Review by Lee Wright of "New & Collected Poems" by Jeffrey Wainwright

Forty-eight years in the making, Jeffrey Wainwright’s New & Collected Poems takes us back. It begins in 1978 with his collection Heart’s Desire – a maiden voyage to bring love and war to the page, giving the reader every ounce of life’s frustration and elation. Wainwright allows the poems to spill from his pen like a gardener shaking earth from a bulb of garlic. 

In Selected Poems (1985), his verses are often as cold as sealskin, but it’s a cold we all must face, to understand what it is to feel human. Even the subject of love in Selected Poems barely moves grass. Love, like poetry, is present, but it doesn’t change the world. Wainwright remains tightly focused on the human mind. The poems wind around the reader like vines. He avoids happiness and instead writes of Thomas Müntzer, the deteriorating mental health of George III and dead sweethearts. What is in Wainwright’s mind cannot be touched. 

The Red-Headed Pupil (1994) is a gentle reminder that as the world changes, so we change. We are, as Wainwright points out, plasticine men, shaped by our surroundings. He asks the reader tenderly if they are content among the paving stones. 

The poems stretch from 1999 to the present day, and it is these newer poems that feel deeply personal. "Did you just give up and go" is a line I’ll never get over or forget. In another line he asks, "O my soul, where are you?" which is one of those questions we collect like scars on the body as we age. Is it possible to avoid becoming world-weary as we hold on to the years? Throughout New & Collected Poems, Wainwright is concerned with this question. And who will replace us when we’re gone? That too is something the collection left me asking.  

To borrow Wainwright’s line, "the fish in cold preserve their flesh," just as the ageing poet preserves his reputation in this collected works. 

About the reviewer

Dr Lee Wright holds a PhD from the University of Leicester in Creative Non-Fiction and has had numerous pieces of short fiction and non-fiction published. 

Review by Rachael Clyne of "Killing Spree" by Jorie Graham

In the past I have found the work of this renowned US poet somewhat complex and impenetrable. Killing Spree, in sharp contrast, is spare and stark, in both words and layout. The book reads like a single epic poem covering all aspects of the disastrous period we are facing. How to do it justice in a short review? Many of the poems are thin columns covering several pages, reminding me of an image from the Matrix when streams of data pour down – known as digital rain. Graham manages through her fragmented approach and anaphoric rhythms to shower us with the impact of climate, disease, war and slaughter. We get the full picture through these fragments. Many of us, while still sheltered from the worst impacts, are bombarded daily with images of genocide, floods, fires, oppression, division and hatred. She does not shrink from an apocalyptic view.

A key poem for me is "The Falling," with the image of dice tumbling from the sky, as contagion, war, and slaughter that rain on random targets. And yet the words are more of a broad sweep, allowing us to fill the gaps with our own references and making the whole thing readable without it being a telling rant: "all the new & / improved / viruses shook out their mutations."  Graham talks of "famines, like / bunched veils, reeling with / their new contagions." She audaciously attempts to articulate her vision of the aftermath and how people will survive or not, with poem titles: "When The World Ended," "Tomorrow" and the final poem "Suddenly":

           – what thou lovest well
           remains – it says nothing
           but forgiveness.
           It says repeat after me. And I do.
          

          What have I done.

          Who will I become.

This is an impactful take on the most critical time in history.

About the reviewer

Rachael Clyne is a retired psychotherapist. Her collection Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams) is about eco-concerns. Her Seren collection, You'll Never Be Anyone Else, explores themes of identity and otherness, migrant heritage and LGBTQ+. She's currently building a collection that comments on the world state and challenges of ageing.

Review by Colin Dardis of "Bunting’s Honey" by Moya Cannon

A persistent theme is the danger of forgetting, of lost words and times. "And Now The Babies" laments that "no one can figure out again, | how to give peace a chance." In "Planting Roses in Baicheng," set in the Chinese city that has seen its fair share of border changes over the years, an old, local woman contemplates as "a witness from inside history" and wonders about her history. This pondering on the past is built upon in "All Gone," a key poem in the collection, which recognises the evanescent nature of family events:

          And a century later
         hardly anyone remembers this
         nor do they really matter,
         the trillions of family stories
         which, every day, drift down
         a billion rivulets
         into Lethe’s indifferent waters.

The collection’s title poem celebrates Edward Bunting, famed for his work in collecting and notating Irish folk music. The reader can’t help but draw a comparison here between Bunting and Cannon, the latter collecting stories in her poems that otherwise would be lost, from Tyrone villages to the River Saōne to Venice to Jilin Province. In "Turlough Hill," Cannon notes that we will never truly learn of the history of the site "because nobody wrote | nobody will ever know." Cannon excels in letting us know of hidden wonders, of human adventures and pastoral splendours, and it is from within nature that some of the strongest poems arise.

The opening section of the collection is a series of eco-poems, ablaze with appreciations for scenery and wildlife. However, there are notes of warning. In "Die-back," the poet warns us that

          A species, even, can disappear discreetly,
          with no official count-down,
          without the drama
          of an asteroid or an ice-age

Similarly, in "For the Birds," we learn of pigeon flocks that had "darkened America’s skies," reduced to the last of its year dying "imprisoned, in a Cincinnati zoo." Cannon’s eco-poems are a standout of the collection. In the thrall of nature, greeted by a vision of lake and sky, Cannon wryly notes a crowd of spectators jostling "closer to a roped cliff edge | where a hundred smartphones are held aloft." Contrast this with the poet’s own discovery of a corrie lake in "A Quarrel with the Lexiographers," noting her how "heart leaps" amidst the "skree and heather"; Cannon’s experience feels realer, void of the prism of technology. Indeed, in a poem titled "A Technology," Cannon charts the history and advancement of typesetting, but frets if "a millennium from now | will anyone, perchance, survive" to read our current "cacophony" of "whirring symbols."

