Review by Sue Mackrell of "House Work" by Khadija Rouf

In House Work, Khadija Rouf evokes the seismic shock following the birth of a first child: ‘After the baby everything changed. / My body rebelled against me, / I was no longer myself … Our home felt unchartered then. / Her in my arms, / trying to re-negotiate each room slowly, / realising I knew nothing at all’ ('After'). She captures a familiar moment of overwhelming panic: ‘Among mountains of washing / the only things moving / were my terrified eyes’ ('13 Ways of looking at a washing-machine').

There are so many moments of recognition in these poems; I had my own children in the 1970s and now watch my own daughter navigating the same but different waters. But there is more here than the kitchen sink; Rouf places the minutiae of household routine into its universal context as the 'domestic becomes cosmic' and 'galaxies swirl under beds' ('The formation of dust'). She writes beautifully of erotic tenderness, the loving chaos of family life and the warmth of female friendship. There are seahorses, snail shells, and 'tip-of-the-nose prints / from marvelling at a sunset or a starlit night' ('Window pane'). 

But in 'Femme Maison 1945-47,' Rouf responds viscerally to the anguish expressed in the paintings of Louise Bourgeois: ‘She is me. / What was once a woman / is now naked, torso and bare legged, / conjoined with a house … Will she be herself once more, one day? I need to know.' 

Relationships are redefined: 'A man and a woman are equal / For a time. / Then, a woman and a washing machine are one' ('13 ways of looking at a washing machine'). Life is dominated by the tyranny of sorting bins, cleaning toilets, preparing a meal before work, ‘in time credit for once’ ('Cooking'). 'Hoovering / is an act of violence, Amazonian, full of fury' ('Hoovering'). A 'woman in Derby goes on rampage, / sucking up objects in her path, / …psychologists try to explain the trend, / but have to admit, they just don’t know' ('Hoovering II'). A chasm of misunderstanding opens; there is 'scrapping over the division of / labour.’ Rage over an un ironed skirt explodes, and ‘You stand in wonder … Somewhere the skirt still lurks, creased and ready’ ('Skirt').  

Rouf reserves her astonishment for the women who were ‘…so angry with Selma James / All she said was, imagine if housework were paid? ...  this work done for love / somehow discounted, not seen as toil / [but if] caring would have currency / …We could speak invoices, take time owing’ ('For Selma James'). Perhaps the most powerful poem in this collection is ‘Minding:’ ‘We budget for someone to look after our baby…’ Its repetitions convey the anguish of leaving a child with a stranger, for money, ‘praying to God, / the hand over, praying that she will not hurt my baby, / Transactions of love and care, the split inside, the ache so I can work, the unnamed cost of wanting both.’ 

In ‘Unattainable,’ Rouf writes: 'Serious: the work for which I am paid is cerebral, muscular…Valueless – the work for which I am unpaid / is expected.’ In the 1980s as a divorced single parent and a student, I was told by a male lecturer my place was in the home looking after my children, while women lecturers were introducing me to Betty Friedan, Adrienne Rich, and Selma James. 

Rouf prefaces this collection with one of James’ most famous quotes: ‘By demanding payment for housework we attack what is terrible about caring in our capitalist society.’ She founded the International Wages for Housework campaign in 1972 arguing that women’s unwaged work should be paid for by governments, but it attracted a great deal of hostility from those who feared women would be institutionalised in the home, and other women’s groups focused on fighting for the right to work outside the home and equal pay. Now in her nineties, James is still campaigning and writing; in a recent interview she said, 'I never understood that argument because women were already institutionalised in poverty in the home. Women were dependent on men.' It was a time when I had to get my husband’s signature on a rental agreement and women relied on their husband’s NI contributions to fund their pensions – many women are still suffering the consequences of that.  

In 2020 James wrote: ‘Especially since the Covid19 virus hit, it is undeniable that waged and unwaged carers are front line, and that we rely on them for survival.’ Rouf’s thoughtful and cogent poems contribute to a long and continuing tradition of making the personal political. 

About the reviewer

Sue Mackrell’s poetry has been published in a range of print and online publications including Diversifly (Fairacre Press), Agenda Poetry and Ekphrastic Review. She has an MA in Creative Writing (Loughborough) and taught there for several years. Retirement gives her time to write, indulge grandchildren and enjoy her garden. 

