chef before managing to ‘escape.’ In Hannigan’s case, this escape took him to academia and a life as a writer, living in and writing travel books about Indonesia, before he felt able to revisit his childhood home and look afresh at the whole county of Cornwall.

For me, this is definitely a settle down somewhere comfy and immerse yourself in a different world type of book. Each chapter takes us through the geological specificities of Cornwall, the historical elements that have contributed to the folklore of the area, alongside a walking travelogue that takes the reader through the county. With pictures, maps and personal anecdotes, this book has a range of elements to engage with, which bring alive this diverse and interesting area.

Starting out at Cornish poet Charles Causley’s terraced house near Launceston, Hannigan walks along the Tamar, considering the idea of borders: who sets them, on what conditions are they set, and how / why are they important? That link to literary Cornwall carries on, unsurprisingly, throughout the book, exploring the old myths and folk tales, those writers and artists who made Cornwall their home, and those who visited – often with some very strange prejudices around the ‘native’ people and the ‘beauty’ of the area, or not as some more romantic artists seem to have decided.

There are some lovely images included, but I still found myself using my map app to find some of the areas being described, especially Causley’s little cottage. Having been an occasional tourist to the area, it was great to be able to delve a little more into the area on so many different levels. This is clearly a labour of love for Hannigan and, as you read it, his generosity at sharing this area he knows and loves so well can be felt. So, as mentioned above, settle down and immerse yourself in this world of piskeys, smugglers and the actual reality of an industrial landscape where real, actual people who may not be surfers (although it seems many are) live, love and work – for, with and often despite the tourists. Oh, and if you’re lucky enough to get the hardback version, the cover is also a beautiful artwork in its own right!

About the reviewer
Kim Wiltshire is a writer and academic, Reader and Programme Leader for Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. She writes scripts, short stories and was a British Academy Innovation Fellowship researching ways of embedding arts into healthcare settings during 2022 and 2023. 

You can read more about The Granite Kingdom by Tim Hannigan on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Lee Wright of "Father's Father's Father" by Dane Holt

Father’s Father’s Father, the debut poetry collection from Dane Holt, explores the shaping and eventual disillusionment of masculinity, as well as the lingering effects of tragedy. The opening poem, titled "John Cena," delves into the predictable patterns of professional wrestling, where audiences anticipate the familiar rise-and-fall of matches that provide the structure and comfort many of us craved as adolescents. Cena represents a scripted form of heroism—akin to figures like Superman or John Rambo. But what if we looked beyond that manufactured persona? Could the image of the all-American hero have become stale? Is Holt suggesting that Cena’s image is tied to a version of America that overlooks its own complexities and contradictions? Rather than a "fallen" hero, perhaps Cena is one who’s now on his knees, wrestling not just with opponents, but with his own myth. 

Holt belongs to a dynamic new wave of Northern Irish poets, and the collection gives the impression of him wandering, collecting fragments, and observing what causes them to bend or break. In the poem "Humphrey Bogart," the speaker begins by recounting tales passed down by his grandfather, describing a time when men were characterised by a rugged, almost invincible self-sufficiency. Holt uses an image of a man striking a match with his thumb, waking up to a lit cigarette, and performing daily tasks with a cigarette in hand, evoking an idealised version of masculinity—one that is calm, composed. The grandfather’s memories of the past are a source of nostalgia, and The African Queen (the film referred to in the poem) fills the absence of verbal confirmation as part of their understanding of love. There’s also an image of birds filling the sky, a striking conclusion to the poem, which suggests an omnipresence of the departed, both in film and in life. All the poems contemplate a form of sadness (though not without comedy). They look at the consequences of a life that doesn’t get the chance to be redeemed, expendable people of deep emptiness, those who struggle to pick up their lives. As Holt writes in the poem, "Seven Esenin Versions": 

         I cannot deceive myself: something 
         heavy troubles my heart.   

This reader feels it too: poetry is where attention to the tender and the brittle began. 

 

About the reviewer
Lee Wright holds an MA in Creative Writing and is currently pursuing a PhD, focusing on the coming-of-age memoir and film analysis. His fiction and nonfiction have been published in Fairlight Books, Headstuff.com, époque press, and Cigarette Fire Literary Magazine.

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "Wish: New & Selected Poems" by Maggie Brookes-Butt

In his ‘Ode on Melancholy,’ John Keats famously suggests that ‘Ay, in the very temple of Delight / Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine.’ And perhaps it works the other way round too: in the temple of Melancholy, there’s a shrine to Delight. 

Maggie Brookes-Butt’s life-affirming collection, Wish: New & Selected Poems, encompasses both alternatives: her poems are sometimes temples of Delight which house shrines to ‘Veil’d Melancholy,’ sometimes temples of political Melancholy, which open up to reveal Delight, Joy, Beauty. As many have pointed out, contemporary poetry is – as far as it’s possible to generalise – not always on home ground when it comes to delight or happiness or joy. Joy is all-too-often left to birthday card rhymes, seen as naïve in an age of end-game capitalism, political polarisation and climate disaster. 

The poems in Wish, though, are far from naïve: this is a grown-up, fierce, brave joy that can thrive in the teeth of political realism. In the opening sequence, Brookes-Butt stages imaginary conversations with her infant granddaughter, which are both celebrations of shared love, and honest appraisals of the future the latter has been born into. In the poem ‘Realities,’ for instance, she writes:

                    The whine of chainsaws
          plagues the forests, while glaciers silently drip. Missiles
          land on another hospital, another school. And the people 
          we love go away and we never see them again …

          But let us not go there today. Better by far to hold my hand
          and look for bears in the woods, mermaids diving
          from the rocks, Father Christmas landing on the roof, 
          dance the hokey-cokey and sing “that’s what it’s all about.”

This is what Brookes-Butt’s poems do so beautifully: they dance the hokey-cokey, find the bears in the woods and mermaids on the rocks, while still facing up to the ‘realities’ of the modern world. A dawn chorus, for example, is ‘a technicolour / torrent-of-sound, reminding, insisting, in spite / of everything – there is joy in the world, / there is so much joy.’ Even in a Second World War prison camp, the downtrodden inmates find ‘unexpected peace’ in an allotment, where they ‘grow gifts / of vegetables or flowers to give on visit day.’

Like the inmates, Brookes-Butt's poems often find 'unexpected peace,' miniature utopias, in a wider context of turbulence and degeneration. Hers is not an escapist joy, though, that turns away from horror. Rather, it’s the kind of visionary and radical joy that Friedrich Schiller and Ludwig van Beethoven might have understood – a joy that challenges present and future ‘Realities.’ Even if, in that particular poem, the poet ultimately declares ‘let us not go there today’ to her grandchild, the implication is that such realities will have to be faced in the future. And the collection as a whole holds onto a radical and joyful optimism for that future, in spite of fear, in spite of melancholy, ‘in spite of everything’:

For now leave
fear about the drowning and scorching of your world
to me. I have enough for both of us. When I’m too
voiceless to protest, too old to carry a placard, 
I’ll hand it to you like a baton or perhaps a fiery
sword, and you can run in my stead. We will defy
the politicians with lies for hair, shout down
fearfulness itself with tongues of flame. 

About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor is director of Everybody's Reviewing. His most recent book is the memoir A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024). He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is here.