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 Colin Dardis of "Boy, Mother" by Caroline Bracken

Winner of the 2024 Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Prize, Boy, Mother is a sequence of poems exploring a mother’s relationship with her son, who has a long-term mental illness. However, this is not just the typical unconditional familial love of devotion and sacrifice. Rather, Bracken displays the interplay being the wellbeing of mother and son, as set up in the opening poem, "Amor Matris": "Some / children / are easy / to raise … // Some / mothers / are easy to love," going on to give the exceptions of herself and son. We see this uneasy symbiotic relationship throughout the work: "he gains ten pounds    you lose ten," "both he and you will be judged," "I carried him under my skin for 293 days safe in amniotic fluid." The mental wellbeing of one is wholly reliant on the other: the mother to know that the son is safe and well, and the son to have his mother fight on his behalf for access to care and the safety of home.

"Admissions" catches the interminable horror of hospital waiting rooms with wry observations: "greasy Hello magazines show Princess Diana alive … a half-full water cooler   no cups." We find similar trivialities in "Black Coat," where the mother frets over the suitability of a coat to be worn to her son’s possibly impending funeral. The mind goes to curious places in times of stress, but to hint at such whimsy in times of suffering without underplaying the suffering itself is remarkable writing, reminiscent of David Sedaris or Henry Rollins.

A number of poems are set in admission areas, anonymous waiting rooms, even police stations, Bracken expertly capturing both the clinical boredom of inactivity and the uneasy anticipation of bad news. Constantly, we are reminded of the mother’s helplessness, her sanity at the whim of a medical examination or a police search.

          A stranger will tell me
          he is either dead or found
          I have rehearsed both
          during six weeks
          of fluid dread
          ("Ballast")

Where these poems excel is that, although obviously written after the event, the reader feels right alongside the mother as she waits for the news, any news, sharing her concern and her fears. "Eyewitness" and "Mental Health Act" dissect and distil each action and thought slowly, drawing out the gamut of feelings and sensations, allowing space for the reader to enter the thought process.

Judge of the Poetry Business prize Jane Clarke, in her blurb for the collection, notes the collection's "innovative poems," although there is little that could be considered as breaking new poetical ground. Bracken prefers extra spacing between words or line breaks to do the work of commas and semi-colons; at times, punctuation is dispensed of altogether, causing a double-take in the reading of some lines that could have benefited from clearer intervals. To be generous, such form could be said to be representative of the frantic minds of both mother and son, where in the moment, thoughts and expressions are not precisely and neatly expressed, but tumble out in a cacophony of worry or illness. However, at times, the omission inhibits rather than elevates the writing.

The collection’s closing poems shift away from the turbulence and trials of disappearances and medical interventions to something more akin to normalcy: a shared coffee in a cafe, a trip to Marks and Spencers, the mother showing her son how to construct his hair into a man-bun. All of these little events are shown to be hard won, even fraught – "your leg shaking my hand shredding napkins," or the marvelling of the son successfully navigating a self-check out with ease by the overly-anxious mother – but come as blessed reprieve after the early tribulations.

Admittedly, this reviewer is not a parent, so outside of these poems, it would be hard to imagine the natural concerns and heartache that a mother or father may go through with a child. However, it is testament to the willingness of Bracken to be open and shame-free in sharing her concerns that Boy, Mother makes it a little easier for this reviewer to envisage such. Overall, this is another fine collection reflective of the usual high standard from the Poetry Business, and one to be sought out by all.

About the reviewer
Colin Dardis is the author of six poetry collections and four pamphlets, most recently with the lakes (above/ground press, 2023) and What We Look Like in the Future (Red Wolf Editions, 2023). A neurodivergent poet, editor and sound artist, Colin is co-host of the long-running open mic night, Purely Poetry, held in the Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast, and editor of the poetry blog, Poem Alone.

Review by Colin Dardis of "No Small Thing" by Trevor Conway

Trevor Conway opens up his third collection with an engaging essay, expanding on the themes of the book, serving as an amuse-bouche for what lies within. In the world of post-pandemic literature, Conway realises that we have all been forced to look inwards, spending more time in the house, shut off from others. Naturally, what arises are the themes of home and family, and chiefly for Conway, the new arrival of a daughter. Imagine Bill Bryson’s At Home, exploring the dichotomy of the home and all its trappings, but told through the intimate prism of a small (and often sleep-deprived) family. 