Review by Kate Durban of "My Name is Mercy" by Martin Figura

Martin Figura’s new collection was created as a project at Salisbury NHS foundation trust. These powerful poems offer a unique insight and perspective into the life of a hospital, and its inhabitants, during the pandemic. They convey the impact of Covid-19 on patients, families and staff in telling detail, resonant metaphors and poetic eloquence. The poems give us a moving glimpse of personal perspectives with great honesty and poignancy.

The collection opens with a poem about the journey to work in "Morning," which describes the stark emptiness of streets against the menace of the hospital chimneys. This evocation of place amplifies the collection. There is a sense of different worlds: the pettiness of people fighting over toilet rolls against the daily sacrifice of those battling Covid, patients and staff alike.

The experience of the illness itself is devastatingly captured in "Mother’s Day": "each deep breath coughed, the retching blue lit trip," and the fear brought by hallucinations in "Fever." There is death, but recovery too, reflected in the return of appetite: "delicious want, a little mash and gravy."

We see the experience of the health workers caring for the sick. In "Protection," the hot claustrophobia of PPE is a tempest, which soaks uniforms and leaves "faces run with rain." In "Night Shift," someone’s reflection is like an astronaut adrift from the world, in a universe of flickering monitors, once again conveying a sense of other worldliness. There is the raw grief of an end-of-life nurse who cuts short her maternity leave to come back to work and copes with seven deaths in a day. Everywhere there seems to be profound sickness, isolation and grief.

And yet even at the heart of the conflict, hope shines through these poems. There is a great sense of optimism and strength in the theme of teamwork. The poem "Notes Left Behind for a Newbie" offers encouragement by a team bound together like a raft. The perspective of staff in a variety of roles is important because it reminds us that doctors and nurses are not the only people who work in hospitals. We hear about the chaplain who ministers where he can in "the emptying out of anger or bedpans." There is the voice of the unseen pathologist in the lab and there is the care for a member of staff who has succumbed to the infection - "one of us," who expresses gratitude for "this family, these friends, this work." We hear of kindnesses - the holding of hands and the talk of home and the joy of online connections. And at the end there is the hope of new life in the Christmas day birth of Ethan. 

Martin Figura’s collection is a mighty accomplishment and by reading it I have been educated, moved and inspired.

About the reviewer

Kate Durban is an MA Creative Writing graduate from the University of Leicester and a part-time Cancer Wellbeing Nurse at Peterborough City Hospital. She lives in rural Northamptonshire with her husband Philip and two dogs. 

 

Review by Tracey Foster of "Fan-Peckled: Twelve Old Shropshire Words in Poems and Pictures" by Jean Atkin and Katy Alston

The smooth, matt cover of this illustrated book of poems gives a hint to the landscape of texture within. The onomatopoeic sounds of gates closing with a ‘clicket’ and footprints tramped through ‘slud’ echo through the lanes, hedges, skies and streams of these old paths. We get to feel the earth between our very fingers, ‘grey clay marbled with yellow’ as it ‘clarts’ up behind the heavy horses’ hooves. We feel the warm air of long summers past as the red kites take to flight ‘like a loaf rising,’ and we watch field furrows, dreaming of ‘the golden rustle of next summer’s wheat.’

Katy Alston’s grainy pencil sketches, splashed with wet tints, sit beside the words and capture images of a Shropshire past: narrow barges, shire horses, dappled undergrowth and red kites overhead. She uses a muted pallet to convey a disappearing pastoral life, as beautifully described in 'Noon-spell,' where a resting labourer, watches the sunlight on the cobbles:

          How the sun, in an odd trick,
          is spelling time to turn 
          a man from cartwright to mechanic.

 

The native dialogue is annotated with simple footnotes that explain the colloquialisms, giving us a deeper understanding of the poems, which were originally inspired by The Shropshire Word-Book: A Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words (Georgina F. Jackson, 1879). This is an exercise in keeping alive our ancient words, much championed by author Robert Macfarlane, who advocates the retelling of our forgotten lexicons - ‘language is fossil poetry’ - and who would no doubt applaud this exercise. 

