Review by Karen Powell-Curtis of "Familiar Phantoms" by Sue Forrester

Sue Forrester’s debut pamphlet, Familiar Phantoms, transports us across time and place, from England to Africa and Asia. We tend to think of phantoms in terms of people, but Sue Forrester writes of places as if they too are phantoms. 

Her poems are rich with sensory details. In "Lamping with Lizard" we hear the "rustles, chirps and clicks" of Africa after dark and, by torchlight, we see "Iridescent bulbous beetles." We experience the fragrances of the "verandah scented with citronella" in "Small World," and the "jasmine blooms" in "The Scent of War." The poem "Cooking with Mother" offers taste and touch through the "production / of eighty doughnuts for the tea tent."

Forrester uses the power of objects to evoke the phantoms in her poems, and to link the past to the present. For example, in "One September Day," the Registrar’s fountain pen triggers a memory of a "21st birthday gift from Aunt Win," and simultaneously creates a new memory as she "Writes in the book, the forever book, / in the forever ink" to register a birth.

A "silver and black obsidian butterfly brooch" brings to mind another aunt in "And Apple Pie." In this prose poem, it is the absence of a particular object, a "silver-trimmed barrel" from which the aunt "dispensed chocolate biscuits" which represents the unique relationship between the niece and her aunt. Forrester writes, "And I mourn that biscuit barrel, swept away in a heartless house clearance, her daughters knowing only their mother, not my aunt."

"Needlecraft" is full of details revealing the love between a family. The central item in this poem is a knitting needle which has been repurposed to check "the lemon cake is done." The needle is the "survivor of the pair I used / when my big sister taught me to knit." This prompts the memory of sitting "on the little chair, / Daddy made for me," watching "my sister make a buttonholed loop / on the pot holder I’d knitted for Mum."

We gain a sense of a life through recollections involving cars in "My Brother’s Car." The poem ends with the moving description of the brother telling "a crowded chapel how he got to know / our father under a car" with "oil dripping onto their heads and hands: / a malodorous unction, full of grace."

The phantoms in Sue Forrester’s pamphlet are sensitively summoned but her poems never slip into sentimentality.

About the reviewer
Karen Powell-Curtis has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. Her poetry has been published in various anthologies and magazines. 

Review by Rennie Parker of "Poems of a Nottingham Lace-Runner" by Mary Bailey, with an Introduction by John Goodridge

 

How pleasant to make the acquaintance of Mary Bailey, a lace worker ("Lace Runner") from the great industrial city of Nottingham. For here is her pamphlet, her only one, since she was dead by her mid-thirties; but available at last thanks to the combined efforts of researchers plus Five Leaves Press.

Bailey is adept at ballad metre, but this should not be surprising, as mill hands and fieldworkers alike would improve their monotonous hours by singing. It’s possible that she had popular tunes in mind when composing her verse:

          You ladies of Britain, we most humbly address
               And hope you will take it in hand,
           And at once condescend on poor Runners to think,
               When dress’d at your glasses you stand.
  

There is ample evidence of the love she feels for her children, with none of that reserve which members of the upper classes were meant to show; she works hard and gets about, rebuking mean girls and enjoying the small wins of everyday life on the breadline. I like the sound of this person; the Baileys appear like the numerous and chaotic family next door but where their priorities are in the right order. 

Moreover, it’s important to know that literature was not only available to her but a realistic means of survival at the time. Literature was not an add-on or a hobby; it was part of the work she could do and where she might expect some benefits from that production, whether in sales, patronage, or as a springboard for a career. She knows what is popular at the time: there are moral instructions, appeals, an epitaph - but I find the most engaging piece is her verse letter, meant for her family in Staffordshire:

          Dear brother and sister the packet is come
          To let you both know we are safely got home:
          And, in this epistle I’m happy to say 
          My dear little Ellinor slept all the way …

The book was produced by subscription, same as the model used by today’s online publishers such as Unbounders; her patrons are listed at the back, numbering 90 in total with the vast majority of them being female - none of that idle sitting in drawing rooms for these ladies -  and it’s probably significant that Bailey’s two editions happened in the same decade as her vastly more popular compatriot, John Clare (who was only fifty miles away by stagecoach at the time).