In "Pascal," the poem opens with a quote from the French physicist: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me." Cannon wonders "what lies | beyond the rim of a universe"; such contemplation of the expanse of existence is amusing, given that Pascal also famously wrote "All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone." And yet these poems, contrastingly, make the reader want to go outside and explore a mountainside or watch a sunrise, and revel in "that honeycomb of hours spent laughing and talking" in human contact. Although there are notes of sadness and grief, these poems are so rich in the celebration of nature and connection that the reader is enlivened, even emboldened, at the collection’s end. In "Old Friend," fittingly the closing poem, we are reminded that there will be "nothing left of us in this world | but what we have remembered to give away." With these poems, Cannon has ensured that what she leaves behind adds to the beauty of the world.

About the reviewer
Colin Dardis is a neurodivergent writer, editor and sound artist, his work has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and the US. He co-hosts the long-running open mic poetry night, Purely Poetry, in Belfast, and is editor of the Poem Alone blog.

Review by Debasish Lahiri of "Debris" by Daniel Huws

Sometimes poetry can be the disturbance of clear blue skies, shaking the airline passengers, briefly, from their polite boredom into mild alarm, but merely coaxing a bird to bring out all its dance moves in a mid-air ballet. A quiet, precise quire of our disquiets, the poetry of Daniel Huws brings dynamism of drama, that of the recondite garret or the familial dinner table, to a laconic, punctilious close like the sibilant witness of sunlight through the window of the same room. Huws has always had that Welsh gift of using nature to narrate the seasons of "man," to feel the winds (and smoke) of time in the hair, and the tug at the hem of their clothes. Everything, or nothing, is mundane, or mythical.

In Debris, poetry from his two earlier collections Noth (1972) and The Quarry (1999) is collected alongside "uncollected" and occasional poems. Huws’s tribute to Christopher Reid in his "Author’s Preface" can equally be a testament to his own craft as a poet. Patience, a quality Huws admires in his editor, is his own great forte. When the needle on a seismograph is going mad as Hieronymo, when the world – of one individual, or the world as a civilization sees it – is going down, Huws’s poetry holds it all in the unshaking crucible of its palm, without "a single cumbersome word or phrase" or “a jarring note." The clarion call of mortality sounds through the bacchanalian mist of youth, clearly, in "The Party": "He took off his flesh and lay in his bones." 

Burnishing parergons – small moments, contemplations that sit askew to the straight highroads of existence, realizations that are of no consequence, but great import – with suppleness and poise, with an unerring eye and acute ear, Huws often produces such lines – "days of dying bred spite in our tongue" and "to have strayed in a wood which seemed like home."  

Huws pulses with the dark-vowelled flow that we find in Dylan Thomas, but he keeps that well behind an English dyke. This is his particular Welsh-ness. However, like sand between fingers that tide does sometimes breach: 

          With the voice of a flower, the voice of a child,
          You cried against the iniquity
          Of blackness, blackness clammy and choking
          …
          Your only resource was to flourish death
          In a brilliant flare of uncomprehending.

The misted past catches up with us as the poet conjures for us places, straight out of the gizzard of time, and we feel a sudden damp in our boots from that old bog of years, or quarry:

          Ages ago,
          And I still stand
          Caught in the long afternoon
          In the old quarry,
          Face to the wall,
          Counting to twenty.

Huws’s Debris is a reminder that the pluck and spirit of "small" beings – women, men, children or flowers – ensure that the world does not end tonight.

          The slow way home was through the wood
          Which creaked with age
           …
          And in the November storm
          The red campion battled so late.

The occasional poems in the volume (addressed to Ted Hughes, Jean Hawkes and Lucas Myers) are rhymed with a friendliness and accord that is the bedrock of friendship that has withstood the ravages of time. Daniel Huws writes like the restorer of old paintings, the light that is always there in the dark-overtaken masterpieces and just needs brightening. If poetry can turn to sound a silence that is ever-growing in us, around us, as in Huws, then it will have succeeded in its labour.

About the reviewer
Debasish Lahiri has nine collections of poetry to his credit, the latest being A Certain Penance of Light (2025). Lahiri is the recipient of the Prix-du Merite, Naji Naaman Literary Prize 2019.

Review by Pam Thompson of "Passion" by David Morley

 

This dazzling collection begins with an epigraph from Rainer Maria Rilke: "The work of the eyes is done. / Go now and do the heart-work on / the images imprisoned within you." There is plentiful evidence of "heart-work" in these poems. Morley, an ecologist and naturalist by background, combines the scientist’s observational precision with the poet’s imagination. The opening poem, "The Mist Net Releases Her Birds," is a ghazal, an Arabic form originally, its subject traditionally love and loss. It is written in couplets, each with a repeated last word as a refrain. "The pandemic makes prisoners of us" gives us the context. The poem ranges across the globe in a quest for togetherness and is underpinned with metaphors of flight and responses from the person being addressed, one of which is central to the collection, "We resist through poetry … poems are a kind of politics as well as religion."

The "wings of the ghazal" prepare us for numerous birds. A hummingbird vibrates on the page, "she havers / in the time warp of her / wingbeats" ("Rosy-Topaz Hummingbird"). There is a similar relish of the sounds of words in "Puffins on Bardsey":

          all frizz and fluff-crowns
                      rug-headed kerns
                                    clemmed, clumping
                                                up a skerry of sky

I liked the fact that Morley features scientific experiments and discoveries by women. "Swans" is dedicated to Caroline Herschel and her indexing of Flamsteed’s Observations of the Fixed Stars, 1798, with its gorgeous description of the comet named after her: "it’s swan’s neck of snow // dipping into the dark water of space." Anna Atkins uses sunlight to take photographs of seaweeds, "light-burned pictures in water" ("The First Book Printed by the Sun").

