Review by Neil Fulwood of "New and Selected Poems" by Julian Stannard

As usual, when a new collection of poetry lands on my desk, I open it at random and sample two or three poems to get a feel for tone, content and the author’s personal style, before reading the book in sequence and mulling over my review. At random in this case turned out to be page 21 and a poem called "Speed," which concerns itself with a volume of Rupi Kaur, a waste-paper basket and the peregrination of the one toward the other. Grinning devilishly, I flipped toward a hundred and some pages and alighted on "Closed," a wry state-of-the-nation piece which ends with a memorable redefinition of "Protestant Work Ethic." I stuck the kettle on, settled back and started at the beginning. I ripped through the book’s 247 pages in two sittings.

Let’s be honest: a lot of poetry can be po-faced. Overly serious, with humour regarded as the province of light verse, and light verse regarded as something of a pejorative. Hallelujah, then, for Julian Stannard, who gives us the best of both worlds: poetry that blends intellectual rigour, sterling craftsmanship and sly wit in a seemingly effortless manner. 

There’s a mordant Englishman abroad aesthetic in poems like "The Blessing of the Octopus at Lerici," "Piazza Della Posta Vecchia" and the magnificently titled "The Road to Bastardo," but mainly he achieves the kind of loose-limbed informality that was the trademark of the New York school (only without the attendant self-indulgence or tendency to the verbose). Not that Stannard aligns himself with any particular movement or trend. Simply, he doesn’t need to. And speaking of magnificent titles, wait till you experience the pure delirious joy of "The Gargantuan Muffin Beauty Contest." Or "Well-Regulated Dumplings." It takes some skill to fashion poems that live up to titles like these.

Flipping through the book once again - already it’s proving one of those handful of titles in my collection that I find myself instinctively drawn back to - I looked for something succinct, something I could quote in full, that would give the reader a flavour of the Julian Stannard experience. Almost immediately, "What Did I Find on Bogliasco Beach" presented itself:

         Bottle-tops, bottle-tops, bottle-tops
         grey stones and some smaller red ones too

         desiccated seaweed, stuff mostly
         and something that once hung from a tree.

         And oh yes I found a pair of lips.

To use a cliché more suited to film reviews, Stannard’s New & Selected is a wild ride. Do yourself a favour: buy a ticket; take the trip.

About the reviewer 
Neil Fulwood lives and works in Nottingham. He has published four full poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It, Can’t Take Me Anywhere, Service Cancelled, and The Point of the Stick, and a volume of political satires, Mad Parade, with Smokestack Books.

You can read more about New and Selected Poems by Julian Stannard on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Neil Fulwood of "Beethoven: The String Quartets" by David Vernon

Erudite without being pretentious, learned without being dustily academic, philosophical without being obfuscatory, David Vernon’s wonderful book, Beethoven: The String Quartets, whirls the reader through Beethoven’s sixteen string quartets, locating them in every possible context - social, political, religious, historical, contemporary - as well as rigorously exploring their relationship to the rest of Beethoven’s oeuvre. Vernon comes across as a polymath, an intellectual and a man of culture. That he also demonstrates wit, warmth and humanity is the icing on the cake. Beethoven: the String Quartets is the kind of book that sets the gold standard for non-fiction.

About the reviewer
Neil Fulwood lives and works in Nottingham. He has published four full poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It, Can’t Take Me Anywhere, Service Cancelled and The Point of the Stick; and a volume of political satires, Mad Parade, with Smokestack Books.

Review by Rennie Parker of "The Point of the Stick" by Neil Fulwood

Here is one of those unclassifiable pamphlets which makes perfect sense when you think about it. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before? Take any number of conductors - magnetic figures all - encapsulate their style, their motivation or their hallmark, and present them as a sequence where the reader can guess who it is. Art as an enigma, much like the alchemy of conducting itself. You can read the unnamed stanzas in Neil Fulwood's nifty little collection, and check your answers at the back of the book, like any good test paper. I scored four and I'm disgusted with myself; maybe I am listening to the wrong recordings, but I enjoyed the guessing game nevertheless.

Of course we do not learn overmuch about the conductors as they march past - the poems are between eight and twelve lines, so the poet has to hit the ground running with a bijou design of those dimensions. What we have are lightning sketches, illuminating without becoming cartoonish. Judging by the correct four guesses, the pictures are accurate too: for instance, there are films of Adrian Boult wielding his trademark 'billiard cue,' and he was as sparing in his gestures as the poem implies, 'deployed with a slight / supple turn of the / wrist.' I like how 'wrist' is separated from the preceding line, emphasising the clean gesture. The collection is full of expert touches like this, the 'punchline' exactly situated, the felicitous phrase which brings the portrait alive.

