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 Harry Owen of "Wildfire" by David Mohan

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

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

           The world is kindling for a dropped match … 

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

           in backwoods, on the street.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            Vacuum

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

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

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

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

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

Review by Joe Bedford of "We Saw It All Happen" by Julian Bishop

Watching news stories about environmental catastrophe, I feel something like anger, panic, despair, and underneath that something terrible and unfamiliar that leads me to silence. Naming that feeling – that is, finding an emotional vocabulary for what we are witnesses to – may become the dominant preoccupation of poetry in the coming years. Julian Bishop’s collection We Saw It All Happen is a step towards that emotional vocabulary.

Through verse rooted in the natural world, Bishop’s poetry embraces the global and the tiny, the present and the absent. His scope is vast: agriculture, climate, ethics, extinction, plastics, pollution, technology, waste. At times, Bishop’s feelings are drawn delicately in verse that is alive with sardonic humour, lamenting with the world’s insects for his own ‘addiction to squish, for its satisfying / half-rhyme with delicious.’ Elsewhere, his frustration subverts the poetic form in the same way anger chokes our ability to talk, raging on a ‘gob of atoll / slice of paradise / diced / into scum and phlegm / coughed up by firestorm / froth of surge / churned to a fury.’ At the heart of this frustration are the human behaviours that in some ways may live at the heart of our emotional confusion. With pithy clarity, he relates that ‘to protect the world from a threatened cat / the marksman only took one shot / to protect the threatened cat from the world / we only had one shot.’

But as Bishop declares from his preface, his intent is not fatalist. Rather, it is a cry for change. This is the call that prevents our currents of contradictory emotion from lowering us into paralysis. We may find that in expressing these contradictions, as Bishop achieves in We Saw It All Happen, we create a structure of feeling wherein those emotions no longer silence us, but call us to speak.

About the reviewer

Joe Bedford is a writer from Doncaster, UK. His short stories have been published widely and are available to read here. His debut novel A Bad Decade for Good People will be published by Parthian Books in Summer 2023.

You can read more about We Saw It All Happen by Julian Bishop on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "Scale" by Mina Gorji

Mina Gorji’s latest collection uses scale as its central theme to explore how life, in its many forms, finds a way to survive, if not flourish, in extreme conditions. In the title poem, the ‘map reveals so many stars … how cold it is between the galaxies, the snowdrops in the garden the morning after frost.’ Gorji goes in search of meaning in the cosmos – both macro and micro versions – using language to give shape and voice to often sublime forms, as in 'Message from an Asteroid' where ‘inside the earth, crusts of cobalt under oceans, on the skin, on the lips of submarine volcanoes.’ 

These are ecologically-centred poems in that they present organisms that are often invisible to the human eye but vital all the same, and whose presence is a timely reminder we must come to view ourselves as stewards of the planet if we are to survive the impact of decisions we make as its dominant species. So, it is into this world of extreme heat, arctic cold, floods and destructive volcanoes the reader is plunged, although Gorji’s methods are subtle when dealing with such topical material. 

The poetry of John Clare and Christina Rosetti are clear influences and Keats is detected in 'Owl' which ‘which glides across silence – slowing to a moment held – white wings steadying air.’ Humans themselves make the occasional appearance, presented as characters in harmony with nature ('After the Harvest,' 'Ice Age') or out of step with it, rather humorously depicted in 'Waiting for Snow' where the poet’s ‘Grandmother had never felt the snow before; she knew the touch of monsoon rain … before the shock of Edinburgh rain, soaking her saree with its cold and grey.’ 

It is a testament to Gorji’s many talents that she is able to create such depth of feeling with so few words – poems rarely last for more than a page – which is a comment about scale in itself. She implies that even a sparse arrangement of words has the power to convey the start and the end of time, the evolution and destruction of a single species, or the continuance of life for others that manage to adapt. There is also a sense that hope is somehow present – even in the most hopeless of places – and, it is this, the reader comes away with after reading Scale in its entirety and is all the richer for it. 

About the reviewer
Dr. Paul Taylor-McCartney is an author, researcher and lecture, with interests in dystopian studies, children’s literature and initial teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in a range of notable UK and international publications including Aesthetica, The Birmingham Journal of Language and Literature, Writing in Practice (National Association of Writers in Education), Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine and Dyst: A literary Journal. He lives and works in Cornwall. You can find out more about him and his work by visiting https://paultm.org/

Review by Sally Evans of "The Last Days of Petrol" by Bridget Khursheed

This first poetry book by Bridget Khursheed, who lives in the Borders near Melrose, is full of powerful, distinctive poems, mostly about countryside phenomena, with a sense of continuity through ecological awareness and awareness of the present. Its seventy-eight pages, packed with poems, display a certainty of vocabulary, rhythm and phrase unusual in a first book of poems. There’s the same certainty about line ends in the poems, which vary from page width to a few having very short lines.