Morley’s use of the Romani language reflects his dual English/Romany heritage as it did in this book’s predecessor, Fury (2020). There are glossaries, though Morley has said elsewhere that he would ideally like the reader to derive meaning from the shape and sound of the Romani words alone. Using the language is a form of resistance against oppression. In "Storytelling," the poet gives a paper on the Romany language at an academic conference, "I spoke of its leopard-leap of dialects … // How the words galloped untethered …" Passion indeed, though It is greeted "cold applause" and a young lecturer asking about the point of all this "trash." For the poet, the point is to go on telling stories of the prejudices and privations faced by the Romany culture. Different voices include that of a caravan (or vardo): "I am a caravan. The eye of my door open to the vryámya (weather). / The Travellers douse me with benzína (petrol). I am unclean" ("Mermeyi Pesha").

There are poems about family, about Morley’s former work as a scientist. Emily Brontë, in a poem of the same name, contains her rage at winter’s advice to reject the first show of spring and "Make life bare." Yeats is summoned as a presiding spirit of intention in a poem towards the end of the book which echoes the opening ghazal’s wings and nets:

         I wake in my tent to the thrum of linnets
         on a morning of insect wings and glimmer,

         the mist melting over a mirror of water,
         and go. I go with my quiver of mist nets.
         

         ("Mist Nets on the Lake Isle of Innisfree").

"Growing primroses is also a process / of not growing them, a path of unlearning …" ("I Found Poems in the Fields"). I enjoyed travelling, listening and observing with David Morley in this absorbing and thought-provoking collection.

About the reviewer

Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. She is a Hawthornden Fellow. Her works include include The Japan Quiz (Redbeck Press, 2009) and Show Date and Time (Smith|Doorstop, 2006). Her collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. Pam was winner of the 2023 Paper Swans Pamphlet Competition and her winning pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends (Paper Swans Press), was published in March 2025.

You can read more about Passion by David Morley on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Pam Thompson of "Pattern-book" by Éireann Lorsung

 

I first came across across  Éireann Lorsung in Nottingham when she was doing her PhD and was a generous host of poetry events. Since then, I have been enthralled by poems which have sprung up online, via her blog, her multiple passions, and just recently, her postal zine / newsletter. Gentleness, persistence and exuberance are just three of her qualities and all show up here.

Andrew Latimer’s cover design, for this substantial collection from Carcanet, repeats the name of the title in a subtle gradation of colours and which encapsulate its concept. In an interview with Jon McGregor at her online launch, Lorsung says that the colours in the repeated words on the cover are significant for the poems. 

She is avid – about poetry, other artists of all sorts, her people, her places (the English Midlands, the American mid-west, the low country of Flanders) the multiple possibilities of subject and form. Jon McGregor writes a long list of some of Lorsung’s subjects on the back of the book. These are a few of the things that stood out for me: bicycles, rivers, roses, rain, nectarines, ochre, language, parents, students, memory, elegy, frost, gardens, Magritte, poetry, chamomile, learning, brothers, blue, painting, pottery, yellow, tractors, sewing, autumn, fields, fieldfares, art, postcards, gold, sonnets, songs, friends. 

The book is dedicated to Shana, a friend from childhood and threaded through are poems reflecting their growing-up, what is lost and what remains: "When you get this note, it will be // the future … // Friendship is a kind of time-machine, it turns out" ("Postcard to Shana with Photo of Washington Avenue Bridge (Minneapolis)"). 

I particularly loved the affectionate "Postcard to Shana with Drawing of Blackbirds," whose precise sensory imagery of weather, nature and seasons is abundant elsewhere:

          Every warm thing of our girlhood calls us here.
          Blackbirds. Poems. The world: its tablecloths

          and rainy mornings, cities, hands, and flowers.

Lorsung makes everything shine. It all matters, and is worthy of being repeated, just as people’s lives, and memories of such, are enhanced by what has been known many times. 

There is generous love shown towards the ordinary and extraordinary and in finding poetic forms to hold them. The sonnet is a neat container, as in "Sonnet for the Second-Language Speaker," and "Sonnet with a Quotation from Millay," which remembers a childhood friend and what might have been. "Autumn Song" is a longer tour de force where phrases about places, nature, seasons, the body (and more) are shuffled then repeated in different iterations to breathtaking effect. This sounds like a random exercise but I’m certain it was far from it. 

Equally impressive are the sparer fragments  in "Miniscule Sequence" and "Attunement," the latter, being "after Thomas A. Clark":

           gold arrow                                        
           goldfinch
   

           world of ideas
           world of things

There’s so much more to say but I hope this have given some idea of how these poems convey the sheer joy of being in the world and appreciation of its patterns - as Louis MacNeice has written about the world, "The drunkenness of things being various."

About the reviewer
Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester.  Her works include include The Japan Quiz (Redbeck Press, 2009), Show Date and Time (Smith|Doorstop, 2006)  and Strange Fashion (Pindrop Press, 2017). Her  prize-winning pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends (Paper Swans Press), was published in the Spring of 2025. 