As an insight into one woman’s life and experience, it’s beautiful; here is an authentic voice from those times, showing how a literate working woman thought and felt in the 1820s. Only the usual word of warning for any production like this: she is of course a supplicant, asking favours of the gatekeepers and upper class folk who could determine how she lived or died, or whether the literature should continue at all.

About the reviewer
Rennie Parker is a poet living in the East Midlands, and she is mostly published by Shoestring Press. Her latest collection Balloons and Stripey Trousers, a nightmare journey into the toxic workplace, came out earlier this year. She works in FE and blogs occasionally here. She is also on Twitter/X and Bluesky.

Review by Rachael Clyne of "The Postcolonial Flâneuse" by Ramisha Rafique

I am attracted by flânerie, the random wander in cityscape, and was intrigued by the postcolonial aspect. While I anticipated the gauntlet of sharp political comment, I found myself immersed in Rafique’s gentle reflections on gender, race and religion as she tours street cafes. As a Muslim woman she already disrupts the white male origins of the genre.

From lockdown in Nottingham to Paris and Marseille, from Istanbul and Syria she offers vignettes. She wants to be part of the flow, rather than a labelled stereotype: "She has become part of / the mass. She is him, and her, / and them." Rafique vividly engages our senses with "Café Soundtrack" – music, chatter, accents, clink of cups, adding visual notes – a man fiddling with his ring, a passerby’s cloud breath. 

One minute we are on a Nottingham street, the next we are in Paris where statues of past empire become sleeping places for the current homeless. "For Those Lost in The Kashmiri Diaspora" concerns her own heritage and continuing impact of a region divided by the British then recolonised by Pakistan and India. The book covers many themes: conversing with God through a foreign language, social decline in the face of climate change and the joys of girl-chat setting their world to rights over coffee and cake.  A museum visit hints at how its art treasures reflect colonial tastes and cultural plunder. 

With the poet’s light touch we are offered a smorgasbord of tastes, customs and meditations, that stimulate food for thought. She eventually takes us into her familiar comfort zones, e.g. "Arab Quarter, Marseille," where her uncovered head is disapproved of by an older woman and she is comforted by "the fusion of black tea leaves, mint, and sugar." All in all, this is a pamphlet well written and worth reading.

About the reviewer
Rachael Clyne is a retired psychotherapist. Her prizewinning first collection Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams) concerns eco-issues. Her pamphlet, Girl Golem (4Word) and her latest collection, You’ll Never Be Anyone Else (Seren Books), explore themes of identity and otherness, including migrant heritage, LGBTQ+ and relationships.    

Review by Jonathan Wilkins of "New Uses for a Wand" by Fiona Theokritoff

Fiona Theokritoff has a wonderful way with words that beguile, enchant, and beg for answers to so many questions. Science, myth and fancy intertwine in her poetic world, a world of warrior queens and sad aspiring mothers who mourn their loss, searching for an answer to their quest for motherhood. Then there are the shoes of all types and fashions, old and used, newly formed, hidden in walls, each with a fascinating tale to tell. 

A world of wonder is brought to us in perfectly curated poems in all shapes and sizes that show Fiona Theokritoff’s talent for words. From the Big Bang to Brian Cox, the pamphlet takes us on adventures in science, asking questions, demanding we investigate further as all good word-detectives should. Unknown words and phrases pique our interest, demand that we look further, her words drawing us into mysteries that we must unravel. Then there are poems of dancing, and motherhood: at last motherhood is achieved, the beauty of the child juxtaposed with the tawdriness of real life. 

We end with a mother’s death. A child was carried, a child was born, and "Cartographer" truly maps the matrilineal life of a family where the mother's flame is passed on to the new matriarch. Life goes on as it does, and words go on too, demonstrating the completeness of the family - completeness in just ninety words. In the words, we read of dreams and reality, past, present and yes, future - a future where words mean everything, where cultures clash, where dreams are dreamt and reality is faced. Indeed, the beauty of Fiona Theokritoff’s New Uses for a Wand is that her poetry allows us space as readers to magic up our own reality.

