Review by Christine Hammond of "The Iron Bridge" by Rebecca Hurst

One of the first things you notice in Rebecca Hurst's The Iron Bridge is the overriding density of the work - sometimes weighed down by a self-imposed desire for accuracy in recollecting / recording, sometimes liberated enough to allow the light in. Much of it does overtly take on the mantle of a log-book / field guide of sorts, somewhat indicated by the titles of the first and last sequences: "Mapping the Woods,” "An Explorer’s Handbook." 

The writing is sensitive and immersive, using nature to observe and interpret, as in "Banksy Wood" - provoking a sense of loss yet never becoming overly sentimental: "It could be a metaphor, but for now it’s just a place, raw as a skinned knee." "The wood floor is anvil-hard. Gone: bluebell bulbs, litter fall, mycellium’s soft web." 

          Gone: chewy mounds of moss, hart’s tongue, clumps of hard fern, bracken,
          Walks past. Licked clean by Baba Yoga’s broom. Swept
          downhill to the stream.

An enjoyable  feminine voice and experience is present, blending and embedding everyday items, activities and experiences with nature, for use as metaphors:

          What stirs the blood?
          Not tea and muffins
          Not tatting and quilling.
          I like to wrestle. I like the heavy lifting
          The hard-work of shaping and making ...

          I love you because loving you 
          Is not light work, not woman’s work.
          Yet it is the patch I have been given.

There are also typesetting novelties to negotiate – partial right-hand justification ("Wone"), landscape layouts ("And then we saw the daughter of the Minotaur," "The Needle Prince") as well as a liberal amount of prose / prose poetry /reflective story pieces and writing presented in numbered paragraphs. 

Get ready for an adventure that combines both town and country, home and abroad – take a backpack and a compass and be open to discover new things.

About the reviewer
Christine Hammond began writing poetry whilst studying English Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her early poems were published in The Gown (QUB) and Women’s News where, as one of the original members she also wrote Arts Reviews and had work published in Spare Rib.  She returned to writing after a long absence and her poetry has been featured in a variety of anthologies including The Poet’s Place and Movement (Poetry in Motion – The Community Arts Partnership), The Sea (Rebel Poetry Ireland), all four editions of Washing Windows and Her Other Language (Arlen House) and literary journal The Honest Ulsterman. She has also been a reader at Purely Poetry: Open-Mic Night, Belfast. 

Review by Cathi Rae of "The Fox’s Wedding," poems by Rebecca Hurst & illustrated by Reena Makwana

As a poet who recently and joyfully placed the word "bosky" into a piece and who has written on The Children of Lir, a collection located in landscape, rurality and the re-imagining of fairy tales is clearly right up my street - or should that be "breaches" (to steal from the poem “Into the Woods” in this collection). If you can imagine Angela Carter, but a reined in, hyper-controlled Carter, where every word is perfect and carries superbly judged weight and musicality – this collection is precisely that.

These are fairy stories that dig back into narratives of blood and skin and teeth, where happy endings are de-railed and deconstructed. The girl raised by wild dogs ("Teeth") returns to the pack and turns her back on “the bones of polite behaviour.” The boy who hides to watch the fox's wedding ("The Animal Bridegroom") is spared his life, but loses language – a word a day until he is “as silent as any beast and lonely.” Even The Frog Prince ( in "The Frog Prince") is "a damp squib of a boy from the wrong side of Tunbridge Wells."

The motif of pins and needles run through many of these poems – the prick of memory in quilt made by a mother – needles to ask needle sharp questions – the path of needles and the path of pins and the task of making impossible fairy tale clothing, "seven nettle shirts seven years dumb in a tree" ("Brothers").

This collection comes from The Emma Press, a Birmingham-based small press, who specialise in producing collections of poetry, short stories, children’s books and art squares where design, layout and illustration are an integral part of the reading pleasure. The illustrations in this collection, by Reena Makwana, are as perfectly executed as the poems themselves.

About the reviewer
Cathi Rae is an award-winning and widely published poet. Her collection Your Cleaner Hates You & Other Poems was published in 2019. She is currently funded by M4C to work on a large scale collection on voicing the marginalised. 

You can read a review of Your Cleaner Hates You & Other Poems on Everybody's Reviewing here.