Review by Gary Day of "Sojourn: Moments in Poetry" by Christine Hammond

There’s much to admire, like and treasure in Christine Hammond’s debut collection: the mystery of "Snowdrops 1963," the beauty and grief of "White Rose" and the exquisite delicacy of the haiku sequence "Little Rose Garden." For those who crave something more visceral there’s "Menopause," where tampons have the same dark tendencies as the murderers in Macbeth: "your bloody employ / to stab the childless." Then there’s "Rape," a work of such intense fury that it brands itself indelibly on the mind.

In contrast are poems of piercing tenderness. "Sandeel Bay" is a memory of a lovers' outing. The pair pick berries and watch "grey seals turn at the rocks." It is "a perfect day," and the last two lines sweep in like a wave, lifting this reader, at least, to a new level of awareness. "Perpetual Motion" is a fine expression of one of the themes of the collection: how to keep the best of the past alive in the present. It is arguably Wordsworth’s chief concern in "Intimations of Immortality" from which Hammond quotes the expression "trailing clouds of glory." In "The Twisted Key" the lines "couldn’t anybody tell her? / Did nobody know" seem to echo the Beatles' "Didn't anybody tell her? Didn't anybody see?" from "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window."

"Ritual" is another exploration, or rather evocation, of the relationship between past and present. It describes the poet's mother lighting a fire in the "immaculate hearth." The line "the glow of broadsheet rosettes / cast a news flash for the era" is only one example of Hammond's gift for fusing the personal, the poetic and the political. I hope this collection is widely read to give Hammond the audience she deserves.

About the reviewer
Gary Day is a retired English lecturer and author of several books including Literary Criticism: A New History and The Story of Drama: Tragedy Comedy and Sacrifice. He is also co-editor of The Wiley Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789. His poetry has been highly commended in a number of competitions, most recently in the Write Out Loud Echoes competition. His work has appeared in The High Window, The Seventh Quarry, The Dawn Treader as well as various other magazines.

Review by Christine Hammond of "A Dress with Deep Pockets" by Jen Feroze

Winner of the 2024 International Book and Pamphlet competition, this beautifully crafted collection is an homage to love, shared experiences and the unique joy of female friendship. You sense the purity of captured moments that become the life-defining journey markers our human psyche searches for and longs to plot, both for meaning and posterity.

In "Hare Girl" reminiscence is powerful, but never heavy or overburdened by sentiment. It is this lightness of touch that characterises much of Feroze’s work, as seen here in the last two verses moving the highly tangible real-life images to an almost ethereal disappearance at the end, likened to the swiftness of a hare through the trees. 

From this, we have some understanding of a transition from the personal qualities and actions of people that leave a short-term impression, to longer-term, deeply affecting and treasured memories. 

         We went camping in each other’s gardens.
         starchy tents and popcorn and stolen vodka.
         I found her before dawn dew-soaked,
         curled in the long grass and defiantly shivering. 

         That was years ago. Sometimes she writes me letters,
         Sends sage and rose petals, chips of crystal 
         That I line up on my desk as I think of her:
         Sleek, fleet, disappearing into the trees. 

A recurring theme, we can see it again in "Selkie." Here, another friend (Stacey) is compared to the mythical, shape-shifting creature that is a "selkie" – capable of shedding its own skin to transition between seal and human, in and out of the water. Again, the poem moves seamlessly from everyday observations to an exceptionally powerful nothingness, just a slick in the water leaving a marbled imprint "soft as a sigh."

          I’m sitting in a damp towel
          Watching Stacey shed herself in the water …

          … And Stacey is untethering,
          wetsuited in the dawn fog.
          Her recipe for spinach pancakes,
          stubby coloured pencils, the persistent ringing
          in her ears. Her Gwen Stefani impression,
          nervous driving, impulse to stroke every cat,
          the way she sits in galleries,
          magnetised. All of it slicks the water,
          A marbling soft as a sigh.

A Dress with Deep Pockets is a highly enjoyable, immersive and poetic reading experience. Events and interactions rooted in the everyday are effortlessly noted, articulated and committed to a precious memory sub-strata. Thus, their value is identified as something of lasting beauty.

