Review by Pam Thompson of "Skinship" by Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana

 

Skinship is Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana’s second collection after Sing me down from the dark (Salt, 2022) and is both a development and continuation from the previous collection. Corrin-Tachibana lived in Japan for ten years, experienced two marriages and the challenges of coming to terms with cultural expectations, not least judgements by in-laws, and indeed her own mother.

Skinship (its meaning in Japanese, "skin-to-skin contact") sees the narrator returning to Japan after a fifteen-year absence. Candid personal narratives are delivered via a variety of forms, predominantly variations on the zuihitsu and haibun. 

A zuihitsu draws together loosely-connected fragments of different types of writing. It allows narrator and reader to travel through time and place and to grasp several understandings about an overarching subject. Take the opening poem, "Skinship: a zuihitsu," which flickers through various memories around the birth of the narrator’s son, "Our son was born in Kalamazoo Hospital," and signals aggressions she meets along the way: the nurse who seized her nipple and "shoved it" in the newborn’s mouth; the mother-in-law who insists she eats an omelette which makes her sick, the increasingly ominous significance of a song, "I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo! Recorded in 1942 by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra." 

The Forward-prize shortlisted" ‘Madame Gout: a zuihitsu" draws its title from the writings of Benjamin Franklin in his dialogue with the Gout:

                                                                       Madame Gout. You know my 
          sedentary state and on that account, it would seem, Madame Gout,
          as if you might spare me a little, seeing it is not altogether my fault.

The rest of the poem is diverting and entertaining, beginning with accounts of the rich food the poet has eaten leading to the "foot twitch" on the train journey when she is talking to the "tattooed Norwegian." As we learn about famous gout sufferers, for instance, and the word’s derivation, "from the Latin gutta, a drop of liquid," we also sense the poet’s frustration at her husband’s repeated statement that "gout is common in Japan." The final couplet stings and conveys much about the relationship: "Your husband asks how is your foot? For the umpteenth time. / He is happy you are in the house when he returns from golf."

A haibun combines a section or sections of prose with one or more haiku. Traditionally the prose sets a scene, perhaps describes a journey while the haiku provides an oblique commentary or reflection on the prose. There are harsh times certainly but "Haibun from East Lothian," with its precise details of landscape, of plants and birds and joy with a lover, temporarily blots out other concerns even as the haiku hints at warning:

                                                                The spiky cockle I carry back
          from the bay, held sideways, is a pair of birds nestling their
          heads. Upside down it is erotic. And for a few days, in a
          whitewashed cottage, I do not think of your spoilt daughter
          … my teenage son … or of the stranger husband, in the spare room.

above marram grass

quartering short-eared owls

pursued by corvids

A "burning haibun" usually has a darker intent. In at least three sections, an act of erasure is performed on the initial prose which is then reduced to a haiku. "Fishbones: A Burning Haibun" gives insight into the narrator’s fraught relationship with her mother. She was "Rarely praised" and "there were plenty of stories about the trauma of having me." The poet "yearned, even as an adult, to hold her attention." The prose section ends with "She hates me cooking Dad fish. Throws open the lounge windows. Has no patience. For fishbones." The haiku which emerges from the erasure encapsulates chillingly what the broader narrative has conveyed:

I diluted her –
she spat words,
fishbones

The inclusion of the Japanese language, its phrases and characters, adds an extra visual and aural dimension. The different layouts of the poems are a visual treat too as is their attention to the nuances of social behaviour. I admired the shifts in tone, the balancing of heartbreak with resilience and sardonic humour and the narrator’s no-holds-barred approach to her material. There are so many more threads and features to be explored (e.g. music, literature, art – for instance the sharply poignant poems written in response to Yoko Ono’s Music of the Mind exhibition at Tate Modern) in this rich and inventive collection.

 

About the reviewer
Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. Her latest pamphlet is Sub/urban Legends (2025, Paper Swans Press). She is a Hawthornden Fellow.