There are references to war-torn countries, driven individuals rebuilding themselves, and the conductors as self-made people as well as media stars - familiar enough ideas when it comes to international artists, but relayed here in Fulwood's uncluttered and direct manner with not a word wasted. Each segment dovetails in with its neighbours so well that there is no 'odd one out,' which sometimes happens with a sequence. I would have welcomed a couple more lines for each conductor, because I was interested to know more about them - but it was not part of the poet's design; and anyway, that's what biographies are for.

The Point of the Stick may sound like a niche pamphlet but in fact there is a wide audience who would love this collection. Instrumentalists, concertgoers, choir members and Radio 3 listeners could all benefit from finding a copy in their birthday envelopes. Better still, it's so pocket-sized you can take it with you to a marathon recital and read it during the interval. As a concept album, it is small and perfectly formed. Go, little book! I am posting my copy to a pianist friend who will appreciate both the poetry and the subterranean references to complex lives and their overwhelming dedication to music.

About the reviewer
Rennie Parker's latest collection is Balloons and Stripey Trousers (Shoestring, 2023). She was born in Leeds but lives in south Lincolnshire, and currently works for an FE college. Blogs here, daily nonsense on Twitter @rennieparker.

You can read a review of Balloons and Stripey Trousers on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Review by Neil Fulwood of "ColdHarbour" by Kathryn Daszkiewicz

Kathryn Daszkiewicz is a poet of understatement and almost scalpel-like precision. Her poems have the impact of a moment of silence in a grand symphony, the hint of a memory or an idea stirring unreachably at the back of the mind. 

She is a forensically observational poet of the natural world as ‘Misletoe’ and ‘Four Seasons of Haunting,’ towards the beginning of the collection, demonstrate in fine style. The theme threads through ColdHarbour, culminating in the brilliantly sustained and imaginative sequence ‘The Greenwood Speaks: Twelve Trees of Ogham’ and the elegiac ‘Woods Seen from a Train.’

Elsewhere, there are poems on family, relationships, landscapes, the passing of time and the canvases of Edward Coley Burne-Jones. Throughout it all, Daszkiewicz’s voice is plaintive, her poetics subtle and her command of form and lineation and the use of negative space (particularly in ‘Harm and the Man’) are controlled and assured.

An enviable facility, evident in many of the pieces here, is the poem as a single sentence, unspooling down the page in perfect cadence, finely nuanced and as delicately balanced as a house of cards. Which is why I have chosen, in this review, to forego the inclusion of quotes. Trying to represent Daszkiewicz’s artistry by means of a handful of snipped out lines here are there would be a reductive and pointless exercise. 

Take ‘Visiting Time,’ for example. A poem about ageing, the trickery of memory and the traumas of war, it is constructed in two sections that play off each other, it deals in the accumulation of minutiae and it delivers its hammerblow denouement no louder than a whisper. To isolate five or six lines from it would tell you nothing. To read the whole piece is to quietly experience heartbreak. It is the kind of poem that doesn’t need a critic to talk it up or take it apart; it just needs a reader.

On which note, consider my work here done: ColdHarbour is an aesthetically and emotionally satisfying collection by a writer at the height of her powers. Seek out a copy. Make time to lose yourself in it and return to it. It really is that good.

About the reviewer
Neil Fulwood lives and works in Nottingham. He has published three full poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It, Can’t Take Me Anywhere and Service Cancelled, and a volume of political satires, Mad Parade, with Smokestack Books.

Review by Neil Fulwood of "Radical Normalisation" by Celia A. Sorhaindo

Here’s roughly the first half of "Poetic Turn of Events," the compact, bristling, self-questioning opening poem in Sorhaindo’s astonishing collection:

        Today, The People are giving back,
        mirroring, throwing light, honest
        feedback to The Poets; uncovering
        cryptic metaphors; deciphering line
        breaks; telling The Poets exactly what
        they feel-think of them & their loopy
        poetic turns …

It’s what I’d be tempted to describe as a game-changer, except the game is barely yet afoot, and Sorhaindo has another 90 pages to deliver - 90 pages in which the poet challenges herself as rigorously as she does her readers; in which soaring intellectualism and street patois exist side by side; in which womanhood jostles with race, cultural heritage, self-interrogation and the sheer defiant act of surviving.

Poems on the aftermath of a hurricane and the rebuilding of a community are delivered in clear-sighted and stringently unsentimental terms, while a questing and experimental sensibility is apparent in pieces such as "Un-Set Binary Bits - Lingua Franca" and "animula : rapture of an Introverted Narcissist," where Sorhaindo seems to be testing the boundaries of the page itself, never mind the flexibility of the words thereon.

