Review by Colin Dardis of "Take Care of Your Hooves Darling" by Laura McKee

McKee’s short collection, published by Against the Grain Poetry Press, is a volume concerned with transformations. In "sheepish," we find a woman who awakes to find wool and horns on her person, perhaps as it her inner self-consciousness has become a Kafkaesque outer manifestation (indeed, there is an allusion to a "dry clicking beetle" in the poem). Elsewhere, a son plays dress-up, first looking like Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) with a t-shirt for a turban, then as Dolly Parton, imitating her stage presence at Glastonbury, "flirting with each last word." The words "love thyne self" scratched into a metal rail leads a rumination on alloys, and how "cold steel may contain | traces of gold."

The pantoum "dead frogs" continues this theme: a dead frog is "revived with electrical charges" like Frankenstein, whereas a bereaved mother imagines her lost baby similarly "arisen," the dead transformed back into life through the power of desire. All this transformation naturally comes alongside ideas and ideals of escapism. In "good morning," the speaker imagines slipping down into a sewer in order to reach a river,

          until I
          get to the sea
          and no-one
          will have to pretend
          to listen to me

There is the suggestion of being the outsider here, of a person who feels the weariness that comes with conformity and expectation. The theme of escapism expands: we see it in Van Gogh’s suicide, vividly reformed as the blood from the gunshot wound becoming a "splatter || of red on gold | in the foreground." Another speaker wonders if they are supernatural after doctors find of a trace of "occult blood" (blood that can’t be seen by the naked eye) in a stool, the name suggesting new possibilities.

McKee’s ultimate escape and transformation, however, is to be found in romantic and intimate love. In a changing room, the panduriform form is desired - "I notice she is a violin" – whereas in the British Museum, the appreciation of a portrait is distracted by their partner’s hand between their thighs. Elsewhere, we have the desire for skin "liberally scattered with moles" to be licked, and teeth to be sunk into a flank. McKee is unabashedly forthright, not only in her desires but also her insecurities, and it is this honesty that is one of the driving forces behind her poems.

The entire collection is deceptively simple: you could skim your way through the book in about twenty minutes. However, such a rush would be to ignore and dismiss the depths and varied connections that are on offer throughout the work. Rather than giving us the whole picture, McKee has laid down a jigsaw for us to piece together, which results in a complex portrait of poet as woman, as lover, as individual, as rebel.

About the Reviewer
Colin Dardis is a neurodivergent writer, editor and sound artist from Northern Ireland. His most recent book is Apocrypha: Collected Early Poems (Cyberwit, 2022). His work, largely influenced by his experiences with depression and Asperger's, has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and USA. 

You can read more about Take Care of Your Hooves Darling, by Laura McKee on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Harry Owen of "Wildfire" by David Mohan

Where does one begin with the ‘wildfire’ running through this excellent collection? With an attempt at definition, perhaps.

The obvious one is of any raging, destructive conflagration that consumes vast areas of woodland, brush and veld, devastating wildlife and threatening human habitations. Even in a world increasingly familiar with the devastation caused by anthropogenic climate change it still shocks to read the first lines of the title poem, ‘Wildfire’:

           The world is kindling for a dropped match … 

           the fire spreads like dawn
           igniting brush, forest, grass, it cuts
           black footprints, a poacher’s report
 

           in backwoods, on the street.

Different forms of wildfire emerge, from the strange incendiary mixture of ‘Greek fire’ used in ancient warfare, to the mysterious will-o’-the-wisp and luminescent ‘foxfire’ of the imagination, something half actual, half mythic, wherein

          wildfire will sleep between dreams
          of lake water and reservoirs
          …
          riled and vicious and ready to terminate
          this touch paper planet.

The ecopoetic spirit of Wildfire – expressed in the recurrent motif of burning – is clearly evident, as in ‘The Field Fire Almanac’ where 

           you might find a thousand 
           charred spiders, larvae,
           crickets, beetles, slugs,
           two centipedes: a mass grave 
           …
           just the potash of dust.

Other forms of burning, psychological and emotional, smoulder in poems that explore close human relationships of one kind or another – friend, lover, spouse – experienced in times of despair or loss (‘Black Dog Tattoo’; ‘Gorse Fire’; ‘Black Light’). In the yearning poem ‘Votives,’ for instance, we learn, without being told directly who is being addressed, that 'I wanted // more than this for you, I swear, / a bonfire, flames, a burning ship.'

And in honour of Oscar Wilde, a fellow Dublin native, David Mohan pays his moving tribute to the great man after visiting the hotel room in Paris (‘Hôtel d’Alsace’) where he died, sick and destitute, in 1900. 

For all the recurrence of ‘black’ and ‘fire,’ I very much enjoyed these finely crafted and emotionally powerful poems, genuine amusement appearing in the wonderfully dark humour of ‘Vacuum’:

            Vacuum

            I like retraction, reversal
            of the Hoover’s stomach—
            disembowelled it reveals
            what’s left to settle in a room.

            I find pockets of lint,
            cough-balls of fluff,
            a static vest
            of vacuous fabric;

            what’s through with happening;
            the fall of dust become edit—
            yarn bulbs of stuff,
            a bolus strung out to a mess.

            Unravelled, I relish strewing it,
            returning it to the carpet,
            to mattresses, polished surfaces,
            like a mourner emptying ash.