Some of these poems are essentially ‘nature’ poems, some imply family and children, a few are quietly polemic, like the poem about Helen Duncan, a well-researched and unusual take on the Scottish woman who became involved in Churchill’s war propaganda, or the title poem, about frantic car messages round the country, descending to

           empty journeys,
           fast except by speed cameras,

           and the trip to the shops
           things nobody needs packed
           by a teenager …

Whether these poems are set in her local Borders with their unknown lanes and riversides, Edinburgh’s Easter Road, Kelvingrove, the Eildons, or Darnick, Khursheed’s strong sense of place gives a background to the range of poems, in which there is always a link between the clearly pictured observations and the observer. In City wood above the bypass,

           I am walking through the machine-gun wood,
           looking for siskins.

and then we are told what she finds:

          the path is needled

          and high above the pitched notes of crossbill

          and goldcrest

          are the blown wires that tear up the sky

to the surprise conclusion:

         I am looking for siskins in the pinewood
         and instead I find only me.

All he vocabulary is precise and consistent. There are a few country words: cleavers, scroggs (perhaps the most obscure, meaning crabapples), technical words when wanted, freshly used words: 'Toys abraded  / into nightmare in the silence,' or 'Rucksacked, the baby cries for home.'  

With so many people publishing poems these days, and it’s a good feature of Scottish culture that poetry can thrive in this way, not too much is generally expected of a first book. But this one raises the game. It raises the hopes and discoveries of the poetry reader and shows us a live, properly managed, healthy, modern, country Scottish English. Not a line wrong, not a word out of place.

About the reviewer
Sally Evans edited Poetry Scotland from 1997-2018, and was awarded a PhD in Creative Writing at Lancaster University in 2022. 

You can read a review of Sally Evans's novel, Wildgoose: A Tale of Two Poets, on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

 

Review by Lauren M Foster of "Terminarchy" by Angela France

There are so many excellent poems in Terminarchy, I found it difficult to decide which ones  to highlight, so I will start at the beginning. The opening piece, 'Poetry Makes Nothing Happen,' reminded me of what I once heard said about Alice Munro’s short stories: 'Nothing happens but everything happens.' There can be many positives to nothing happening in our contemporary world—such as during the lockdown of 2020 when nature, at least for a short time, appeared to thrive. 'Poetry Makes Nothing Happen' ponders possibilities, the idea of each decision creating an alternate timeline – like a poetic chaos theory. The second stanza seems particularly poignant right now given the situation in Ukraine:

           Or so that a fighter sits up almost all night reading Rumi, trying
           to understand death and blood, peace and love and sleeps
           too late to be ready for the knock at the door so tells them
           he’ll follow after because he wants to hold his son and play
           with his daughter and nothing happens as he kisses his children
           because he isn’t in the car when a government missile hits it.

France seems to have a relationship with the land, to love it the way one would love a person: she writes the land’s personality, its character, and quirks. I sense a deep sadness at the destruction of nature and the march of progress, something I can sympathize with. Loss runs through the work, as to be expected in any ecopoetic collection, and it explores absences and disconnections, with regards both to nature and other people: the poems 'Fallow' and 'What Remains' made me think of the artist’s exercise of drawing a tree by observing the negative spaces in-between. Longing, too, is present, perhaps for the material in a scientific sense: tangible things, the physical world around us.

'Water Mark' is probably my favourite poem in Terminarchy; its movement follows the bends and cambers, climbs and drops of the road in the work—and like the water of the leak which lends the poem its title, it finds its path of least resistance. There is the pseudo presence of a stranger the other end of a phone-line staring at a screen as they talk, a seeming non-awareness of a world beyond the call-centre:

         She says she can’t send a crew without a postcode.
         I could tell her I know that old sycamore, leaning
         over a crumbling wall, how this bend tightens
         if you come down the hill too fast. There are houses
         backing into the hillside, hidden behind trees
         and shrubs, stately gateposts by the road
         with blurred names carved
         into lichened stone, no numbers.

Journey-ways feature prominently in Terminarchy in works such as 'Desire Path,' 'Piggy Lane' and 'Strange Road.' There are adventures of the everyday sort, the familiar seen in unfamiliar ways, small joys, open spaces, the freedom of roaming, of the frogs and sparrows you might get to know in your back yard. There is a sense of wonder present that many lose after childhood is but a distant memory.

Online life and the false sense of having done something about injustices and the climate emergency is analysed in 'Small Gods,' 'Scrolling and Blame'—and 'Missing the Blood Moon' illustrates that detachment from a true-present endless digital media can bring. The Lockdown too, is a worthy subject, in 'After,' where people ‘came out, blinking in the summer light’  while others ‘step back inside, close their doors, pull down their blinds.’

Terminarchy is observant, thoughtful and well crafted with those small details, word choices and delightful metaphors which make a difference. In 'Muscle Memory,' France writes:

          The lift of a kettle, cup, the snug of peeler
          against my thumb, the stretch of fingers
          around a winter potato. How to tong coal
          on to a new fire or draw the flame
          with newspaper held tight across the grate.
          My hands remember how to rock a crying infant,
          how to wipe a child’s face, the O of her mouth
          disappearing like a moon behind cloud.