One of the highlights of the collection is the personification of certain rooms in the house, given voice to comment on their nature, and the comings and goings of the people who use them. These poems are rich in humour and fancifulness: we find a hallway that feels neglected because it’s only used to get from one place to another; it is rarely the desired destination. Elsewhere, an attic ponders on its quietude, whereas the bathroom sees all manner of private horrors. 

Le Corbusier’s Five Points of Architecture states that "a house is a machine for living in," and so we find ruminations on laundry, child-rearing, cooking, cleaning and other domestic demands. It is within this endless machination that Conway gives us his richest descriptions: minced beef cooked until "all its red head are dulled," "nappies full as the shell of a snail," the emptying of a wheelie bin "taken like fish in one gulp," or a television set that "jabbers like a senile uncle." There is beauty in mundanity here, and Conway excels as reimagining these tasks through language into things of affection and astonishment.

The daughter poems show us a sense of fragility: "Oh, Man" muses on how some men struggle with fatherhood. "Baby Steps" marvels at the child "coming to terms | with the new physics | of her body machinery," but fears what new dangers walking will bring. Hope for the future also arises, coupled with the uneasy undercurrent of knowing that no future is wholly secured, the shadow of the pandemic looming over the years ahead.

         Other images we have yet to see:
         a schoolbag tight like a barnacle to your back,
         the jagged, crayon scrawl of your name,
         your face womaned in make-up.

It is a testament to Conway’s effectiveness that this reviewer – childfree and with no desire to rear – found the tenderness and devotion inescapable. 

There is the occasional poem outside of the home, of airplane flights, of ruminations on Galway city and a new beginning in Catalonia. Yet it is the scenes that take place inside the familial four walls that come across as most personal. No Small Thing lives up to its title, showing the reader that the apparent microcosms of daily life are a huge part of our being and our identity, and that fatherhood has brought with in a new appreciation of these "houses shared like simmering saucepans | of routine, belief and ritual."

About the reviewer
Colin Dardis is a neurodivergent writer, editor and sound artist from Northern Ireland. His most recent book is with the lakes (above/ground press, 2023), a series of twenty-five poems loosely connected by the theme of water. His work, largely influenced by his experiences with depression and Asperger's, has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and USA.

Review by Colin Dardis of "Cockroach" by Elizabeth McGeown

The 2022 UK Slam Champion, three-time All Ulster Poetry Slam Champion, and winner of many other spoken word plaudits Elizabeth McGeown delivers up her debut full-length collection, a book version of her successful hour-long live show, Cockroach. An exploration of self-identity, from teenage awkwardness to perplexing adult encounters, we find personalities of movie stars tried on and cast off in a litmus test of affinities, the rejected cockroach character searching for answers in pop culture, in art, within seclusion and amongst perceived peers.

McGeown’s preferred style of delivery feels rapid-fire and urgent on the page; the reader is often caught up in the intensity of delivery through short lines that drive the narrative forward. Such form can threaten to become staccato, fired out like so many other spoken word performances for the sake of a neat series of rhymes. Rather, here we sense that the narrative turns against itself, the speaker questioning and analysing along the way, evoking angst and self-doubt.

Sometimes the source of such anxiety and hesitation is internal, from fibromyalgia and other medical complaints (this reviewer challenges anyone to try and find a better poem about self-applying an enema for a gastric issue), but often the sources are external; we find mention of #MeToo, and McGeown’s experiences of gatekeepers and sexism in the fields of music and the spoken word scene. We see school bullying, and the weight of expectation to conform:

          I did not pay the daily toll
          and call Angela pretty
          when the prettiest thing about her was
          the relief we felt when she left.

- "Witch"

This blends naturally with the larger search for the self that the collection is primarily concerned with, and McGeown is aware of the perverse paradox that the self is frequently defined through the company it keeps. Hence, we find various house parties, dates, the need for space and solitude conflicting with the search for meaningful company. This leads to compelling observations such as "a misfit + a misfit = a kind of sanctuary." We also see this attraction reflected in a self-deprecating style:

          A painting of a loser is vivid
          perhaps never quite so vivid
          until witnessed by another loser.