Radical Normalisation fuses linguistic fireworks and a freewheeling imagination, tempered by the poet’s awareness of the weighty responsibility of her craft, and is unlike any other collection I’ve read this year. 

About the reviewer
Neil Fulwood lives and works in Nottingham. He has published three full poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It, Can’t Take Me Anywhere and Service Cancelled, and a volume of political satires, Mad Parade, with Smokestack Books.

Review by Neil Fulwood of "Following Teisa" by Judi Sutherland

Judi Sutherland’s book-length river poem begins with these lines:

          How it wells up from nowhere to chase
          gravity downhill, becomes a rill,
          a rickle of old stones, then hurtles rocks,
          purls and pools in reeds, broadens, welcomes in
          the tribute of the lesser streams …

The sense of motion, the ebb and flow of Sutherland’s cadences, the unforced use of alliteration and internal rhyme: everything coheres into an exquisite aesthetic statement of intent which is developed and delivered on as the book progresses.

Following Teisa - the word is the ancient name of the River Tees - has its root (or should I say its wellspring?) in an earlier book-length poetical work, Teisa: A Descriptive Poem of the River Teese, its Towns and Antiquities, by Anne Wilson, apparently self-published in 1778 and long since forgotten. Sutherland includes a facsimile of Wilson’s title page along with a short but informative introduction providing context on Wilson’s life and work, as well as setting out her own stall.

Sutherland’s achievements in Following Teisa are certainly not to be under-appreciated: the book functions with equal success as a work of poetry, an evocation of the natural world, a travelogue and a social document. Each stage of her journey is carefully delineated with relevant place names, while a scattering of beautifully rendered line drawings by Holly Magdalene Scott perfectly complement Sutherland’s words.

Only two other works came to mind as I read Following Teisa: Nancy Gaffield’s Meridian and Alan Baker’s Riverrun; Following Teisa deserves to stand head and shoulders alongside  them. By turns lyrical, contemplative, urgent and incisive, it is a joy. 

About the reviewer
Neil Fulwood lives and works in Nottingham. He has published three full poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It, Can’t Take Me Anywhere and Service Cancelled. Smokestack Books will publish his new collection, Mad Parade, in July 2022.

You can read another review of Judi Sutherland's Following Teisa by Sally Evans on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Review by Neil Fulwood of "Fox Fires" by Wyl Menmuir

Get past the title and YA-style cover design, both of which seem curiously at odds with the novel’s tone and literary aesthetic, get past a slightly awkward first chapter, and Menmuir’s sophomore outing develops into a fascinating study of the interrelationship between cityscape and mindscape through which glimpses of Iain Banks, Haruki Murakami and perhaps even an afterimage of Stefan Zweig can be discerned.

In an imaginative conceit every bit as good as that which powers China Mieville’s The City and the City, Fox Fires is set in a city-state called simply O, its borders recently opened to the outside world, where maps are forbidden and the streets unnamed (the better, apparently, to confuse would-be invaders, though how the absence of signs is a deterrent to enemy tanks or ground troops is left unexplained). Allegorically, this concept is fantastic and Menmuir is at his best when he weaves his claustrophobic world-building around it (O is subject to curfews, its citizens spy on each other, strange propagandist posters appear and disappear randomly).

When Fox Fires works, it works well - particularly in regard to its mysterious narrator - while its heroine is beautifully nuanced and as memorable a protagonist as you could want. The most effective scenes achieve the dream-like unreality of an art house movie (indeed, it would be interesting to see a director with a European sensitivity take it up as a project).

At 188 pages, it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and with the exception of a few dialogue passages which suffer from being aphoristic rather than organic the writing is controlled, evocative and intelligent. I’d certainly recommend it as an intriguing work by a developing talent, though I did wonder if it was just a couple more drafts away from being truly great.

About the reviewer

Neil Fulwood lives and works in Nottingham. He has published two full poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It and Can’t Take Me Anywhere; his third, Service Cancelled, will be released on 29th July 2021.

You can read more about Neil's work and his collection Can't Take Me Anywhere on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

You can read more about Wyl Menmuir's Fox Fires, and listen to a special reading of the opening scene from the novel on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

A Book That Changed Me, by Neil Fulwood: “Collected Poems,” by Sylvia Plath

It was the mid-80s. I was thirteen. My Nan was housebound. Every couple of weeks I’d go to Bulwell library and take out some books for her. I remember borrowing a scattering of classics and regency romances, but her tastes predominantly ran to poetry. As can be imagined by anyone who knows the area, Bulwell library - back then far smaller than in its current incarnation - didn’t exactly offer the broadest selection of verse. Nor did I, at that age, have the broadest frame of reference. My literary horizons were bounded by the Alistair MacLean and Desmond Bagley thrillers on Dad’s bookshelf, plus the odd well-thumbed James Herbert paperback doing the rounds at school.