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. Her collection SOJOURN Moments in Poetry is now available on Amazon in both digital and paperback. 

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 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.

Review by Christine Hammond of "The Night Jar" by Louise Peterkin

The cover art of Louise Peterkin’s The Night Jar sets the tone for a collection that is stylish and understated, yet beautifully theatrical. 

Be prepared for the poems to take you on a Carroll-esque transport of delights. Like Alice, you’ll experience a colourful cast, often led by women appearing to  inhabit the interstices of fantasy and reality. Yet somehow, no matter where the dramas are played out, they remain elegantly embedded in the relatable, ordinary script and emotional spectrum of our daily lives. Lives that include love, faith, relationship ennui, sexuality, freedom, joy, disappointment, longing, ambition, loss and escape from routine oppression. 

In a four-episode vignette we are introduced to the adventures of a recalcitrant nun in "Sister Agnieska Runs Away to the Circus." Here, the Big Top is described as a "yummy mirage" and early on the skilful use of tense and double entendre convey the poem's "fallen" theme: 

          … the twirling, the leaping and the curving
          for the love of God, the love 
          of the falling …

          … You know now balance 
          is an act of sheer faith.

"Snake" is both visceral and anthropomorphic. It articulates the ending of a relationship, carefully planned and executed:

          No one suspected I could be so snakey..
          ... I was long gone.
          My skin like hosiery on the floor

The motif is extended with "snakey" witticisms and a well-placed dramatic exclamation:

          I nudged to the East with panache …

          ... there were clues …

          sodden shirts twisting 
          round my arm like a bracelet
          the spiced tomb of the laundry basket.

The bird image in the final verse is both delicate and self-contained, with a Haiku resonance that only adds to the sensory experience: 

         How lithe I am I have wriggled free!
         I hiss like Peter Lorre. A small bird
         fizzes like seltzer inside me. 

Peterkin’s debut is a fine piece of work. Intelligent and exquisitely crafted, the poems are highly visual and immersive. Reading them will leave you satiated, yet still looking forward to the next production. 

About the reviewer
Christine Hammond began writing poetry whilst studying English at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her early poems were published in The Gown (QUB), The Female Line (NIWRM) 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.

You can read more about The Night Jar by Louise Peterkin on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Christine Hammond of "The Pretence of Understanding" by Beth Davies

When you read The Pretence of Understanding (The Poetry Business), it’s not hard to see why Beth Davies won the 2022 New Poet’s Prize. 

Her debut collection is a considered response to the realities of transition, exploring both the resultant rewards and losses. Her voice is clear and unambiguous. It re-visits childhood, acknowledging the immovable family roots that are woven in and uses them to help make sense of past and present experiences.  

There is a reflective tension throughout. A sense of belonging and valuing what matters competes with the inevitable change, autonomy and distraction that come with leaving home, university life and starting work, as seen in “A Plea for Future Winters”:

           … if one day, these Christmas card mornings cannot
           make me child again, throw a snowball 
           In my face. 

Davies dedicates this volume to her Grandparents and there are several poems that will resonate with anyone who has known the sorrow of dealing with elderly relatives and witnessing the slow decline. “The Garden at William Street” uses their overgrown garden as a metaphor:

          Later at the care home, you don’t notice 
         our scratched legs, dirty shoes, the tang
         of grass clippings. Your mind is too overgrown,
         your words behind thorns, my name
         a house you cannot reach. I hold your hand
         wishing I could tame that wilderness.

There may be retrospection in this collection, but there is no sense of over-sentimentality or sugar-coating. The poetry has its own motif of loss, decay, decline and death. This is often intelligently articulated using nature, notably through a lens of some of its not-so-cute inhabitants such as rats, crabs, insects, earthworms and (rotting) fish. The restrained, everyday portrayal of their visceral fates subtly serves to remind us on a metaphysical level of our own human experience.

About the reviewer
Christine Hammond began writing poetry while studying English at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her early poems were published in The Gown (QUB), The Female Line (NIWRM) 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) and she has also been a reader at Purely Poetry - Open Mic Night, Belfast.