You can read a review by Gary Day of Sub/urban Legends on Everybody's Reviewing 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 Maria Taylor of "Ambush at Still Lake" by Caroline Bird

It’s been said that humour often comes from a serious place. That concept can be easily applied to Caroline Bird’s Ambush at Still Lake. Themes such as parenthood, marriage, addiction and recovery are turned on their head in Bird’s surreal and animated collection of poems. In Bird’s prose poem ‘The Addict Impersonator Contest,’ addiction itself is quite literally turned on its head: 

                                                                                               True self-hate
          Takes years to master like the Handstand Scorpion Pose in yoga, or
          Jazz drumming…

The humour here is wry, perhaps even uncomfortable, but  it also dances with the truth. The poem ends with a distortion of the speaker’s mimicked addiction with real-life hurt. I felt the irony of the judges’ description of it being ‘the realest routine they’d ever seen’ and felt the punch of ‘Mum and Dad crying with pride.’ Bird understands how humour and tragedy cause friction when woven together. There’s an intuitive awareness of this that often has startling results. 

Throughout the collection, rich images and strange confessions jump out at you. Experiencing a Bird poem requires a suspension of disbelief which I was more than happy to go along with. We live in a strange and complex world and Bird’s poems allow us to navigate the strangeness in an engrossing, vivid way. In ‘Starter Marriage,’ for instance, the speaker in the poem invites everyone to their wedding, including a BT Operator who kept them on hold for ‘forty minutes in 2007.’ Is Bird perchance saying that we live in a society in which most individual relationships are based on shallow connections – or is it just straight-up funny? Or both? What I especially like about Bird’s poems is the reluctance to come up with answers. Instead the speaker and the phone operator dance together, ‘reminiscing / under a marquee of stars,’ to what else but the ‘synthesised’ tune of Greensleeves that brought them together. 

In ‘The Baby Monitor,’ a sinister scenario occurs when a baby monitor becomes a living being, long after the actual baby has grown into a child at ‘preschool.’ There is something universal about the monitor itself being an object parents fixate on – and perhaps that stress never goes away:

                I sat through parents’ evening
          Like a killer in the dock, Knowing
          The monitor was home alone 
          Crying to an empty room.

For all the humour here, it’s also surprisingly chilling! 

Bird’s poems have a spontaneous feel, as if they’ve sprung from a place where humour and pain co-exist. Perhaps when someone has been through a great deal, they appreciate that the so called ‘happy ever after’ of marriage is not a wholly trustworthy thing. In the collection’s title poem, ‘Ambush at Still Lake,’ it’s the placid lake itself which offers an answer of sorts to the manic nature of life: ‘We carry on / dying forever, always almost home.’ 

About the reviewer
Maria Taylor is a British Cypriot poet and reviewer. Her latest collection is Dressing for the Afterlife (Nine Arches Press). Her debut collection of poetry, Melanchrini, was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. She has been published widely, including poems and reviews in The Guardian, Magma and The Times Literary Supplement. She has been highly commended in the UK Forward Prizes for poetry. She also works as Reviews Editor for Under the Radar. 

Review by Debasish Lahiri of "The Face in the Well" by Rebecca Watts

Rebecca Watts is a collector of ephemera: natural ephemera. But ephemera that holds eternity in its vial, just as enormous skies can come to inhabit wells, though all one can see is the face that "was always there." 

The Face in the Well, Watts’s new poetry collection, is an unusual work. Its rootedness in the countryside, the delicate-filmed, layered transit of daylight as though through fine-spun silk or cobwebs, casting shadows like the keyboard on a piano, is recorded in precise, urbane lines. All that constitutes the days of night and the light of nights is poured with great care into the rut between the E and F on that great imaginary piano of her verse. And like a piano, Watts’s poetry has its notes and keys. A chromatic polyphony often pervades her poetry: "But one day I tired of the house’s shadow, / the grey rectangle of the afternoon."

There is an audible drop in semitone as Watts reaches back to recreate a childhood memory. As her words touch a flat, memory rises to a sharp:

          Esme draws a picture
          but it’s only a whisper – 
          the pencil barely touches the paper

As in the titular poem, the dally of water, its creation of depth, its tenacious measuring of time passed becomes that bread-crumb directing our navigation through her poems. There are four "Soundings" in the collection, surfacings and deep dives into time and experience. Shrieks become sibilant before they become sibylline:

           Can anybody actually hear me?
           I’m shouting through the car’s back window

           while the others stand around in the layby laughing
           at my act, which isn’t an act at all.

The nineteenth-century English landscape painter John Constable (who was like Watts from the South-East) is said to have told his engraver David Lucas that "when water reaches the roots of plants or trees the action of the extremities of their roots is such that they no longer vegetate, but die." He was talking about a pond at Stratford Mill. Watts imbues her poems with this instinct for seepage and quiet infusion, like water, like the well, sometimes inspiring life, but sometimes also touching absence and death.

           ...  Now 
           only a part of one wall

           and a couple of gear wheels
           hang on at the edge of the pool.
           Go down and you’ll find it

           where the water’s ferrous
           with rust, or blood,
           depending how you’re minded.

Like the twitter of swallows gathering in the sky at the end of John Keats’s "Ode to Autumn," the starlings gather around Annie at the end of the garden. Childhood memories, the shaping influences of poets and teachers, the vulnerabilities of becoming a woman in a patriarchal world blow through our ken like rolling of the fishing nets and hazelling of the fields. The Face in the Well is a force that drives a fuse through blood and water, nature and the affairs of humanity.

About the reviewer

Debasish Lahiri has six collections of poetry to his credit. His latest book is Legion of Lost Letters (2023).

Review by Christine Hammond of "Citizen Poet" by Eavan Boland

Last week, Trinity College Dublin announced plans to re-name its main library after the highly acclaimed Irish poet, Eavan Boland. Consequently, it will be the first building on Trinity’s city centre campus to be named after a woman. This is a fitting tribute to a pioneer in literary feminism, whose relentless pursuit to revolutionise poetry would go on to provide countless opportunities for previously unheard women’s voices. 