You can read more about Skinship by Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Pam Thompson of "Passion" by David Morley

 

This dazzling collection begins with an epigraph from Rainer Maria Rilke: "The work of the eyes is done. / Go now and do the heart-work on / the images imprisoned within you." There is plentiful evidence of "heart-work" in these poems. Morley, an ecologist and naturalist by background, combines the scientist’s observational precision with the poet’s imagination. The opening poem, "The Mist Net Releases Her Birds," is a ghazal, an Arabic form originally, its subject traditionally love and loss. It is written in couplets, each with a repeated last word as a refrain. "The pandemic makes prisoners of us" gives us the context. The poem ranges across the globe in a quest for togetherness and is underpinned with metaphors of flight and responses from the person being addressed, one of which is central to the collection, "We resist through poetry … poems are a kind of politics as well as religion."

The "wings of the ghazal" prepare us for numerous birds. A hummingbird vibrates on the page, "she havers / in the time warp of her / wingbeats" ("Rosy-Topaz Hummingbird"). There is a similar relish of the sounds of words in "Puffins on Bardsey":

          all frizz and fluff-crowns
                      rug-headed kerns
                                    clemmed, clumping
                                                up a skerry of sky

I liked the fact that Morley features scientific experiments and discoveries by women. "Swans" is dedicated to Caroline Herschel and her indexing of Flamsteed’s Observations of the Fixed Stars, 1798, with its gorgeous description of the comet named after her: "it’s swan’s neck of snow // dipping into the dark water of space." Anna Atkins uses sunlight to take photographs of seaweeds, "light-burned pictures in water" ("The First Book Printed by the Sun").

Morley’s use of the Romani language reflects his dual English/Romany heritage as it did in this book’s predecessor, Fury (2020). There are glossaries, though Morley has said elsewhere that he would ideally like the reader to derive meaning from the shape and sound of the Romani words alone. Using the language is a form of resistance against oppression. In "Storytelling," the poet gives a paper on the Romany language at an academic conference, "I spoke of its leopard-leap of dialects … // How the words galloped untethered …" Passion indeed, though It is greeted "cold applause" and a young lecturer asking about the point of all this "trash." For the poet, the point is to go on telling stories of the prejudices and privations faced by the Romany culture. Different voices include that of a caravan (or vardo): "I am a caravan. The eye of my door open to the vryámya (weather). / The Travellers douse me with benzína (petrol). I am unclean" ("Mermeyi Pesha").

There are poems about family, about Morley’s former work as a scientist. Emily Brontë, in a poem of the same name, contains her rage at winter’s advice to reject the first show of spring and "Make life bare." Yeats is summoned as a presiding spirit of intention in a poem towards the end of the book which echoes the opening ghazal’s wings and nets:

         I wake in my tent to the thrum of linnets
         on a morning of insect wings and glimmer,

         the mist melting over a mirror of water,
         and go. I go with my quiver of mist nets.
         

         ("Mist Nets on the Lake Isle of Innisfree").

"Growing primroses is also a process / of not growing them, a path of unlearning …" ("I Found Poems in the Fields"). I enjoyed travelling, listening and observing with David Morley in this absorbing and thought-provoking collection.

About the reviewer

Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. She is a Hawthornden Fellow. Her works include include The Japan Quiz (Redbeck Press, 2009) and Show Date and Time (Smith|Doorstop, 2006). Her collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. Pam was winner of the 2023 Paper Swans Pamphlet Competition and her winning pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends (Paper Swans Press), was published in March 2025.

You can read more about Passion by David Morley on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Pam Thompson of "Pattern-book" by Éireann Lorsung

 

I first came across across  Éireann Lorsung in Nottingham when she was doing her PhD and was a generous host of poetry events. Since then, I have been enthralled by poems which have sprung up online, via her blog, her multiple passions, and just recently, her postal zine / newsletter. Gentleness, persistence and exuberance are just three of her qualities and all show up here.

Andrew Latimer’s cover design, for this substantial collection from Carcanet, repeats the name of the title in a subtle gradation of colours and which encapsulate its concept. In an interview with Jon McGregor at her online launch, Lorsung says that the colours in the repeated words on the cover are significant for the poems. 

She is avid – about poetry, other artists of all sorts, her people, her places (the English Midlands, the American mid-west, the low country of Flanders) the multiple possibilities of subject and form. Jon McGregor writes a long list of some of Lorsung’s subjects on the back of the book. These are a few of the things that stood out for me: bicycles, rivers, roses, rain, nectarines, ochre, language, parents, students, memory, elegy, frost, gardens, Magritte, poetry, chamomile, learning, brothers, blue, painting, pottery, yellow, tractors, sewing, autumn, fields, fieldfares, art, postcards, gold, sonnets, songs, friends. 