- "Villain (ix)"

Indeed, self-deprecation is something McGeown excels in, as there is enough humour, spark and playfulness to stop the poems ever descending into self-pity or despondency. Ultimately, we find an authentic voice that isn’t afraid to question or defend itself. Cockroach is postmodern mal du siècle, enjoyable and engaging from start to end, and never losing any of the energy and tension McGeown brings to her live performances.

About the reviewer
Colin Dardis is a neurodivergent writer, editor and sound artist from Northern Ireland. His most recent book is What We Look Like in the Future (Red Wolf Editions, 2023). His work, largely influenced by his experiences with depression and Asperger's, has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and USA.

Review by Colin Dardis of "The Wind Stills to Listen" by Deirdre Cartmill

Deirdre Cartmill’s third full-length collection is an exploration of longing and fulfilment. The first half of the collection take the reader through the fallout from a miscarriage, from the initial thrill and excitement of expectancy to the resultant grief and trauma. "Signs of Life" sums up the devastation in a neat image of the line of a pregnancy test developing like a polaroid picture:

          like a photograph emerging from a negative
          and slowly filling with the possibility of life
          …
          But when we hand you to the doctor
          and she scans you for the first time,
          you disappear like a film exposed to light

Suddenly, given the shock of the news, motherhood and loss are seen everywhere. The flowers of a petal "fold into a womb"; the would-be parents' relationship gets compared to "pages joined by a perforated edge | and how little it takes to tear them apart." The fragility of life is exposed.

Deprived of motherhood, the poems take up the theme of observation. In "Fishmarket Pas de Deux," the speaker does not take part in the absurd dance reencountered in the poem; instead they "partake by watching." The mothering instinct is transposed onto the image of a child scavenging for food in "Daily Bread," the image seeming to haunt as a ghost, demanding to be seen, filling a void perhaps where a child should be. And yet, again, the speaker will only "watch and wait, and do nothing." In the opening poem, "Between Crossing and Passing," we are told that ghosts will do "anything to sate that unmet need | to be seen, heard." Cartmill places the unfilled mother between mourning the past and grasping at the future. We are shown a traffic light turning green, and told that "everything seems possible now," yet elsewhere we find "a trail of pawprints" that "lead nowhere," and we are left to wonder what possible direction the narrator is left free to take.

However, in the suitably-named haikai sequence, "Crossing Points," we find a key image encompassing both connection and separation:

          Window reflections.
          Me superimposed on you.
          joined without touching.

Cartmill excels in creating significance in seemingly minor images, using the material world as symbols for the turmoil felt whilst trying to make sense of what life has delivered – or failed to deliver. By the time we reach "Intercession," there is supplication, where Cartmill read to "let the reflection of Christ | washed over my upturned face." Now, with a different form of superimposition, the collection moves into a sequence taking up the majority of the book, told through the figure of Mary Magdalene. We see a blossoming faith, the ontogenesis of a personal and intimate relationship with Christ.

Magdalene starts off much as Cartmill, an observer, "reaching out, unable to touch." Yet soon, we see her move past observation and into participation, as she finds "my home in him" and eventually is invited to even preach alongside Jesus, the two becoming the one voice, and again, we find yet further superimposition.

Cartmill uses the Christ story to bring consolation and fulfilment; just as some nuns are encouraged to move any sexual desire they make have onto the Christ figure, the reader can’t help but draw comparisons and parallels between this faith helping to ease the pain of miscarriage. And indeed, Cartmill does not shy away from the intimacy that people speculate Christ and Magdalene may have held: "I watch each muscle flex," "his hand is on my waist," "his breath lifts each hair on my neck." One may stop to wonder why such emphasis on the physicality of the relationship, yet such human elements help us buy in to the intensity of feeling here.

Whatever one’s own personal views on faith and theology, the reader will still be caught up in the story, one that is emboldening, feminist, and inspiring. What we are left with is a resolution that offers a different form of motherhood, as Cartmill expertly squares the circle of the narrative to show us a surrogate relationship found through belief:

          So I speak of all God has told us,
          of how God gave birth to us
          as we give birth to men
          who shun us, break us, rape us

          - yet we do not stop giving birth.