This re-naming comes the month following publication of Citizen Poet (Carcanet). This collection of new and selected essays reveals the extraordinary commitment to writing Boland undertook over decades to argue the case about the artistic and cultural tradition of Irish poetry. Specifically, why it rendered women "the subject, rather than the object of the poem." Exposing the inherent bias and shortcomings of prior structures and formats, she showed how the literary culture, role and existence of poets, as well as the poetry itself, could not facilitate women who wanted to give expression to their everyday lives and experiences: "The Poet’s vocation – or, more precisely, the historical construction put upon it - is one of the single most problematic areas for any woman who comes to the craft. Not only has it been defined by a tradition  which could never foresee her, but it is construed by men about men, in ways which are poignant, compelling and exclusive" (from "In Search of a Language"). 

Boland writes: "I was still short of the exact words, the accurate perceptions. I still talked at night and listened with real excitement. And yet I was beginning to feel oddly stranded. Something was obstructing me, throwing me off course. I was between a poem – there, at home on the tablecloth – and the idea of the poet. I could control the poem, even though it was with half-learned and hand-to-mouth techniques. I could listen for, and understand, the idea of the poet I picked up at night in the conversations I heard around me, But the space between them filled me with an odd malaise. Something about it seemed almost to have the force of an exclusion order" (from "Turning Away"). It is almost impossible to equate with today’s Ireland the impenetrable landscape these compelling essays portray. We take for granted that women now have the intellectual freedom to write and publish poetry but for that, let us never forget the immeasurable debt of gratitude we owe to Eavan Boland.

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.

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. 

Review by Peter Raynard of "Still City: Diary of an Invasion" by Oksana Maksymchuk

There has never been a time of global peace; the nearest was the two hundred year Pax Romana (Roman Peace) at the crossover into the Common Era. Today sadly, after millennia of technological and social progress, wars still abound, whether in Sub-Saharan Africa, Myanmar, or Gaza, Syria, Yemen of the Middle East. Then there is the Russian invasion of Ukraine over two years ago and its continuation of almost WW1-like trench conflict, where unknown thousands of young men die in combat at the whim of the autocrat Putin.

The Polish American poet Czesław Miłosz criticised a vein of poetry that divorced the poet from society. Urging a poetic that was witness to history (which for him was the dehumanising effect of Soviet totalitarianism in Poland post-World War Two), he called it the Witness of Poetry, not ‘because we witness it, but because it witnesses us,’ inferring that because of his experience in Eastern Europe’s upheavals, he is both witness and citizen.

Oksana Maksymchuk is also both witness and citizen. By being so, the urgency and historicity of Still City: Diary of an Invasion (with no daily dates), punches the reader with each entry. There are many dimensions within the experience of modern warfare, for example being both a land war and a digital war.

Friends of friends have died
on the front line
locked up in cellars
buried alive
in their own beds

We mourn them online

There is a deep ricochet of disbelief in what is happening, not knowing how long it will last. Separation is a key theme throughout: ‘he sends a picture of his classroom, desks / abandoned in haste.’ The normality of the past is a haunting in the present, which changes the nature of time (another key theme): ‘was it / years or days ago / that we read our poems / in an underground gallery?’ Life becomes subterranean, so you lose sight of what is going on.

Of course death is ever present, in reality and fiction.

Some say it didn’t happen
others that it was staged
corpses from the morgue
laid out
for an exhibition

In the poem ‘Blank Pages’, she references Hegel’s ‘History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.’ History is thus reduced to either a blank page marking peacetime, or in this case filled pages of horror and destruction.

So you cling to the idea of the old normality, when the present is trying to erase it, replacing it to the point where the invasion becomes ‘the unspeakable.’ So we must be glad that Maksymchuk, as witness and citizen, has spoken, and filled these vital pages of history.

About the Reviewer
Peter Raynard is a poet, and editor of Proletarian Poetry: Poems of Working Class Lives. His latest collection is Manland (Nine Arches Press, 2022). His debut poetry pamphlet, The Harlot and the Rake: Poems after William Hogarth, and academic essay on the poetry of Fred Voss and Martin Hayes, are both forthcoming in 2024.

Review by Lauren M Foster of "A Marginal Sea" by Zoë Skoulding

What comes to mind, as I read Zoë Skoulding’s A Marginal Sea, is sound - be it birdsong, waves, language, empty space. Sound holds as equal a weight as meaning in this collection.

For me, there are several poems which stand out, the first of which is "A Short Presentation on the Current Direction of Travel." I feel like I am on a small boat out in the middle of the Menai Straits, that narrow stretch of water between North Wales and Anglesey which the collection’s title refers to, as I listen to the undulating rhythms of the boat’s engine as it rides the waves. Whether that is the intention I don’t know, but it’s where it takes me. There is a strong sense of the present in this poem. It is hypnotic, Zen-like, in its mantra, and this strange poem has stayed in my memory with a surprising clarity.

          we are where we are we are where we are we are where
          we are we are where we are we are where we are we are

In "A Rose for Rosa," I feel the poet is seeking Rosa Luxembourg in places and streets around the world named after her. The revolutionary spirit in this poem is fierce. I recall Luxembourg disappeared. Her body was never found and the authorities claimed she had committed suicide by drowning but no evidence of that ever came to light: "... it wasn’t rosa luxemburg who lit up the roza luksemburg electric lamp factory in warsaw she is not in the jardins rosa luxemburg in paris or the jardins de rosa luxemburg in barcelona where although you may find roses you will not find her it’s no use looking..."