About the reviewer
Harry Owen is the author of nine poetry collections, the latest being Thicket: shades from the Eastern Cape (2022), and editor of three anthologies. Before emigrating to South Africa, he had been appointed the first Poet Laureate for Cheshire in 2003. He lives now near Stellenbosch in the Western Cape winelands. His website is here and his blog is here.

Review by Cathi Rae of "Arrival at Elsewhere," Curated by Carl Griffin

At the end of March 2020, when the world closed down, artists and writers I knew fell into two camps: there were those, faced with very real concerns about their livelihoods, struggling to home-school and manage their fears for themselves or family members who found themselves unable to make any creative response to our new world order, and then there were the others who found themselves writing or creating obsessively, trying to record the events and their personal responses. As someone who was firmly in the second camp, I was excited to read this pandemic collection, and it’s not quite what you might expect, described by the curator, Carl Griffin as “a book length poem, [where] poets from across the world speak in one voice in response to 2020’s life-changing pandemic.” Poets submitted via a world-wide open submission which requested personal and nuanced responses to the initial few months of lockdown.

Poets included range from the well-known and established to new and unpublished voices, who each submitted complete pieces. Fragments from each were then taken and woven together into one complete book-length poem which touches on many of the experiences lived by us all in 2020.

So, there are many  beautiful, poignant and nuanced descriptions of the silence, the growing attention to nature and gardens, loneliness, fear of the future and managing ourselves in world where many of our compass points are missing. The many different voices have  been skilfully edited to create an extraordinarily effective and moving long poem, an effect that stays with you long after you have read it. It is  one  of the most interesting poetic responses to 2020 that  I have read.

If that’s not enough to pique your interest, sales of this book go to support NHS Charities Together.

 

About the reviewer
Cathi Rae is currently a PhD student  at the University of Leicester. A selection of her own pandemic writing was published in UnDividing Lines, in Autumn 2020. You can read a review of her pamphlet, Your Cleaner Hates You and Other Poems, here.

 

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "Collision" by Claire Walker

The sea is everywhere in Claire Walker’s beautiful new pamphlet of poems, Collision, haunting its geography, its characters’ voices, language and dreams. Here, ‘brine rises to the surface … / it coats our skin, our hearts,’ and ‘it creeps like a vine / across the map of this town.’ Sailors wear sweaters threaded with ‘waves, … [and] salt hides / in the Arran twists.’ The sea ‘calls to them like a lover,’ and ‘at night, she nestles in their heads, / whispers in waves.’

And if the sea’s voice is female, so too are the other voices which Walker recovers from the sea’s histories, its romances, legends and shipwrecks. These all-too-often-overlooked voices do not tell macho sailors’ yarns, but rather the stories of women who ‘swam / against history, made the coast’ – of mothers, lovers, mermaids, ‘The Fishwife,’ and the groundbreaking nineteenth-century palaeontologist Mary Anning. 

In the short sequence of poems dedicated to her, Anning becomes both a powerful counter-voice to a male-dominated history of palaeontology (‘they … try and erase me’), and a displaced representation of the female poet. A kind of poet-scientist, Anning collects symbols from the sea (in her case, symbols of evolutionary history), and then marks them, writes on them: ‘my fingerprints are spelled out on flint / letters chiselled in the lines of my nameless bones.’ Walker’s description of Anning in the poem ‘She Sells Seashells’ might almost stand as an allegory of her own method:

          Now picture the girl. 
          I gather the coast; hidden art waits
          for my fingers to unfold rocks.

          I line my finds out on a table,
          little fancies I’ve cleaned
          to show the shape of all our pasts …

          Limestone presses messages
          on the seashore. 

As Anning knew well, though, these messages from the seashore are never straightforward: ‘most would laugh me off the [cliff] edge,’ she says, ‘claim a hoax.’ Messages, symbols, images from the sea are ambivalent, complex, over-determined, culturally and historically loaded, sometimes even laughable. 

Walker understands this, too – the way in which age-old sea imagery can overwhelm the real, drown it in signification, as it were. In ‘Self-Fulfilling Prophecy,’ symbolic language has become just that – a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby ‘real’ seagulls seem to have been overtaken by their representation: ‘tired / of our assumptions’ they ‘are living up to their reputation.’ The symbolic has almost erased the real. Similarly, in ‘A Tattooist’s Mistake,’ sea imagery takes on a life of its own, overwhelming the human subject:

          You ask for a mermaid,
          so that is what I give you. 
          My needle draws her slender back, 
          arching to surf that nibbles her skin. 
          Hair red and long, floating
          like crimson seaweed out against water …

          After you leave, 
          you spend the night beachcombing – 
          she, supple in the twist of your arm. 
          You return at sunrise, hollow-eyed,
          ask me for starfish, seaglass, oysters;
          the entire spill of an ocean. 

The language of the sea – its imagery, cultural weight, symbols – cannot be contained; it ‘doesn’t pack neatly into crates,’ and ultimately overwhelms the tattooist, artist, poet, palaeontologist. Voices, selfhood, identities, whether male or female, are all too easily ‘lost to the fetch of a wave.’ Nonetheless, as Walker’s evocative poems demonstrate, the attempt to swim against the tide, ‘against history,’ in itself remains worthwhile. Even if the sea will always, in the end, overwhelm representation, drowning out all other voices, something beautiful might be salvaged in the attempt. As Walker puts it, ‘something in us admires the wreck.’


About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor is director of Everybody's Reviewing. His books include the poetry collection Cassandra Complex (Shoestring, 2018), and the novel Melissa (Salt, 2015). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.