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 James Nash of "Selected Poems" by Donald Davie, ed. Sinéad Morrissey

I like a knotty, argumentative poet.  And I like Donald Davie very much. He was a blind date.  I knew the name but had read, to my knowledge, none of his work. Barnsley born but for much of his life a peripatetic academic, there’s more than a bit of Yorkshire grit in these poems, the grit around which pearls are formed.

In a brilliant new selection by Sinéad Morrissey there are pieces from every decade of Davie’s writing life; poems where he foreswears sentimentality and romanticism and chews away at ideas and experiences like a favourite bone. What we have then in his writing is a synthesis of his internal dialogue that speaks directly to us. These are not imagery-filled, metaphor-heavy poems and they feel as if he has chipped them, mason-like, from stone to ‘chisel honey from the saxifrage.’

Poems which reference 18th-century poet William Cowper and Barnsley Cricket Club win me over instantly, and I warm to the poet and the man. I am astonished by how much he wrote and how close he was in age to the present me when he died in 1995. I think we are now dating.

This is an accessible exploration of Davie’s work.  And it makes me want to read more, so this taster selection clearly works. It is an important reminder of the great writer he was, and how relevant he still is, nearly thirty years after his death. Morrissey’s introduction is clear-eyed and intelligent, a perfect primer for a clear-eyed and intelligent poet who in his poem 'Wombwell on Strike' writes:

           I was born of this 
           tormented womb, the taut West Riding.

About the reviewer
James Nash is a poet and writer based in Leeds. Heart Stones, his third collection of sonnets, was published by Valley Press in 2021.