I loved the sequence "Adar Môn Birds of Anglesey," especially the translation of a bird call utilizing symbols as well as letters in "Telor Yr Helyg Willow Warbler Phylloscopus Trochilus": ">>>//::: fitis // >>::  >>/>>piecuszek >>// >>"

Imagery is strong too, such as in "Newborough Warren with Map of Havana": 

           an apparition of ponies
           shimmers into something you’d believe in
           their furious hunger
           teeth locked on tufts of dune grass
           while underground the rabbits
           hollow out the dark

And earlier, in the same poem, sound again, and an eco-poetic consciousness:

          a marsh harrier turns
          overhead the far off drone of planes
          the warmth is wrong it should be raining
          in another language lluvia

A Marginal Sea is an unusual, absorbing collection with subtle insights of the world around us but it also reaches unfathomable depths. Is it a coincidence I use imagery of the sea to convey what the work gives me? I don’t think I have read a collection quite like this. It is startling and stands on its own of all the works I have read.

Some poems have almost avant-garde post-punk sensibilities and it was no surprise to learn Skoulding is also a bass player. I think her musical practice shines through in the poems. I would love to hear these pieces in a performative context. Skoulding comes across as a poet who listens more than anything, not only to the sounds around her, but for shifts in society, and for meaning.

About the reviewer
Lauren M Foster is a graduate of the MA Creative Writing at University of Leicester. Her work has been published in Ink Pantry, Leicester Literary Review, The Journal, The Wombwell Rainbow, The Sirens Call and more. She was Poet in Residence on The Kindness Project, 2023, and is a drummer/vocalist/lyricist in The Cars that Ate Paris.

You can read more about A Marginal Sea on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Jon Wilkins of "Come Here to this Gate" by Rory Waterman

This is a beautiful collection in three parts. The first part consists of a visceral remembrance of the author's father and the weight of his death due to alcoholic dementia. Here are memories that can never be forgotten, heaped with regret and self-loathing. The sequence is a disturbing, harrowing picture of loss, that we almost don't want to witness. We hide behind the pages, as it were, trying to understand Waterman's feelings, his anger and his love. He communicates his emotions in such a transparent manner, we are there at the bedside, there at the beginning of the end, and the final moments.

Remembered and mis-remembered events cloud his memories and we follow in his steps as he faces his father's death. With his father’s rambling, ranting, his anger unbound, nothing is erased from Waterman's memory, especially his love for his father.

After the horrors of the first section, we are taken through the gates of the second part of the collection, invited into another world. There is real beauty here in the descriptions that bring events to life. We are there picking gooseberries, we taste the fear of the narrator's visit to a chiropodist and we share the despair as his bike is stolen. The humour in the poem "Student Cuts" is blatant and laugh out loud, but then we are moved to tears by the sadness in "The Stepfathers" and earlier "At a Friend's Second Wedding," where death looks over the shoulder of the Mother who sits and watches the marriage.

Waterman's travels are described eloquently and are intriguing as are the friendships he makes and describes. None of the words are misplaced or misused and his journey takes us to the final part of the collection - an odyssey through Lincolnshire Folk Tales. Here, Waterman intertwines his own memories with tales from long ago and reflects on the world that has been lost. We can see the love for his home county. I loved "Nanny Rutt" with its humour and disdain for so-called decency. It flows like a song - a song for life and imagined worlds, just as this collection is a celebratory song of loss, life and love.

About the reviewer
Jon 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 University. 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 Jane Simmons of "The Strongbox" by Sasha Dugdale

In her new collection The Strongbox, Sasha Dugdale draws on elements of Greek mythology and classical epic literature, exploring and reinventing narratives and characters from Homer’s Iliad and Ovid’s Metamorphoses and incorporating distorted fragments of Heraclitus, to create fourteen new, long poems which come together as a cry of distress for the modern world. 

The dialogue within and between these powerful poems shapes our understanding of our troubled times, the conflicts between states, between political and religious ideologies, and between male power and female strength. In "I. Anatomy of an Abduction," Dugdale presents the reader with an unnamed girl who has somehow been abducted or persuaded to leave behind her country, family and childhood to travel to a war-zone.

          It began with the sun
          appearing over the plane wing
          supernatural orange
                                          but no light

It is impossible to read on without thinking of the London schoolgirls travelling to join Isis in Syria. Then, when Helen - the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta - is introduced, "trapped behind the walls of Ilium" and "plagued by dreams about the coming war," the familiar Homeric narrative of the Trojan War makes clear the parallels of lured brides, political conflicts in the Middle East, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These connections are ready to be explored in poems which offer the reader a lens through which to analyse both love and war.

The title of the collection, The Strongbox, is a good introduction to Sasha Dugdale’s use of the recurring metaphor, a technique which is key to an understanding of the collection. In one sense, this example serves as a metaphor for poetic form: the sonnet form is often described as a "box" and, although the poems are not sonnets - and some of the pieces are prose or drama-script - there are fourteen pieces here for the reader to unpack. These experiments with genre, along with the intertextuality, are part of Dugdale’s distinctive poetics.

If a strongbox is a secure place for storing valuable goods or valuable stolen goods, then it can be read as a metaphor for the abducted or lured brides, a judgement of male-female relationships, and of political and ideological conflicts as is made clear by the further metaphor of "a golden crown" for the city. Helen herself was famously born from an egg, the result of the rape of Leda by Zeus in the form of a swan. In "XI: Gods & Men," a precious egg is stored in a locket kept inside the secret drawer of a campaign chest, in a Greek king’s gold-painted canvas tent in the encampment on the Trojan plain. Then in "XIV: The Ticket Booth," Dugdale reworks the story of Europa whose beauty attracted the attentions of Zeus who then approached her in the form of a white bull and abducted her. "The Rape of Europa" is also a term used to refer to the fate of European art and treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War. In the poem, the lines "[I] found no words / And little hope" invite the reader to consider the strongbox and its contents as a possible representation of Pandora’s box, containing all the troubles of the world - and finally a small hope. Perhaps language – the power of words – offers that hope. 