Twelve expressions taken from the Word-Book are the starting point for the poems:

• Buts and Feerings - a number of furrows ploughed onto the land
• Lady-With-The-Ten-Flounces - a child’s term for a goldfinch
• Clicket - the fastening of a gate
• Fan-Peckled - to be freckled
• Keffel - a worthless horse
• Talking to Moments - mumbling to yourself
• Geolitudes - a burst of temper
• Shalligonaked - a useless, thin overcoat
• Glid - term for the Red Kite
• Noon-Spell - a labourer’s lunch time
• A Corve of Oddlings - a wicker basket of many things

 

From Fan-Peckled:

         Last night there were the speckled lakes
         On a sickle moon not watched
         Nor wished upon through glass.

         Then morning fetched a dot-dance in the woods
         Of deckled oak leaves and the bee-pad
         Footfalls, pollen-tickled, in the foxglove.

A collaboration of poet and artist, this is a lovely collection that is a timely diversion from modern problems and will apply a balm to the mind, through language, image and texture.

About the reviewer

Tracey Foster has been teacher of Art and Design in schools in Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Rutland for over 40 years. She took part in the Comma Press short story course in 2019 and had a short story published in a collection, Tales from Garden Street. She had a poem about Covid published by BusPoetry Magazine and has since commenced an MA in Creative writing at Leicester University. 

Review by Elizabeth Chell of "GREAT MASTER / small boy" by Liz Lefroy

 

Liz Lefroy’s pamphlet of poetry is innovative, beautifully composed and is as unique as Beethoven himself. Just like Beethoven’s 9th symphony, she combines two art forms, traditional and prose poetry. The artistry of her language, the vivid reflections journey us through the past and present life of Bonn and Vienna. Her themes lend themselves to the Romantic music of Beethoven, merging into the classical tones of her surroundings. 

We are mesmerised by the budding dancer in the poems, the toil and hard work as she finally flowers, and then her voyage into motherhood. The power of Lefroy's words places us beside her; lines such as ‘I  survive fleshy awkwardness’ resonate with our own adolescent selves. Of her pregnant self in the bath, the phrase ‘beached on the rounded island of myself’  is such a perfect description; for me this feeling has never been so adequately illustrated.

The strength of Lefroy's poetry lies in the marriage of the beauty of Beethoven's music, the beast of war, and the war within him, his deafness. Reading through her work you are reminded that, although Beethoven wrote beautiful music, there is often an undertone of sadness and despair. This is a story of life and development of beauty triumphing over despair; it is an extraordinary accomplishment and an absolute pleasure to read, again, and again.

About the reviewer
Elizabeth Chell is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Leicester University. She is a full-time teacher and lives in Leicester. 

Review by Sue Mackrell of "#MeToo: Rallying Against Sexual Assault and Harassment: A Women's Poetry Anthology," ed. Deborah Alma

This powerful anthology of poems has gained new resonance and purpose with the murder of Sarah Everard and the police response to a vigil held in her memory. It is a witness to the courage and strength of women who are speaking out against violence and intimidation. It harks back to Maya Angelou’s ‘And Still I Rise’ and reaches forward to a new era when women’s voices are heard and respected. 

Particularly pertinent are the poems which explore the ways in which women’s lives are circumscribed by an implicit sense of threat: ‘you think / you are being followed / and you pick up speed’ (Meg Cox). Familiar routes are charted: 'There’s the “Cheer up Love it Might Never Happen” Spot,' 'Here’s the “Avoid At All Costs” / Underpass' and 'I still had to walk round / the block to make sure he didn’t know I lived here / on my ordinary street at the end of my ordinary walk home' (Emma Lee).

The anthology opens with the barely understood experiences of childhood, the ‘whispers of kids being “interfered with”’ (Angela Topping), the invitations to look for rabbits and lost dogs, and the ‘It’s just a game ... the girl who tolerates it the longest / is the winner’ (Sally Jenkinson). Frustration and anger are expressed at  everyday abusive language, the ‘cocksure roar of boy used to his own way, / one more of the ones we warn each other about, / whose reputations we pass around like classroom / secrets’  (Jane Commane).

For some ‘all my stories [are] small / but always wary,’ the 'ground floor flat / a face at the window / no phone / no back door' (Amy Rainbow). But the most harrowing poems are gut wrenching and visceral, ‘Unwrapped / like a parcel of offal / slippery, coming / unstuck’ (Linda Goulden). Disturbing images stay in the mind, a child waiting for ‘the lock that unclicks, the coffining dark, the / hooded stranger with Papa’s voice, the makeshift bed’ (Pascale Petit). There are unanswerable questions:  ‘What do you do when your child is born of rape?’ (Louisa Campbell).