Terminarchy is not a didactic ecopoetic collection, but instead informs and engages the reader, as good writing should. It retains a warm and largely positive outlook throughout while acknowledging the damage the human race has inflicted on the natural world. There is kindness, compassion and a down-to-earth vibe that I enjoyed greatly.

About the reviewer
Lauren M Foster is a writer and musician based in Charnwood and a graduate of the MA Creative Writing at University of Leicester.

You can read more about Terminarchy by Angela France on Creative Writing at Leicester here.

Review of Sheaf Poetry Festival (4) by Jon Wilkins

What a wonderful way to spend a weekend, indulging in the impressive poets featured in the Sheaf Poetry Festival held on YouTube and accessible to all via Zoom, Twitter @SheafPoetryFest, and on www.facebook.com/SheafPoetryFestival. The performances from all poets will be available on YouTube. Search Sheaf Poetry.

Having earlier attended their Ecopoetry and Found Poetry workshop, I ended my Sheaf Poetry Festival experience by listening to a performance of poetry about climate change with Carrie Etter and Caleb Parkin. I was not disappointed. Using many of the techniques described in their workshops they proceeded to eviscerate climate change deniers with their powerful words and performances. Words can deliver change. The right words that is. Poetry can make a difference in raising awareness of matters of vital importance and we see this here.

Caleb Parkin read from work looking at gendered aspects of ecology. He talked about writing as if in drag. Taking on another persona to get your message across. And what a message.

Caleb thinks that who we have in charge is important in climate change. He read from poems welcoming change. 

Caleb felt that using schlocky pop culture in your writing means you can have fun writing your own works with ecological themes.

Inspired by Dylan Thomas he was able to combine the memory of Thomas and his work for a petrochemical giant. ‘By the Writing shed at Laugharne’:

          unliving water
          Neither fresh nor salty nor brackish
          Water which once had fierce appetites
          Now shredding like cellophane
          Popped like a dot of bubble wrap …

... giving us the sense of pollution of the ocean as we allow it to be damaged beyond repair. Simple writing, full of the horror of pollution and climate damage.

Carrie Etter read from her collection The Weather in Normal about her hometown in Illinois. She divided the book into three arcs about the loss of where she comes from. This started with the death of her parents, then the sale of the family house, and then the effect of climate change in Illinois. Throughout the collection, she shows a widening arc of loss. Not just her family, but the environment she loved and the loss of the ecology she had known. She is angry. She is disappointed. She is not sure if we can overcome the problems, but in her writing, she highlights them and brings the issue to new audiences. 

She performed a ten-minute prose poem from the collection and the images are etched in my mind. She is well worth a read and her readings tonight ended on a hopeful note as she described happy memories of her hometown. Beautifully written:

          … A song in the body
          The body in Illinois.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is sixty-five. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons, and loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years.  He has always loved books and reading. You can read a review of Jon's recent novel, Poppy Flowers at the Front, here. His website is here. 

Review of Sheaf Poetry Festival (2) by Jon Wilkins

After yesterday’s wonderful introduction to the Sheaf Poetry Festival, I was lucky enough to take part in an "Ecopoetry and Found Poetry" workshop held by Carrie Etter and Caleb Parkin.

As I stated yesterday one thing about the pandemic is that it is opening up new windows onto the world of poetry, in this case through Zoom. The Sheaf Poetry Festival is led by Festival Director Suzannah Evans and her fantastically hardworking team of Angelina D’Roza, Brian Lewis, Katie McLean, Ellen McLeod, Amy Smith, and Elle Turner and held over the weekend of November 20-22, 2020.

Prior to the workshop, we were sent some downloadable documents about the threats of climate change and oil development to Alaska.

I will concentrate on Carrie Etter's workshop. Immediately she engaged with the audience and a conversation was started. She explained to me and 24 other participants what Eco Poetry and Found Poetry was.

Ecopoetry is any poetry with an ecological basis.

She spoke of Found Poetry and gave us a definition to work from by the Academy of American Poets (a great resource in itself). They thought Found Poetry was a refashioning of existing text, the literary equivalent of a collage, which is a beautiful thought.

Bringing these two concepts together, Carrie showed examples from the work of Wendy Mulford, Kathleen Jamie, and Peter Reading - all poets I will now engage with as their work seems to be innovative and extremely readable.

Carrie spoke of the four techniques to be used in Found Poetry: Erasure, Interspersal, Dramatic Monologue and Shape and described how they worked in the context of the poem.

Caleb brought up the question of plagiarism and told us we had to be careful but in most cases, we would be covered by free use. The exception was song lyrics as they could cost a fortune if used, but song titles were in the public domain.

Carrie spoke of changing the music of words which is a beautiful phrase and if you contemplate writing some Found Poetry, it is what you should keep in your head.

So we had the Alaskan documents in front of us and the writing began!

This was a pay what you feel festival and easily accessible to everyone and anyone. To access: follow them all on @SheafPoetryFest and visit www.facebook.com/SheafPoetryFestival where the performances will be available after the weekend has finished.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is sixty-five. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons, and loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years.  He has always loved books and reading. You can read a review of Jon's recent novel, Poppy Flowers at the Front, here. His website is here.