Once more, publisher Arlen House offers up an engaging and stimulating collection, and after ten years since Cartmill’s last volume, we find that she has only strengthen her resolve, compassion and storytelling craft.

About the reviewer
Colin Dardis is a neurodivergent writer, editor and sound artist from Northern Ireland. His most recent book is What We Look Like in the Future (Red Wolf Editions, 2023). His work, largely influenced by his experiences with depression and Asperger's, has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and USA.

Review by Colin Dardis of "Sensitive to Temperature" by Serena Alagappan

Sensitive to Temperature is one of the latest releases from New Poets List, an imprint of The Poetry Business which fosters new poetry by writers between the ages of 17 and 24. Within, Alagappan finds correlations between our landscapes and ourselves, using the fragility of both the human body and human relationships to highlight environmental concerns. We see wind erosion as a stand-in for human contact ("will you make time for me? || the steep lee of those aeolian landforms") and a skyscape reimagined as part of the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems:

           expels birds like a throat swallows stones,
           like a stomach stills a swarm of butterflies.
           The sky wheezes with its wind, loses its
           breath, belches thunder, hearts beats shocks
           of electricity

The imagery and metaphors go beyond mere anthropomorphism, to suggest that really humanity and earth need to be thought of as one. In "Aurora," a laceration and the resulting blood flow is compared to a sunrise ("a gash in the sky"). "White Bows" transforms wind turbines into "waving hands ... white bows in cerulean hair." "The Body Keeps the Score" compels the reader to "Stick a fist in the || earth and find dust on your palms." Just as a landscape leaves an impression on the mind, and exploring it takes a physical toil on the body, humanity leaves indelible impressions on the earth too. All these juxtapositions and parallels help remind us that we are undivorcable from the world, that one is dependent on the other.

We are, however, reminded that life persists: "how after nuclear disaster, mushrooms grow on reactor walls" ("After the Mushroom at the End of the World"). The poem goes on to tell us of "a kind of love" that is "unequal between two parties," guiltily condemning us for being guilty perhaps of not loving the world enough. We also have the idea of a mushroom cloud like air waltzing with "open legs and a rising skirt." Alagapan peppers the poems with these delightful curios of contrast: how a grab machine full of prizes can be "like Christmas morning,"  the source of the River Thames as "a mountain crush into liquid matter" or a tornado "tastes cars then hurls them back," reminiscent of the sky belching thunder from earlier.

Elsewhere, we are met with Alagappan's reverence for the world: "Holy" lists instances of awe-inspiring natural occurrences, from the growth of a potato to a volcano, balancing the tricky dual reality of nature as destroyer as well as creator. We find intertextuality in the use of negative space in architecture ("Nostalgia Architects") and the space in an empty lunch box ("Tiffin"), but also in the in the space between humanity and God in "Red Moon," addressed in an ill-fitting metaphor of a hand across the eyes. The poem speaks of "your pain" and "when your heart | broke," odd abstracts that stand out against a collection that is usual exact and original in its language.

As with any eco-poems, or indeed any poems with a strong message, the danger is that the poetry with take second place behind the arguments. However, there is plenty on offer here to assure us that Alagappan is a thoughtful and skilled poet, never slipping into diatribe or grandstanding, and conjuring up original situations and contexts in which to explore her intentions.

About the Reviewer
Colin Dardis is a neurodivergent writer, editor and sound artist from Northern Ireland. His most recent book is What We Look Like in the Future (Red Wolf Editions, 2023). His work, largely influenced by his experiences with depression and Asperger's, has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and USA. 

Review by Colin Dardis of "The Last Spring of the World" by Maureen Boyle

 

Following on from her powerful 2017 debut, The Work of a Winter, Maureen Boyle continues her blossoming relationship with Irish publisher Arlen House. Included in the collection is the sequence ‘Strabane,’ originally published as a separate volume alongside photography by Malachi O’Doherty. Strabane is a small town in County Tyrone, near when Boyle grew up: through the prism of the town, we see a rich and innocent childhood, slowly infringed upon by the rising ‘Troubles’ across Northern Ireland.