But the sheer quality of the writing keeps the reader going. Anger invigorates the language. More reflective pieces are sensitive and nuanced, and flashes of dark humour lighten the tension. Many contributors are nationally and internationally published poets such as Pascale Petit, Helen Ivory, Helen Mort, Roz Goddard, Jacqueline Saphra, Kim Moore, Sabrina Mahfouz and Jane Commane. Others are just beginning to find their voices in writing.  This anthology represents a place of safety where women can speak out without fear. As Deborah Alma writes, it is a call to action from a ‘pride of lionesses who learned to roar stories that choked us.’ It is a rallying cry of anger and impatience. ‘We stand together, each one a Spartaca / no longer silent or alone: each voice stronger, / massing, alive, a wild murmuration / of me too / me too / me too’ (Pippa Little).  

About the reviewer
Sue Mackrell’s poetry has been published online and in print anthologies and journals, most recently in Agenda Poetry, Ekphrastic Review, and Bloody Amazing (Dragon Yaffle 2020). She has an MA (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Loughborough University, where she was a part-time lecturer for several years. Now retired, she has taught and facilitated Creative Writing workshops in Higher and Further Education, schools, museums, art galleries, hospitals, and with ex offenders.

An earlier version of this review was published in Agenda Poetry Autumn 2019. 

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "No Guiding Star" by John Mills

In Awakenings, the neurologist Oliver Sacks suggests that ‘if we are to achieve any understanding of what it is like to be Parkinsonian, of the actual nature of Parkinsonian existence (as opposed to the parameters of Parkinsonian motion), we must … meet [patients] … in a sympathetic and imaginative encounter …. They can tell us, and show us, what it is like being Parkinsonian – they can tell us, but nobody else can.’ This is precisely what John Mills succeeds in doing in his new pamphlet, No Guiding Star: he tells us, through poetry, ‘what it is like being Parkinsonian.’ In many of his poems, Mills, who has had Parkinson’s disease for some years, gives a voice to sufferers – and, in that sense at least, No Guiding Star is an important work. 

Mills captures from within what it feels like to experience Parkinsonian symptoms – the tremors, shakes, shuffles, and so on:

          and then it shook
          and then it staggered
          and then it fell …
          and then it slurred …
          and then it couldn’t write
          and then it couldn’t smile
          and then it cried
          and then it couldn’t.

The pronoun ‘it,’ used throughout this poem (‘And then’), is ambiguous: on the one hand, it refers to the illness itself; on the other, it also reflects the dehumanising objectification of the sufferer, through both his or her symptoms and others’ perceptions of those symptoms. Personified in another poem, the illness declares to the sufferer: ‘you are mine / to dispose of / as I wish’; and, to the well, the sufferer becomes an ‘it,’ a ‘thing’ to be ‘laughed at,’ to be stared at, to be ‘nod[ded] sagely’ over. As Mills makes clear in the poem ‘Conjugation,’ the sufferer’s symptomatic ‘fumbling is comical,’ so that ‘I laugh / You laugh,’ while ‘He cries.’

This is all part of what Mills calls ‘Parkinson’s progress’ – the gradual, degenerative aspect of the disease, as it progresses from one symptom ‘and then’ to the next, 'and then' to the next, and so on. ‘Conjugation,’ for example, moves from ‘the beginning,’ where ‘the verb was / Shake,’ through stares and ridicule, to the final verb ‘He cries.’ The disease is, in effect, a narrative, a story, not unlike Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, moving from symptom to symptom, episode to episode. Sacks claims that ‘we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale,’ in order to understand neurological illness – and, again, this is exactly what Mills achieves, in miniature form, in his poetry. 

If ‘And then’ tells the story of degenerative illness in linear form, other poems capture the stops and starts, the non-linearity of Parkinson’s, as it both ‘progresses’ and loops back on itself. In ‘Nothing on my mind,’ for instance, Mills plays with the order of repeated lines in each stanza to alter their implied meanings:

          Nothing concentrates the mind
          like a serious illness
          although it is all consuming
          I have come to terms with it. 