I knew Nan preferred what I’d heard referred to as the Romantics, so it was a pretty safe bet that if a collection or anthology had a woodland or river scene on the cover - or a reproduction of an oil painting with some dude in a silk shirt looking all moody with a quill pen - it would be the right kind of thing. Failing that, flick through a few pages and check that most of it rhymed. Even with these safeguards in place, though, it didn’t take long to exhaust their stock of Nan-friendly poetry. Which is how I came to take a punt on Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems. 

Nan approached the book with some scepticism. She opened it at random, read one poem (I later found out it was “Daddy”) and asked me to return it. I did, but not before reading a fair few poems. I didn’t understand many of them, but the images, the immediacy, and particularly the white-hot fury of the final works struck a spark in my mind. Poetry can do this? I thought. I want in! When I finally returned the volume, I immediately checked it out again on my own library card. And renewed it over and over until the librarian started eyeing me suspiciously. I asked my folks for a copy for my next birthday. It was probably for the best that neither of them perused it before they got stuck in with the wrapping paper.

It’s because of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems that I read poetry, let alone write it. My third collection is out in July, and it’s all because I choose a book at random in Bulwell library when I was thirteen.

About the reviewer 
Neil Fulwood lives and works in Nottingham. He has published two full poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It and Can’t Take Me Anywhere; his third, Service Cancelled, will be released on 29th July 2021.

You can read more about Neil's work and his collection Can't Take Me Anywhere on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Neil Fulwood of "Plague Songs" by Martin Rowson

 

As a political cartoonist, Rowson has a distinct, immediately recognisable style. His images are exaggerated, grotesque, overblown but swimming with cruelly accurate detail: Brueghel meets Spitting Image, only funnier. 

His poetry is not dissimilar. The longest piece in Plague Songs unspools across seven pages. The majority clock in at two or three. Most poets publish individual collections of around 50-60 pages; Plague Songs runs to over 260. 

Rowson’s subject is COVID-19 by way of the first lockdown, government ineptitude, media inanity and the abject surrealism of being alive (but only just) during 2020. As he explains in the foreword, he wrote a poem more or less daily between mid May and late November, railing at anything from Matt Hancock to Death himself (several poems mourn the passing of a long-time friend), and in compiling them for Plague Songs an editorial decision was made to leave them in their original, often first, draft. Hence, the rough and ready, raw, sometimes self-indulgent, unmediated aesthetic that defines the collection. 

They are also frequently offensive. When Rowson has a target in sight, be it a senior cabinet minister or the virus itself, everything is fair game and no quarter is asked or given. Nothing is off limits. The scatological becomes merely another poetic device. The language is saltier than that of a bad-tempered sailor with Tourette’s. Plague Songs is not for the faint-hearted or the easily offended.

What it most emphatically is, however, is the most honest literary response to 2020 that has yet to hit the bookshelves. It’s often said that we don’t get the heroes we want but the heroes we need. In Martin Rowson, we have that hero. Just don’t expect a cape or PG-rated content.

About the reviewer
Neil Fulwood was born in Nottingham, where he still lives and works. He is the author of two poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It and Can’t Take Me Anywhere, with a third forthcoming in June 2021.

You can read more about Can't Take Me Anywhere on Creative Writing at Leicester here.

Review by Neil Fulwood of "The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster" by Sarah Wimbush

 

When a pamphlet wins a major competition adjudicated by such luminaries as Imtiaz Dharker and Ian McMillan - and when a number of the poems within that pamphlet have been placed in or won the Mslexia, Red Shed, Live Cannon International and Bread & Roses Poetry Competitions (and others: the acknowledgements page does some heavy lifting) - it’s a safe guess that the reader is in for some good poetry.

The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster isn’t just good; it’s as good as it gets. As a second salvo following the Seren pamphlet Bloodlines (2019), which explored the poet’s Traveller heritage, it doubles down on that work’s statement of intent, that establishes Wimbush as a major new talent, a distinctive voice, in British poetry. 

