Review by Julie Gardner of "Skail" by Richie McCaffery

"Skail" is an old Scots word meaning a scattering or dispersal. This information is provided in the back-cover blurb, where we also learn that "the poems in this pamphlet take place in the aftermath of a pandemic, and in the dissolution of a long-term relationship."

The first two lines of the title poem – an especially strong piece – suggest the supernatural, perhaps hinting at threat: "The night before Halloween, he came to her in sleep, / called out her maiden name, with a cancerous rasp." But this ghost comes not so much in anger as exasperation: "He could wait no longer, it’d been 15 years already / of dilly-dally-hanging-onto-daddy’s dust." Her indecision is swiftly rectified. She involves "the great grandkids / he never even knew" who use "little grain scoops" to scatter her father’s ashes in plant pots and they leave out a "tot of his favourite whisky … to slake his thirst." 

"Little grain scoops" will not be enough. The third and final stanza returns us to the woman and then, as if mirroring the first stanza, to the intangible, the supernatural. Despite the apparent abandon of her actions, we see how keenly she feels the loss:

         But the bulk of his ash was left to her, and went
         headfirst into the remains of the vegetable bed.
         And though it was a wet night, the dust cloud of him
         hovered under the streetlamp, as if getting its bearings.

Perhaps "The Lucky Penny," one of the later poems in the pamphlet, is about the same extended family. It begins: "When you were wee, he brought back a lucky penny." Once washed, however, it is revealed to be a Victorian gold coin. That the finder has not recognised its worth is ironic, given his repetition of the well-worn maxim: "Find a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck." This failure to recognise good fortune, is, we learn in the final stanza, characteristic:

         Over the years you’ve watched your mother’s profile
         change, caring for grandkids and holding the house
         together as he aged too, cursing a life of misfortune.
         He never knew he held gold in his hand. Still does.

The poems in this slim pamphlet avoid first-person narration, perhaps signifying a desire not to claim self-importance but to draw attention to the complexity of what it is to be human. It risks seeming disingenuous, however, especially in poems that seem to evoke the ending of the long-term relationship referred to in the blurb. In "Scrap," for example, we read, "Her last words to him were written, not spoken, / a paper cut severing them and their fourteen years." And in Cicatrix, "He never heard the wind changing. / Before he knew it, he was out of the frame." The distance between speaker and poet seems small, only the pronoun holding them firmly apart. All the poems feel natural and honest, though, the speaker assuming the role of an unobtrusive observer who reports what he sees with compassion and humour. 

In "Bolt," a man gets off a bus and is "dazzled by a camera flash." He wrongly assumes a group of teenagers have taken his picture and is about to confront them when he is saved from humiliation: "the ordnance of thunder blew them all / out of their skin." The poet trusts his reader to work out what has happened. The final lines of the poem roll together the teenagers, the man, the poet, and his readers:

           That’s being human
           one instant so full of self, the next
           made to feel like no-one, nothing.

This acknowledgement of vulnerability is a thread that weaves through the poems.

About the reviewer
Julie Gardner is studying towards a PhD at Nottingham Trent University, focussing on Silence and Voice in the poetry of Vicki Feaver and her contemporaries. Her poetry pamphlet Remembering was published by Five Leaves Publishers in 2024.

Review by Lee Wright of "Fighters, Losers" by Declan Ryan

In one of the most important scenes from 1976’s Rocky, Sylvester Stallone stands in the centre of the ring the night before his fight against Carl Weathers’ Apollo Creed. As he looks up at the giant poster of himself, wearing red shorts with a white stripe, the boxing promoter walks down the aisle of seats towards him:
  
'The poster’s wrong,' says Rocky. 
'What do you mean?' asks the promoter. 
'I’m going to be wearing white pants with a red strip.' 
The promoter looks up at the poster, smiles and takes a puff on his cigar.
'Doesn’t really matter, does it?'    

It sounds stupid to compare a gritty 70’s Hollywood drama with a newly published poetry pamphlet - Fighters, Losers, by Declan Ryan -  but both are about the same thing: boxing. In each you can feel the delicious anger of what it means to be both a fighter and a loser in the same breath.

Every punch Ryan throws in this spit bucket of poetry hits the reader square on the jaw. Written in a reportage style, he takes on some of the key fights in the history of boxing, such as the 1986 WBC Heavyweight title fight between champion Trevor Berbick and Mike Tyson. 

Ryan counts down Tyson’s age in years, months and days, like the minutes in a round. Tyson is said to be trying to punch Berbick’s nose bone into his brain. But the poem, 'The Young God of The Catskills I,' is not so much about Tyson as it is about the doomed Trevor Berbick: the boy from Port Antonio who became a world champion, who lost only eleven from his sixty-one professional fights, and who died at the hands of his twenty-year-old nephew, bludgeoned and left to die alone in a churchyard.  