          Like a serious illness
          time creeps up on us all
          I have come to terms with it
          let it pass

         Time creeps up on us all
         although it is all consuming
         let it pass
         nothing concentrates the mind. 

Again, the pronouns here are significant: on the one hand, Mills is speaking for himself (‘I’), but on the other, ‘time creeps up on us all’ – we are all implicated in his personal experience, all of us subject to time and its degenerative force. There is a similar implication in the poem ‘What dreams may come,’ where ‘It is not the book / that trembles in the night / but the reader.’ The reader is both Mills and ‘us,’ we who experience the tremors, the symptoms, the illness through Mills’s vivid poetry, ‘meet[ing] them,’ as Sacks says, ‘in a sympathetic and imaginative encounter.’

What Sacks emphasises above all is that doctors – and, by extension, the wider public too – need to encounter the sufferer of neurological illness as an ‘individual,’ as a ‘“who” as well as a “what,” a real person.’ The Parkinsonian is not ‘only’ a Parkinsonian for Sacks, but also an individual, whose existence is not defined entirely by illness, who has a life beyond that illness. Mills’s pamphlet once again enacts Sacks’s theory, by featuring beautiful poems about pot-holing, blackberrying, and familial grief, alongside the poems about Parkinson’s disease. Mills’s pamphlet hence not only allows the reader to share and understand that disease ‘in a sympathetic and imaginative encounter,’ but also to share and understand the person beyond the disease. Whether or not some of the experiences of the person beyond, in pot-holing, for example, have things in common with the experience of Parkinsonism – whether or not they share certain imagery with the illness and its symptoms – is left to the reader to decide. 

          There are no guiding stars
          no landmarks
          just blackness and a tunnel
          you wear like a straitjacket. 

About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor is director of Everybody's Reviewing. His books include the memoir Take Me Home: Parkinson's, My Father, Myself (Granta, 2007). His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk

Review by Victoria Pickup of "The Goldsmith's Apprentice" by Keith Chandler

Keith Chandler’s The Goldsmith’s Apprentice is a fascinating collection of poems which explores humanity with great empathy and skill. Chandler’s style is insightful and accessible, initially probing the working lives of people and revealing the details which make each job, and each subject, extraordinary. 

Chandler goes on to examine subjects in a variety of abstract situations, from a bigamist ('My Other Wife') to a brutal observation of an 'Old Man at the Gym,' whilst 'For a Day or Two' ponders what life might be like as a woman.

The collection broadens further with ‘Upper Slaughter: a “thankful village,”’ an original war poem shining a light on areas fortunate enough to see all their men return from the ravages of The Great War, as well as a confessional account from a survivor of Pol Pot’s regime in ‘The Witness.’ Chandler includes poems inspired by issues raised in the media, considering the lives of immigrants in ‘At the Car Wash,’ as well as the touching ‘Lullaby,’ a devastating reaction to the picture which caused a press frenzy of a refugee toddler washed up on the shores of Turkey in 2015.

Chandler draws his collection to a close with an array of personal poems which turn the lens inwards. ‘Mac, 4F, My Teaching Career’ looks into what we presume is Chandler’s own role as he laments subjects of his own past, before going on write several beautiful poems from the perspective of a new grandparent. 

This collection provides many moments of comedy (his description of using the M6 Toll services and purchasing a ‘superior cup a soup’ rang true) which only serve to enhance the more poignant moments in his poetry; displaying fragments of people's lives and focusing upon one or two tiny observations designed to simultaneously draw us in and pull us apart (usually with a impactful concluding line). It’s powerful and emotive writing about the everyday stuff we could so easily choose to walk past and ignore.

The Goldsmith’s Apprentice is a triumph; an absorbing and impactful collection of heartfelt poems which should be on the wishlists of glass-eye fitters, fishermen, politicians - and everybody in between.


About the reviewer
Victoria Pickup studied a BA in English and MA in Creative Writing at Loughborough University. A freelance writer for seven years, she continued to write creatively and in 2008 won the Café Writer’s Award with a poem inspired by travels in Bosnia: ‘The Chicken that Saved my Children.’ She was shortlisted for the Poetic Republic (MAG) poetry award in 2009 & 2010. Victoria now lives in Hampshire with her husband, three children and, of course, a pet chicken.