About the reviewer

Jane Simmons is a PhD student at the University of Leicester where she has won the G. S. Fraser poetry prize. Her poems have appeared in various magazines, won the Seren Christmas poetry prize (2020), been long-listed in the Mslexia poetry competition and The National Poetry Competition (2022), shortlisted for a Candlestick Press prize (2023) and placed third in the Mslexia poetry competition (2023).

Review by Gary Day of "The Silence" by Gillian Clarke

 

Charles Simic said that ‘poetry is a translation of the silence.’ Gillian Clarke’s collection goes a step further. It is not a translation of ‘the silence,’ whatever that may be, but an evocation of soundlessness. The world was a noisy place until Covid struck and then everything seemed to go quiet for a long time. But it was only the human world that was hushed: nature’s music continued, the wind in the trees, the songs of birds, the hiss of rain, the bark of a fox. ‘Listen’ Clarke enjoins, ‘water tells its rosary.’

The linking of natural phenomena and religious ritual is central to the volume. To that extent it brings to life Blake’s dictum that ‘everything that lives is holy.’ The reader is returned to ‘Eden before the Fall.’ Along with this restoration comes a liturgical conception of time. The first section of the collection is organised according to the canonical hours, Matins, Lauds, Prime and so on. These were times of prayer but the poems are not addressed to a creator. They are an account of daily activities and observations tinged with an awareness of the devastation of Covid. ‘We settle close, / Seek sweet diversion from the day, / Its pestilence, its wars, the daily toll, the dead.’ In times of plague, small things become precious: the ‘psalm’ of an owl, ‘the turning of a page.’

Silence is not always desirable, especially if it has been imposed. But those whose voices have been suppressed, particularly in Welsh history, find some some sort of restitution in poems like ‘Llywelyn’s Daughter’ and ‘FForest.’ Finding the balance between silence and speech in the face of great events or small incidents is the shaping force of this collection. Stunning imagery - ‘chalice of gold overflows / with a cupful of snow’ - made me feel as if I were in an art gallery while the recurrence of certain phrases creates a sense of unity as well as an incantatory effect. This superb volume gets pride of place on my poetry shelf. 

About the reviewer
Gary Day is a retired English lecturer and the author of several critical works including Literary Criticism: A New History and The Story of Drama. His debut poetry collection, The Glass Roof Falls as Rain, will be published by Holland Park Press.

Review by Rennie Parker of "Eleanor Among the Saints" by Rachel Mann

Rachel Mann writes the kind of poetry which says: 'don't be lazy, think about this and check up the references you don't understand.' At the same time, she pitches us headlong into all the big questions about identity as she examines and acknowledges the pain and terror of being between lives. 

The Eleanor of her title is Eleanor Rykener, a transwoman from the Middle Ages who (in Mann's expert rendition) becomes a vehicle for other lives and women-divines, rather like an alternative Magdalene. However, the focus is on the journey and the difficulty, at times luridly so, like a vision from Hieronymous Bosch. If you like your poetry strong and without sweeteners, this book is for you.

Her lines are densely-written, often omitting 'a' and 'the' to give each phrase more otherness; and there is a deliberate sound and formatting which recalls Anglo-Saxon riddle poetry. Echoes of Hopkins are also evident, particularly in the piled-up race to embody experience; I can hear a hybrid Geoffrey Hill / T.S. Eliot at times, but that's no bad thing and probably my fault as a reviewer, reading through other poet-Anglican texts.

What's most impressive is the passion behind the lines. Mann is a poet of conviction (rather than the traditional 'faith and doubt') meaning that her world becomes our world as we swim further into the state of all those Eleanors. Her excursions into the present day are no less forceful, even alarmingly so; 'Eleanor as a sixteen year old murdered trans girl' appears to reference the recent case of Brianna Ghey, yet the typical book production schedule would surely place its composition before the case appeared in the media.

I heartily recommend this rich collection to anyone, not only for its fabulous wrangling of character, medieval history and lived experience, but as a reminder of how we too should step up to the plate with the same courage as the poet. The self as transformed into female is nearly always a metaphor for suffering, but the end result is also victory, like the resurrection of Christ. It's okay, Rachel / Eleanor, I want to say. We believe you. 

About the reviewer
Rennie Parker is a poet living in the East Midlands, published by Shoestring Press. She studied for a PhD at Birmingham University and currently works in FE. Blogs at rennieparker.wordpress.com; also on Twitter @rennieparker. You can read about her latest collection, Balloons and Stripey Trousers, on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Christine Hammond of "Sea-Fever: Selected Poems" by John Masefield, ed. Philip Errington

 

Born in Ledbury, Herefordshire in 1878, the scope and diversity of John Masefield’s life experience at home, at sea and abroad is nothing short of diverse. This resulted in a rich seam of lifelong inspiration that fed his early aim to be a writer "come what might."  

Speaking about the poem "The Piper of Arll" written in 1895 by Duncan Campbell Scott, Masefield is reputed to have written to Scott some years later saying: "I had never (till that time) cared very much for poetry, but your poem impressed me deeply, and set me on fire. Since then poetry has been the one deep influence in my life, and to my love of poetry I owe all my friends, and the position I now hold."