And finally: a huge shout out to Five Leaves who are introducing us to so many wonderful poets through their positive recognition of talent.

About the reviewer

Jonathan Wilkins is 68. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones’ bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester and Warwick Universities. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s.

You can read more about New Uses for a Wand by Fiona Theokritoff on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by James Nash of "Remembering" by Julie Gardner

This is a tender and moving collection celebrating and memorialising two lives, the poet’s mother and her own husband, but succeeding, as all good poetry does, in finding universal truths about our common humanity and shared experience of loss.

Deftly constructing a history for her mother who died at forty-seven, and recording the emptiness after her husband’s death, these are quiet but truthful poems that bind us into the ordinary, but somehow extraordinary, emotional textures of human lives, and show us how we survive in the aftermath of tragedy.

This is from ‘Moving On’:

          After the van had gone
          I mopped the kitchen floor
          then went upstairs, stood awhile,
          as empty as the house itself.

Julie Gardener is a fine poet, content to let her readers ‘join up the dots’ if you like, but also happy to acknowledge the influence of other poets like Grace Nichols and Jacob Polley. She is playful in terms of form in ‘Rondo,’ riffing on nursery rhyme (a motif which appears in several of these poems), but ultimately what we have in this fine collection is a poet using simple and gracefully chosen words to explore the territory of memory and grief. The almost Wordsworthian reliance on everyday language gives these poems an emotional reach and power that is refreshing and unusual.

This is from ‘For Arthur’:

          Widow sounds so sad and slow
          and I am neither, though I will
          forever wish you here.

The photograph on the front cover of the poet’s mother is blurred; the poems inside reclaim the misty lives of those who have gone before, mother and husband, and prove again and again that art can construct great memorials. The gift of this brilliant collection is that it allows us to connect to our own loss and mourning, our own ‘remembering’ if you like.

About the reviewer
James Nash is a poet based in Leeds. He often writes in the sonnet form and his next collection, Notes of Your Music, will be published by Valley Press.

Review by Roy Marshall of "Versions of the North" ed. Ian Parks

Versions of The North, Five Leaves Press 2013

The contemporary poetry anthology seems to be in rude good health. There are anthologies based on ‘new generations’ of poets, poets under thirty,  anthologies to showcase or create a school or genre. Others, like the Forward, gather prize winners and well established poets. Still others try to counterbalance these by  presenting the ‘best’ poems from small presses in any given year; many are enjoyable and some are useful, for example, in bringing new voices to the fore.

But few feel ‘necessary’, or give the impression of being able to stand the test of time. Fewer still could be given out in a pub, to be understood and enjoyed by the recipients. I suspect that Versions of The North could.

Subtitled Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry, this is an anthology from Five Leaves Press, edited by Ian Parks. Paradoxically, given its stated geographical borders, the one hundred and forty-seven pages of poems cover a huge variety of themes and gather a multiplicity of voices to celebrate and reflect upon the physical, historical, political, geographical and emotional landscapes of the north of England.

This is a generous book in more ways than one. Ian Parks defines Yorkshire Poetry in the introduction as ‘poetry written by poets with a strong connection to Yorkshire either by birth or close association.’

Major strengths are that poems by deceased poets and sit alongside work by rising stars like Helen Mort and David Tait, and that the ‘celebrated’ sit beside the ‘overlooked’ or less well known.  A democratic accessibility is at the heart of this collection; I was originally going to title this review ‘A new republic of the head and heart,’ a line borrowed and adapted from a poem by Ian Parks.

But the inclusively and accessibility of this collection doesn’t mean the book isn’t full of surprise, confrontation, celebration, grief, humour and moments of astonishing beauty.
The opener is the wonderfully inventive and assured ‘Frost-Gods’ by the late Harold Massingham. Within three lines the reader is located in a landscape where there is ‘Frost-flack over these collieries.’ We are also located in language at once direct and inventive, no-nonsense and dour, exhilaratingly vivacious and, to quote the poem, ‘energied with Reverie.’  There is a self-knowing and perhaps humorously deployed line about surveying a post industrial landscape, and it might stand for much of what this book is about: ‘I look it over, warming / To that grim aura:’

Throughout the collection I encountered, and warmed to, the geography of old-mill workings and slag heaps, the ghosts of heavy industry, the echo and sometimes physical reminders of territorial and political battles, the landscapes of moors and crags as well as great cathedrals, tea shops, rivers and the sea, all described by a spectrum of distinctively individual but collectively ‘northern’ voices.