This collection also concerns the fight of race. On a February night in Miami Beach, Sonny (The Big Bear) Liston fought underdog, Cassius (Muhammed Ali) Clay. With Malcolm X at ringside and the spectre of the Black Muslims on his shoulder, Clay danced around Liston, who is rumoured to have been drinking heavily the night before. Here, Ryan uses facts to beautifully capture the electricity of the time:

At the weigh-in, Clay’s pulse 
was 120 beats per minute. 
The doctor said ‘he’s scared to death.' 

And about Liston: 

One commentator’s written ‘Liston used to be a hoodlum; 
now he is our cop;
he is the big Negro we pay to keep sassy Negroes in line.'
  
Ryan does not pull any punches when examining racial and religious attitudes. There is even the echo of the late William Melvin Kelly about the language and something slightly absurdist about a man who hurts others for money while sporting a tattoo of Christ the Redeemer on his back. But the nine poems that make up Fighters, Losers are not only for those who follow the world of boxing. They are a combination of descriptive, moving and, at times, darkly humorous narratives of men whose only real strategy was to survive.      


About the reviewer
Lee Wright was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire in 1980 and has been writing both fiction and non-fiction since 2008. He is taking an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.

Review by Lee Wright of "Some Kind of Ghost" by Mike Barlow

You don’t necessarily need to be a champion of poetry in order to appreciate this new collection by Mike Barlow. To a certain extent there are a lot of false hang-ups linked to poetry. Some readers can feel beaten before they have reached the second page. Where Mike Barlow is concerned, however, and this collection in particular, there is no “beating around the bush.” He is good at describing what he sees with minimum fuss. In his latest collection from New Walk Editions, Barlow slows everything down into basic language and everyday emotions. 

A former winner of The National Poetry Competition, Barlow's poems have staying power: 

Ella who finally left home at sixteen with nothing 
but a pocketful of change and the rag doll of her childhood. 
May she find the latchkey in her purse one day 
and courage enough to use it.

Poems that are about the most honest of moments:     

With my scars,
tattoos and broken teeth
I’d have been a son my mother feared for. 

For some, writing poetry is a form of therapy. Not so with Barlow. With these poems, it is as though we are all family members, gathered around a death bed, only this will be a New Orleans jazz funeral, with trumpets and dancing and multi-coloured parasols and handkerchiefs twirled in the air.  Barlow’s gifts are on full display here, as he cuts the body loose:

So I slow down, tip-toe the long hall to the scullery. 
And there’s Aunt Dora washing plums. I knock 
on the old plank door and hold my breath. 
She’d always ignore me when she knew 
I was making things up but this time she turns, 
hands me a bowl of glistening Victorias to stone. 

Barlow does a good job of showing us what others are thinking: 

Les, fitter who didn’t fit, chucked the factory job, his mates, 
the lies and moved away where he could be 
Lesley. Shaven legs, coiffed hair, skirt and blouse, 
the bare truth of lipstick and mascara. 
A shout for her, a shout for her.    

All the poems here (even the ones that shouldn’t work, like "There’s that scene in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest where McMurphy first realises the deaf and dumb Chief Bromden can hear and speak") have a deceptive ease about them. They can be at times sombre, yet they still leave you itching to read them again. 

It is true that all poems should make you think. And that is something which resurfaces again and again over the nineteen poems. On a deeper level, the pamphlet could be seen as a meditation on what life is like for the people left behind after the death of a loved one, squeezed between ordinary observations like in the poem "Encounter," which opens with a quote from a plaque on a bench in Drinishader, on the east coast of Harris, in the Outer Hebrides: "On this bench 22nd October 2008 Angus Forbes proposed to Athlone Findlay in the rain." What follows is a masterful poem about sweethearts, that was fuelled by a chance encounter while walking through a park. 

But what is the trick to good poetry? Barlow himself tells us the trick in one poem: "The trick? The trick’s to keep it simple." And by sticking to that rule, he has fashioned a collection that will leave any aspirant poet wishing that they too might be able to achieve similar with mere words.          
  

About the reviewer

Lee Wright was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire in 1980 and has been writing both fiction and non-fiction since 2008. He is taking an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.

Reviews by Lee Wright of "With Invisible Rain" by Polly Atkin, and Jonathan Taylor of "Tidemarks" by Alan Jenkins

It doesn’t take long to get a steady fix on Polly Atkin’s new poetry collection, With Invisible Rain. 

In this pamphlet from New Walk Editions, she brings together twelve poems. Some of them are part-autobiographical, exploring the subject of pain and her treatment for Genetic Haemochromatosis, a disorder which causes the body to absorb too much iron from the diet. The treatment for this condition is the regular removal of blood, helping to remove excess iron from the body. Atkin compares the condition to living in a mansion and filling every inch of space with scrap like an obsessive hoarder. 

One poem describes the feel of the standard-issue hospital plastic pillowcase beneath her head, and the wretchedness she depicts is beautifully conveyed. Along with her own struggle, Atkin draws on James Hilton’s The Mystery of Pain: A Book for the Sorrowful, Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals, and Virginia Woolf’s essay On Being Ill.