In the opening poem, a sort of prelude for the entire collection, Boyle asks:

          How could there never be another spring?
          How could we live without the sense
          of the earth surging into labour

The entirety of the work on offer here is an attempt to answer these questions, of feeling the simplicity and ataraxia of springtime, balanced against infringing adulthood, political unrest, and ultimately, the knowledge of death. Early on in ‘Strabane,’ we are treated to pastoral scene of a weir and a salmon leap, caught up in its natural grandeur, when suddenly, unexpectedly, we are hit with the line 'and where two little brothers drowned.' Similarly, after more idylls of glamour and shopping trips, the first line of the next sequence begins 'And then something came to blow the past away.' It is on such knifepoints that innocence can be lost and which Boyle remarkably conveys.

The study of Strabane brings to mind Damian Smyth’s own studies of Downpatrick, a microcosm of the world used to explore life in general, although Boyle’s style is closer to the prosaic ease of Durcan: there is intimacy and familiarity here. The sequence ‘Namesake’ recounts the life of a close relative, and we read of a life as if it was someone sharing stories at a wake. Similarly, in ‘Luscus,’ we get the account of how the author lost an eye as a child, Boyle choosing to focus on the tenderness experienced from the ocularist afterwards, rather than the tragedy itself.

However considerate the chosen tone and filtering of memory may be, tragedy creeps in however, often in the form of death. ‘Bypass,’ another sequence (Boyle is evidently fond of the form, and in the sequences that stand out strongest in the collection), speculates that 'There must have been a day | when you held my hand for the last time.' Elsewhere, the question is posed: 'What is it like | to wake for the last time?' Boyle rightfully affords to herself these ruminations, but also realises that one must move onwards from remembrances to new milestones. Hence we have ‘First Time,’ a playful yet poignant account of an initial sexual experience:

          It felt like a mix of Christmas and a trip to the dentist.

          The thing itself was a surprise – the shy manoeuvrings,
          the shock of fitting into place

New outlooks come into being, and the tone is optimistic, hungry and excited: 'You must learn everything afresh'; 'Hope arrives with the lilacs.' And yet the lure and pull of the past, of childhood and her hometown, clings to the poetry, as if through words Boyle is measuring the distance between childhood and adulthood. ‘Enclosure’ tells of closed gates 'to keep the children in | and safe'; in ‘Crossing the Alps,’ we are warned that 'All this play' is just

         a way to prepare us
         for the real danger that lay
         always, just beyond our gates,
         our ages and our lives

These lines perhaps serve as a perverse irony, coming in the book just become ‘Luscus’ and the loss of an eye, an accident that happened at home. Yet Boyle manages to successfully juggle these mixed fronts of threat, of childhood, of mixed reflection and adult examination. The Last Spring of the World serves as another stand-out collection from Boyle, who is fast becoming a premier voice within Irish poetry, and indeed deserves to be recognised outside of that field as well.

About the Reviewer
Colin Dardis is a neurodivergent writer, editor and sound artist from Northern Ireland. His most recent book is What We Look Like in the Future (Red Wolf Editions, 2023). His work, largely influenced by his experiences with depression and Asperger's, has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and USA.

Review by Colin Dardis of "Ventriloquise" by Ned Denny

As might be expected for a collection calling itself Ventriloquise, Denny delivers up a large number of after-poems: we have work inspired by Mallarmé, Chénier, Heine, Lorca, Wang Wei, Baudelaire, Hugo and more. The casual reader may find themselves daunted by such a range of allusions and reference points, but as Denny remarks in the notes, he does not want to "pretend to an erudition I do not process." We may therefore allow ourselves to dispense with such worries, but we do need to ask if the poems go beyond mere mimicry and puppetry.

Throughout, there is an obsession with light, or the absence or it: we have the sun’s "gold hammer" and "fair lace," sundown making "the forest one blaze of gold," a light bulb’s "imagined honey." Objects and scenes are constantly presented in light or its absence, "woven of dew and light," "the sunset's catastrophic gold" or "light-fatted" fauna. Denny uses these shades to indicate if something is welcoming or ominous, the mood dictated by dawn or dusk.

           A forest on the move,
           her dark frontier

           steals round the earth
           swifter than our drowned cries.