These lines from Maurice Rutherford’s ‘Outlook on Monday’ put me in mind of Les Dawson’s housewife in a pinafore, arms folded, alert and primed for gossip: ‘A neighbour swabs her doorstep / the clothesline a farcical can-can / incontinence knickers in chorus / high-kicking out of time.’ Dawson’s characters were archetypes, but they were recognisable and loveable ones, and his portrayal of stereotypes was never malicious. The same can be said of the many characters that inhabit this book.

George Kendrick finds cause to celebrate a bicycle tyre in a tree, and this highlights a key aspect of this collection, namely a lack of obscurity, an absence of the deliberately ‘clever’, the flashy or brash. Most, if not all, of the poems, are written using ‘everyday’ language, and many refuse to be tidied or clipped into neatness, but maintain the expansiveness of real speech; perhaps Les Murray’s antipodean ‘Quality of Sprawl’ has its equivalent in northern England. This anthology serves to remind the reader how richly expressive and elegant everyday English can be.

Together with explorations of the seemingly ordinary, there is much bravery in dealing with big themes. This anthology doesn’t shy away from conflict, whether it is the bitter confrontation of the miner’s strike or issues of identity, class and race. Nor is there any trace of a simple romantic view of long gone industries. Instead there is ambiguity in poems which deal with this loss, an acknowledgement that whilst these industries provided livelihoods and a sense of community, they also laid scars across the land and the lives of many of its inhabitants.

Glyn Hughes’s ‘Rock Rose’ is a celebration of the reclamation of the land by nature: ‘Hammer and Chisel, ledger and pen, / cradle and loom are rested / hewn stone is overgrown or sweetened.’ Those who were lucky enough to have known the late Ann Atkinson will be particularly moved by her poem ‘Petrifying Well,’ in which Ann seems to be expressing acknowledgement of the passing of all things.

There are far too many standout poems to mention here, but the delightful invention and controlled rage and humour of Ian Duhig is well represented by his five poems, as is the masterful control of Pat Borthwick in ‘It’s Only’, a tour de force in which she sardonically shines light on the dull waters of the Humber and uncovers a dinosaur’s scaphoid (or does she?) among the brickwork and slack on the foreshore. There is a lot of weather in this book; inevitably rain and snow, but also sunshine, notably in Jules Smith’s poem ‘The Barefoot Bride’.

Elsewhere Ann Sansom sings the hymn of a humble slug, while Paul Mills captures the power of nature on a different scale in ‘At the Lake House’: ‘Stronger than love / is stone’s connection with water. / Anchored and fluid among the peaks / they sculpt each other with force, with likeness, with nearness’. Another stand out poem is Graham Hamilton’s heartbreakingly beautiful tale of salmon and his reflection of changes in the lives of the men who fish and fished them.

I know that  editor Ian Parks had to persuaded into including two of his own poems by a delegation of the anthologised poets. This comes as no surprise since self-promotion doesn’t seem to be Ian’s priority.  But his own ‘Strikebreakers’ is an essential part of the picture, containing a line which conjures a state of civil war in which ‘the mounted men broke through’. In this remembrance, there is a chilling sense of the inescapable and inevitable legacy of such a bitter division and conflict. This is followed by Ed Reiss’s biblical take on un-forgiven scabs. In different ways both poems perform the difficult task of describing the detail and legacy of such battles without becoming overtly polemical.

This is not a mono-cultural  anthology; Liz Cashdan, Debjani  Chatterjee and Ian Duhig among others remind us of the history of migration and the variety of Yorkshire voices and experiences. But I would have liked to see a few more voices springing from differing ethnic backgrounds. Perhaps with the passage of time these voices might come to the fore. This small point aside, Ian Parks has selected and sequenced these poems to create an enduring map of a past and present Yorkshire as seen and described by several generations of its children.  That he has succeeded in his ambition is testament to the sheer quality and variety of the poems.