The book is dedicated to Shana, a friend from childhood and threaded through are poems reflecting their growing-up, what is lost and what remains: "When you get this note, it will be // the future … // Friendship is a kind of time-machine, it turns out" ("Postcard to Shana with Photo of Washington Avenue Bridge (Minneapolis)"). 

I particularly loved the affectionate "Postcard to Shana with Drawing of Blackbirds," whose precise sensory imagery of weather, nature and seasons is abundant elsewhere:

          Every warm thing of our girlhood calls us here.
          Blackbirds. Poems. The world: its tablecloths

          and rainy mornings, cities, hands, and flowers.

Lorsung makes everything shine. It all matters, and is worthy of being repeated, just as people’s lives, and memories of such, are enhanced by what has been known many times. 

There is generous love shown towards the ordinary and extraordinary and in finding poetic forms to hold them. The sonnet is a neat container, as in "Sonnet for the Second-Language Speaker," and "Sonnet with a Quotation from Millay," which remembers a childhood friend and what might have been. "Autumn Song" is a longer tour de force where phrases about places, nature, seasons, the body (and more) are shuffled then repeated in different iterations to breathtaking effect. This sounds like a random exercise but I’m certain it was far from it. 

Equally impressive are the sparer fragments  in "Miniscule Sequence" and "Attunement," the latter, being "after Thomas A. Clark":

           gold arrow                                        
           goldfinch
   

           world of ideas
           world of things

There’s so much more to say but I hope this have given some idea of how these poems convey the sheer joy of being in the world and appreciation of its patterns - as Louis MacNeice has written about the world, "The drunkenness of things being various."

About the reviewer
Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester.  Her works include include The Japan Quiz (Redbeck Press, 2009), Show Date and Time (Smith|Doorstop, 2006)  and Strange Fashion (Pindrop Press, 2017). Her  prize-winning pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends (Paper Swans Press), was published in the Spring of 2025. 

You can read a review by Gary Day of Sub/urban Legends on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Review by Gary Day of "Sub/urban Legends" by Pam Thompson

Brilliant, disorientating, splendidly polyphonic: these poems provoke, puzzle, baffle and delight the reader. Each one bears re-reading, not least the title poem, ‘Suburban Legend.’ Its zigzags, elisions, and turbo-charged imagery are typical of the volume. Everything is happening at once and at speed. The reader is not sure of their bearings or of what’s happening. Is a cooker being dumped or being used to make a meal? Who are the characters and what is their relation? The man is ‘the scourge of our town’ but there’s clearly more to him than that. The imagery is partly cosmic ‘I identify Venus, lucid tonight’ and partly quotidian ‘just a sponge and soapy water.’ The diction is a heady brew of the earthy, the enigmatic and the arcane. How often do you hear the word ‘brumous,’ meaning foggy or wintery, these days?

‘The Keys’ should be anthologised in any future volume of British twenty-first-century poetry. It is situational, symbolic and finishes with a wonderful shift that makes the poem just soar. ‘My Life as a Bat’ has a mysterious sub-text. Revenge against a former lover? Difficult to say, but it is extremely well wrought and humorous as well as sinister. The image ‘ricocheting in a cave’ conveys both fury and despair. ‘Reading my mother’s diaries’ is one of the most poignant poems in the collection. The last line is just beautiful. 

There is a lot going on in these pages. The search for something beyond the obvious in ‘An afternoon’; the relation of art and life in ‘Fête Galante’; the eerie atmosphere of ‘Explorers, Antarctica,  1901’;  and the soothing blues of ‘the evening garden.’ Throughout there is a sense of broken things that can’t quite be put back together, and the poems invite the reader’s to help join the fragments

About the reviewer

Gary Day is a retired English lecturer. He has had poems published in Vole, Ekstasis, Acumen and The Dawn Treader. His 'Anne Bronte's Grave' was highly commended in last year's Artemesia Poetry Competition.

You can read more about Pam Thompson's Sub/urban Legends on Creative Writing at Leicester here.