           What can we say
           that does not make light or her

            - from "Night"

Rhyming is highly favoured, and at times, the technique can be distracting from the message of the poem: too often, the content of the poems feels determined by obvious rhyme choices, such as sheep / sleep and girls / curls in "Arrest," love / above in "Clareaudience" or earth / mirth in "Song." However, one of the most enjoyable pieces in the collection is "Dusk: An Antique Song," reliant on rhyming couplets but so full of action and narrative that the reader is swept up in the driving force of the rhyme, even when broken across stanzas.

Still, the poetry is strongest when rhyme is abandoned, but form is retained. The haikai sequence of "Equinox" floods us with pastoral delights. "To the Fates" gives us three beseeching quatrains of reverence, almost like an extended Japanese death poem. Saying that, of particular note is the rhyming "A Dam," a reduced villanelle of sorts that at one point uses a clever homonymic phrase to retain its form.

Elsewhere, we find a type of zen reminiscent of "Old Man River" or "That Lucky Old Sun," Nature shown as a steady constant in contrast to human follies and pursuits. Denny is concerned with the state of humanity, how we respond in a time of constant change ("You put your head in to the hive | and nothing’s quite the same again"), akin to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, itself written at a time of great Augustan change). Novelist Jenny Erpenbeck has written (collected in her work Not A Novel) how Ovid "shows us how all things … are intertwined with one another. In the very moment we lose ourselves as human beings, he sees us at the beginning of something else that lies outside of us and yet contains us." The same can be sensed here, such as "Atlantis" consoling us with the fact that despite the "vast city," "All is beauty and order there."

Given all the literary reference points, one might suspect that Denny is playing with us when he drops in such lines as "In need of advice, we turn to the dead" and "with too much defined meaning | poetry will never sing." However, undoubtedly, these poems do stand on their own, and sing to us a song of warning and remembrance, to not rush into our new "iron age" of modernity, but to stop and recall a simpler time of light, and of a kinder humanity.

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.

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 Colin Dardis of "Murmurations" by Clare Dwyer

The poems in Murmurations are culled from a notebook that Dwyer kept during the pandemic, written across each wave of the Coronavirus pandemic as they hit England. Forced to shield during each lockdown, cut off from the the normalities of children, grandchildren and life beyond her house, Dwyer turned to other areas of focus to dwell upon. There are three main themes at play throughout the collection: the comfort immediately found in her own garden; the wonders of space; and the sense of family, keenly missed throughout each wave. These three themes in themselves may not seem like natural bedfellows, but Dwyer balances her attention skilfully across them.

It is perhaps in the poems of the garden and of nature that Murmurations succeeds the most: not like the keen botanical slant of Michael Longley or Jean Bleakney perhaps, but more the sheer awe and childlike fascination closer to that of Mary Oliver. In the opening poem, 'Solace of a Small Bird: Wren,' the observer marks the passage of the day by the comings and goings of the bird:

           I count each one and smile,
           it is enough,
           despite these tremors
           which shake the world

This sets the mood for the book: to find solace, comfort and even entertainment in what we already have at our possession, when shut off from the rest of the world. Tickseed, acorns, birds, fern, crane flies and more are all part of Dwyer's line-up, with delight found in each.

Dwyer also takes us outside of Earth, to imagine scenes set in the allure of deep space, with reflection on meteor showers and the Hubble telescope. 'Last Letter from Mars' gives voice to the Mars Rover, close to the end of its mission: 'I am tired, my battery is low, | A storm is coming.' Here is a hint of death, and with so much of it ubiquitous on Earth, even Mars can't escape a death of sorts. Elsewhere, Dwyer conjures up the image of 'this small blue planet | caught safe within the Heliosphere' ('Star Map'), and one can't help but think that in the middle of a persistent pandemic, the use of the word 'safe' can only be ironic.

The opening of the poem 'mineshelf' neatly manages to weave the subjects of family and space together, giving a new twist to a common image seen in space exploration:

          That moment, when the module
          separates from the mothership,
          embarks on its own journey
          is akin to that moment
          when a child
          has self-recognition

Dwyer has moments of such Brautigan-esque inventiveness dotted through the book: people who 'fossilise at an early age,' the fall of post through a letterbox like 'a rapid flutter ... of sparrows,' crows picking moss off a roof to line their nests with, and using their feathers as payment. At times, however, there is an over-reliance on abstractions: the vision of meteors filled the observer with 'awe and delight,' a person and their dog return home from a walk 'curiously satisfied'; there is the insomniac's plea for sleep to 'catch my soul.'