These poems are not gentle - each one changes in pressure and colour, leaving a stark sense of pain. The dislocation of the body, the soreness of the limbs are at times intensely portrayed. 

You may find yourself wondering why you would read this collection given this intensity, but these are also poems of purity. After all, what can be purer than rain? Almost everything here is seen through cloud and rain, always taking the reader to a deeper level of affliction.  Branches snap against skin, arms are pinned down, the body refuses its own blood. In one poem, Atkin writes that she “cannot control it.” That is what invisible rain is all about, the uncontrollable. This pamphlet expresses in twenty-seven pages what some books might take 400 pages to convey. It is a profound instance of a gifted poet at the top of her game.            


About the reviewer 
Lee Wright was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire in 1980 and has been writing both fiction and non-fiction since 2008. He is taking an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester in 2017.      

Ever since Matthew Arnold heard on Dover Beach the Sea of Faith’s ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,’ there has been a strand of British poetry that hears in the sea a sense of loss. No doubt this is tied up with British history on a national scale, and its loss of naval power. But as Carl Jung says, ‘the psychology of the individual is reflected in the psychology of the nation’: and there is personal loss in Arnold’s poem, just as there is in Alan Jenkins’s remarkable and highly original pamphlet of poems, Tidemarks. 

In the pamphlet, Jenkins looks back from maturity on a lost youth spent (and misspent) on or near the water. This is poetry of nostalgia – but barbed, naughty, witty, grotesque nostalgia, a Rabelaisian Swallows and Amazons. The narrator can ‘hear whispers far below / The river’s susurrating flow,’ which tell him it is 

“Too late … to take the helm,

To master that unruly realm

Your father loved, who often sat

With Conrad, Forester, Marryat,

With tales of HMS Kelly or

The Compass Rose.”

‘You signed up for rum, bum and the lash,’ declares one ‘long-dead master-mariner’ to the narrator, but instead ‘you heard the south sing o’er the land at Fairlight and at Ore / So you affected Oxford bags, the elbow-patches pansies wore // And learned to lisp in numbers.’

If these long-dead voices haunt the narrator, so do their associated places, haunts. Indeed, some of the poems mark attempts to return to the old haunts, as if to a time before the ‘elbow-patches’ of Oxford took over – to the old seashores, harbours, boats:

I knew the path, the promenade, the lanes,

The park where a stone Victoria frowned …

Heaps of rotted feathers, stinking bladderwrack,

Gull-shit and tar-stains, and the intimate whiff

In broken shells. Why had I come back? …

… aged nine, I watched a little girl,

Sea-water shining on her sun-browned skin

As she ran shrieking in the shallows’ sudsy foam,

Ran shrieking up to me; I’m going in!

A last-swim sadness, last day before home …

Half a lifetime later I still clutched it,

That gritty towel, arms crossed on my chest

For burial at sea. 

Like a maritime John Clare, Jenkins’s narrator tries to find the old places, but now ‘No-one was waiting on the path’ – the girl is gone, and the ‘gritty towel’ is buried at sea. 

Other poems attempt to reclaim the past by imagining alternative paths the narrator might have taken – that is, by attempting to retrace ‘the sea-roads not taken,’ half a lifetime earlier, in moments of ‘What if   What if   What if   What if   What if.’ In the end, though, the mournful conclusion is that ‘bridges [have been] burnt,’ and it is ‘Too late now’:

“Too late now,

To go to him and show him how

Your hard-learned seamanship has brought

Three stripes, a wife in every port – 

Or even one wife, son or daughter – 

A man’s life, on or off the water!”

The poems poignantly suggest that it is not just too late for the narrator, but also more generally for the kind of life he recalls. The narrator’s personal sense of loss is connected to a more general loss: ‘Everything you are and care for [is] standing ready to be scrapped // Like Ark Royal and half the fleet.’ In place of the Ark Royal, half the fleet, ‘the harbour at Rangoon … / Trafalgar, circumnavigation,’ now stands a vacuous consumerist fantasy:

Instead, I was next to someone’s super-yacht,

motionless behind its oil-rich haze of heat –

… a super-model, fresh from her shoot in Casablanca

… on the sun-deck inviting him to eat

in a tone that acknowledged frankly how boring

it all was …

and everything I’d loved was up for sale. 

As Jung and Arnold might expect, the loss here is simultaneously that of an individual and of a nation: a maritime past – vibrant, riotous, violent, seedy, Rabelaisian – has been lost to both narrator and coastal community. Jenkins's poems are by no means nostalgic for a lost imperialistic naval history, but rather for a seafaring way of life which has been superseded by a millionaire’s boredom. 

About the reviewer

Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, lecturer and critic. His books include the poetry collection Cassandra Complex (Shoestring, 2018), the novel Melissa (Salt, 2015), and the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007). His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.