Prolific writer he did become, not just as a poet - holding Laureateship from 1930 until 1967 - but also as a novelist whose work included two classic children’s novels: The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights.

From "Salt Water Ballads" (1899 -1911), comes "Sea Fever," whose opening is arguably one the most quoted and instantly recognisable lines of 20th century English poetry: "I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky." The easily digested quatrain structure of just three verses contains a wealth of accessible imagery that speaks eloquently to the romance, mystery and calling of the sea. This is further enhanced with alliteration and rhyme that lend a melody and cadence redolent of the waves themselves: 

           ... and the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking
          and a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking

           … and all I ask if a windy day with the white clouds flying
           and the flung spray and the blown spume and the sea-gulls crying

           … to the gull’s way and whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife

Having sailed in 1894 he experienced illness that cut short his life at sea, and returning home for a period, left again for America. Failing to report for duty on a subsequent ship posting in New York resulted in a spell of vagrancy and he finally returned to England in 1897 having his first published poem in 1899. 

Despite the adversities, Masefield repeatedly re-visited his experience of the sea and travel. His combined sensory appreciation of other lands resulted in a muse that was rich in texture. This is evident in another well-known work, "Cargoes" (1903), with its multi-sensory, image-rich depictions of the ships, their passages and cargo in stanzas 1 and 2:

          … ivory, 
          And apes and peacocks, 
          Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet white wine

          … diamonds
          Emeralds, amethysts,
          Topazes, and cinnamon and gold moidores

This is compared with an English counterpart in the third and final stanza:

          Dirty, British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack
          Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
          With a cargo of Tyne coal,
          Road-rails, pig-lead
          Firewood, ironware and cheap tin trays

Selected Poems is an especially enjoyable body of work. It articulates colour and exoticism combined with contrast. This provides an expressive and profound response to not just the conservative "green and pleasant land," but importantly, highlights the grey and grinding industrial oppression on the senses.

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 three editions of Washing Windows and Her Other Language (Arlen House). She has also been a reader at "Purely Poetry" - Open Mic Night, Belfast. Her poem "Ritual" has recently been accepted for publication by literary journal The Honest Ulsterman. 

Review by Christine Hammond of "Revelation Freshly Erupting" by Nelly Sachs

Reading and reviewing the collected works (nine in total) of a poet originally writing in another language on Holocaust themes is challenging. This is compounded with the titanic credentials of a prolific Jewish poet (published 1947-1971), Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner. 

We owe a debt of gratitude therefore to Andrew Shanks for his unique, approximate translations from Sachs’ native German. Additionally, his powerful introductory essay allows us to glimpse, briefly, the countless hours of dedication to his art since he first discovered Sachs in 1983-4 when working as a post-grad in Marburg, Germany,

What makes his approach to this important body of work unique? Shanks describes himself as "not a brilliant" linguist, who "sets out to" produce versions that, to my ear, work as poems in English. He quotes Edward FitzGerald’s famous formula: "Better a live sparrow than a stuffed eagle." More than that, as a "Christian philosophic theologian," Shanks brings important knowledge and an intuitive, spiritual understanding.

This combination complements and reveals for us the subtle, existential character of poetry that uses much in the way of classical and religious / biblical motifs and the natural world to try and make sense of the worst excesses of human depravity. 

"O die Schornsteine" ("O, The Chimneys"), the opening poem of "Habitations of Death," 1947, seems to provide an exemplar for much of what is to come. Here, some of the motifs we have come to associate with Holocaust imagery are articulated only lightly - for example, "meandering dust." They have been carefully woven in to support the heaviness of the metaphysical questions they raise: "Who contrived you? Who built ...?"  

The killings are viewed through the lens of Job’s conviction that he will see God when his skin and flesh are destroyed, which proposes to the reader an unintended, beneficial consequence of the barbarism. Thus, the objectives for murder on the grounds of religion are not only subtly ridiculed, but reduced to futility and nothingness as death has the ultimate potential to overcome and be a cause for celebration.

          "And after my skin has been thus destroyed, then without my flesh I shall see God."

          - Job 9:26

         O the chimneys
         On the artfully contrived 
         Habitations of death, as Israel’s flesh
         Floated in smoke through the air
         A star, there, received it …

         ... O the chimneys!
         Meandering dust – Jeremiah’s and Jobs’s – released –
         Who contrived you, who built, stone on stone,
         For fugitive souls, this path of smoke?

That the persecuted should not become persecutors ("Star Black-Out," 1949) is another example of the lightness of touch that is characteristic. Here, the poem uses the term "Footsteps" and contextual sound as a leitmotif throughout. Although we can readily make the association with (Jack) boots and marching, direct reference only happens in the last verse. Where the previous poem used a biblical quotation, Sachs now employs several classical allusions starting with Echo:

         Footsteps, 
         where in which of Echo’s grottoes
         are you stored,
         you rhythmic harbingers 
         of looming death?

... and ending with a poignant Pythagorean reference that beautifully ties off the whole aural theme of the poem:

         Footsteps of the killers 
         Over footsteps of the killed,
         what black-horror moon impelled
         the ticking circuit of those booted seconds?

         Where’s that leather squeak
         within the music of the spheres

Overall, the poetry uses a reductive, yet restrained, learned and gently sophisticated approach to deal with the horrific acts and consequences. This includes the preceding ideologies that initiated them. The diminution that results impresses upon us the sublimity and determination of the poems to reveal truth and beauty and thereby hope, no matter what. 

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 again 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 three editions of Washing Windows and Her Other Language (Arlen House). She has also been a reader at "Purely Poetry" - Open Mic Night, Belfast.