None of these abstractions let the reader into what the speaker is really feeling, which is a shame, as Dwyer does display the ability to evoke empathy and affinity elsewhere. 'To the Other Side of Truro' charts the local landscape seen on a journey to visit family, beholding a sequence of natural marvels; and yet, when the destination is reached, granddaughters run outside in greeting 'and still, | we cannot hold each other.' The absence of a daughter is felt as 'a hard knot of loss | behind by breastbone.' Seasons change, yet Dwyer feels as if she is 'caught in amber,' absurdly preserved through the inertia of lockdowns.

 All of this takes the reader back to their own sense of longing and isolation felt through lockdown, being cut off from loved ones, and the key poem of the collection, 'The Wood-wide Web.' There is little direct address to the pandemic within Murmurations; in fact, the first mention of the C-word, 'Covid,' isn't until over thirty poems deep. But here, we see the tying together of family, togetherness distance and the impact of the pandemic in one clever extended metaphor:

           Across the woodland
           deep underground
           mycelium in intricate webs
           gossip to the trees,
           who is sick,
           who is threatened.
           The trees take care
           of their vulnerable.

Within the realm of post-pandemic literature, there is this awareness of the need for others, but there is also anger. In 'Reading Home,' there is mention of 'countless deaths | and the fall of Troy.' It doesn't take a great leap of imagination and reinvention to see 'Troy' as 'Tory.' 'A Murder of Crows' (again, the hint of death found in the collective noun) gleefully wishes for the downfall of Boris Johnson. The sense of anger though is subtle, not overwrought, and Dwyer does well not to let it distract from her main themes.

In 'Skeins,' a shrewdly constructed poem of overlapping sentences, we find the clash of escapism (the comforts of nature and family, the gazing into space) with reality: people in body-bags, overworked nurses, grief. It's a good exhibition piece for the whole of the book. Dwyer may not always push and stretch language as much as other poets, but she is comfortable in letting the subject matter speak for itself, to be that mirror held up to the world, which we all need while still reeling from the impact of Covid. And despite the lingering sense of death, there is much warmth in these poems.

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 Murmurations by Clare Dwyer on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Matt Nunn of "The Dogs of Humanity" by Colin Dardis

Dogs, as Jarvis Cocker once sang, are everywhere in this new collection by Northern Irish poet Colin Dardis. But these are no heart-warming tales of a new Lassie; rather they are toughened poems concerning snarling mutts and runts, mute dogs with stiletto teeth and those barking in a language of “Bark, Ruff, Arf, Au-Au, Bow-Wow, Yip” and mutts without the linguistics nor manners to devour mutton in a fashion less than savage on their “butchering lips.” But these are no wild, visceral howls at the moon; rather Dardis has taken a prevailing blackened air of isolation, mixed it many slithers of wry humour and crafted in tightly packed ruminations and poems of observation, a whole orchestra of barks, yelps and howls and with masterful, taut control conducted them with into legend.

And to prove he is a poetic Dr. Doolittle, in the second part of the book he opens up a menagerie as he adds to the mix elephants, blackbirds, sparrows, ducks and rabbits and puts them through the same rigorous poetic examinations as the dogs before them, to turn them into poems of equal gusto and skill.

All of which builds with great animalistic aplomb into the crescendo of the final line of the final poem in the collection, “The Humane Animal”: “We all are. We all are. We all are.” And you feel that no matter the plumage, or manky mutt coat worn, every animal here is Dardis himself, a deeply humane poet for these increasingly savage times.

In the opening line of “Unpublished,” one of the standout poems in this book, the poet asserts that “Life is a poor novelist,” a fantastic line that may well be true. What is, though, indisputably true is that Colin Dardis is a very fine poet and The Dogs of Humanity an equally fine collection.


About the reviewer
Matt Nunn is the author of five poetry collections, the latest of which is St.Judes College Reject (RedSox press). He works as a freelance writing tutor, writing coach, editor and writer and teaches Creative Writing at Solihull College and has performed his work on TV, radio and a million different venues, to audiences big and small, enthusiastic and indifferent, for over 25 years. He’s still amazed at how he gets away with it all.