Broadly, The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster explores geography, class, recent history (key poems take the 1984-85 miners’ strike as a backdrop), heritage and landscapes, both internal and external. There is arguably more going on in its 35 pages than many a full-length collection achieves. I could easily write a couple of thousand words by way of review, studded with any number of eminently quotable excerpts, but for reasons of brevity, ‘The Lost’ serves as an exemplar of the pamphlet’s aesthetic. A social history linking people to jobs and places, it unspools through two pages, moving from nostalgia 

          Elsie’s grand-kiddies scrubbed up nice
          on Saturdays at Greyfriars Baths,
          changing them in poolside cubicles,
          all their worldly goods in one wire basket

to the starker realities of those times:

          the seven lads who never came back
          ...
          while the filthy rich lorded it in NCB’s Coal House
          and Plant

to the socio-economic changes that bring the poem up to date:

          ... the factories turned call centres,
          the schoolyards, the ginnels, the smokeless chimneys
          and beneath them, beneath all that, those lost men,
          and all that blackness still down there.

This is muscular poetry, wrought with precision and loaded with experience. Mordant humour runs through it. Wimbush has a keen eye for human foibles, and heart and talent big enough to transform them into art.

About the reviewer
Neil Fulwood was born in Nottingham, where he still lives and works. He is the author of two poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It and Can’t Take Me Anywhere, with a third forthcoming in June 2021.

Review by Neil Fulwood of "Venus in the Blind Spot" by Junji Ito

This beautifully produced volume collects ten short stories in manga form, two based on works by Edogawa Ranpo, one from a story by Robert Hichens, the remaining seven original to Ito. Already recognised as one of manga’s leading artists thanks to Tomie and Uzumaki, it goes without saying that the artwork Ito has produced here is as beautiful and imaginative as it is dark and visceral.

Venus in the Blind Spot delivers an impressive spectrum of storytelling. 'Billions Alone' is a genuinely unsettling study of loneliness and social inability set against a broader enigma of mass disappearances, sharing a similar sense of disquiet at the emptiness of modern life as Will Carver’s recent novel Nothing Important Happened Today. Elsewhere, ‘An Unearthly Love’ and ‘Keepsake’ explore the dark side of human relationships, ‘The Enigma of Amigara Fault’ trades in folk horror and the unexplained (Ito’s haunted landscapes subtly evoke Picnic at Hanging Rock), while the title story veers into sci-fi and is bound to appeal to fans of Black Mirror. 

Surprisingly, in amongst the chills, gruesome set-pieces and twist-of-the-knife endings, Ito includes a heartfelt and energetically drawn paean to manga pioneer Kazuo Umezz. Part memoir of what Umezz’s work meant to the young Ito, part ardent fan letter, it’s a sharp contrast with the grotesquerie of the other tales.

For anyone new to manga and general or Ito in particular, Venus in the Blind Spot is an ideal starting point. I’ll certainly be exploring more of his work. 

About the reviewer
Neil Fulwood was born in Nottingham, where he still lives and works. He is the author of two poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It and Can’t Take Me Anywhere, with a third forthcoming in June 2021. 

Review by Neil Fulwood of "Lake 32" by JLM Morton

Graced with stunning cover art by Naomi Walker, Lake 32 collects nineteen poems written during Morton’s year-long residency at a former gravel pit since converted to a man-made lake in the Cotswold Water Park - “a world of wayward crayfish and self-help magpies,” as she describes it in the field note that serves as the volume’s introduction.

Morton’s engagement with nature, landscape and ecosystem is tactile and immersive, the poems thrumming with life and activity even as they hymn the underrated pleasures of sanctuary and solitude. 

Modernity (“the drenching squalls of camper vans and gravel trucks”) is a nagging presence, however, at the periphery of this world, the resulting tension elevating these poems above the merely pastoral. “Suppose there was a tree” Morton speculates in "Courage," the second poem in the pamphlet, “that did not burn, / but instead contained a fire / that lit the taper of our hopes.”

Morton’s poetics are confident, whether she’s distilling the contrast between white violet and nettle into the sharp minimalism of a haiku in "Lakegram" or crafting an onomatopoeic account of the ecosystem in "Hibernal Solstice, Soundscape." Experimentalism never gets in the way of immediacy, though, and Morton’s gift for shimmering yet unpretentious language gifts the reader with stanzas like this (from "Night Swimming"):

           Let’s break the stars on the surface
           with the lightness of bodies in water,
           remembering this celestial night
           when we met with the best of us.

Lake 32 is a lyrical, intelligent and life-affirming pamphlet that deserves a wide readership. Lake 32 is off the A419 and deserves a visit.

About the reviewer
Neil Fulwood was born in Nottingham, where he still lives and works. He is the author of two poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It and Can’t Take Me Anywhere, with a third forthcoming in June 2021.