Review by Jon Wilkins of "The House of the Interpreter" by Lisa Kelly

What is it we are interpreting and from whose house? They are legitimate questions and all becomes clear as soon as we investigate the poetry of Lisa Kelly.

Kelly has right-sided deafness which does not define her, and is a glorious poet which does.  Her work illuminates that fact through the three parts of her collection, each named with a double meaning in mind relating to hearing: Chamber is part of the ear and also a room. Oval window is self-explanatory and also a small membrane in the ear. Canal relates to the ear canal and a stream or waterway, perhaps highlighting the journey she has taken as a poet.

The poem "The House of the Interpreter" is a visceral attack on the different approaches to communication for the Deaf: Oralism, the theory, practice, or advocacy of education for the Deaf chiefly or exclusively through lipreading, training in speech production, and training of residual hearing, as opposed to Manualism, the theory or practice of education for the Deaf employing and promoting the use of sign language as the primary means of communication. Kelly has taken one and rejected the other. This is partly explained in this piece and raises questions the vast majority of us cannot answer. Indeed should we answer on behalf of others? I think not. This is their world, their body, their truth.

I find the section Oval Window most fascinating as she relates mushrooms and fungi to deafness. In a talk she gave on YouTube she tells us about this and how fungi communicate. She talks of the world wide wood and her interest in the different ways that life forms communicate. This was very important to her during lockdown and in her studies she learnt how the misunderstood fungi could talk to us and still leave us so much to learn.

"If My Deaf Ear Were a Mushroom" is perfection and the final line - "it would be valued for signing the way to alternate reality" - sums up he words perfectly as she takes on myriad adventures full of vivid colour and images to highlight her world. The mystery of the mushroom she communicates with is epitomised in "Mushroom Stones" where we see normality and mysticism unravelled and almost explained. This a fascinating approach and opens up a bright new world for us to explore and to discover. But discover what? Kelly takes us down the rabbit hole and we have to decide for ourselves.

Later in Canal we explore her journey and we read of the misogynistic world she faces and how, in "A Diptych is not a Dick Pic," she has to confront it. Not a pretty sight in anybody’s world. The colours of "Metamorphoses: Colours, Marks and Signs" contrast perceptibly with her own world. "Blue Hydrangea" epitomises this with the struggle to turn the pink flower blue, the disappointment of having a girl rather than a boy.

This collection is as varied as it is powerful, as imaginative as it is self-possessed with a strength the reader can feel in the writing of a poet secure in their place in the world and confident enough to examine the failings and successes we all have. This is an incredible piece of work and must be read for its insightfulness and its beauty.

About the reviewer

Jon Wilkins is 67. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s. Next year he takes up the UEA Crime Fiction Creative Writing MA. The game's afoot! 

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. 

Review by Laura Besley of "Seventy Percent Water" by Jeanette Sheppard

 

In the title story of her debut flash fiction collection, Seventy Percent Water, Jeanette Sheppard describes how a woman’s body transforms from the usual seventy percent water to a hundred percent after a relationship ends. ‘In the sea she reformed and swam away from the storm.’ 

Sheppard has a natural flair for the obscure. In 'Trumpets,' a woman who wanted her arms to be more ‘finely tuned’ ends up with trumpets for arms. On the surface this is a piece dealing with the practical repercussions of having arms that no longer bend and are made of cold metal, but in reality it’s about the deterioration of her relationship. ‘This morning, as he left for work, I saw him glance at my brass arms and swallow a sigh.’ 

Although there is a wide variety of stories, it is in her stories about old age and all the frustrations and fears that come with that – for both the older person, and those caring for them – that Sheppard truly shines. 

In 'Mirror in the Bird Bath,' the main character puts her mirror in the bird bath because ‘the new one at physio said you had to adapt to your circumstances’ and ‘she had dementia, she knew that, but it didn’t make her a fool’; rage ignites in 'Kindling' at the main character’s brother who takes no responsibility for the care of their mother; in 'Domestic Fairy Tale,' the main character’s ‘mother lays in her hospital bed, reading over and over the two sheets of A4 … attached to the cupboard doors explaining where she is,’ as her care plan is discussed, just out of earshot; 'The Last Time I visited My Mum' hits hard when the mother produces a photo, saying ‘Look, it’s my daughter!’ 

Seventy Percent Water is an accomplished debut flash fiction collection with rich imagery and beautiful language. 

About the reviewer

Laura Besley is a full-time mum to two young boys and squeezes her writing time into the bookends of her day. She has recently been listed by TSS Publishing as one of the top 50 British and Irish Flash Fiction writers with her story ‘On Repeat’ (Reflex Fiction). Her flash fiction collection, The Almost Mothers, was published in March 2020 and her collection of micro fiction, 100neHundred, will be published in May 2021. She tweets @laurabesley

Review by Jane Simmons of "I, Ursula" by Ruth Stacey

At an online literary festival earlier this year, I heard poet Ruth Stacey speaking about writing imagined memoirs - and the techniques which she uses to create an authentic sounding voice for historical characters. In I, Ursula, her second full-length collection of poems, she presents the reader with a wide range of voices for female characters both real and imagined. 

The poems about the imagined characters take us back into the worlds of fairy-tale, legend and folk-history – to Rose Red, to Beauty and the Beast, to mermaids and witches. These poems take us into familiar Angela Carter territory – magical, subversive, feminist - and they are often entertaining in their exploration of paradoxes of female experience. ‘Bears are not good fuck-buddies’ begins the poem ‘Rose Red’ – and though the speaker goes on to list her bear’s many faults which lead her to throw him out because she ‘just can’t stand him any more,’ the poem ends, ‘I hope he comes back / I miss the warmth of the bear in my bed.’

The poems which I find the most powerful are those where the poet explores the experience of the female muse and the male artist in both art and literature. This major theme is introduced in the wittily titled poem ‘Averse Muse’ which opens the collection, and it is easy to spot in other titles such as ‘Muses.’ There is a strong feminist agenda behind the  presentation of the muse in many of these poems, and it is perhaps most striking or shocking in the eponymously titled poems such as ‘I, Ursula,’ ‘Camille  Claudel,’ ‘Jeanne Hebuterne,’ ‘Emilie Floge.’ This is where the personal becomes political: the male artists are known, but not the names of their female muses – not even when they were talented artists in their own right. The poor ‘I’ even goes unnamed in the golden shovel ‘Decorative’ and the later poem ‘Lady of a Portrait’ - no wonder that these women rebel. These poems – like so many others in the collection – explore relationships between artist and muse, men and women, the tensions between life and art, and the creation and appreciation of various forms of art, in terms of power and powerlessness.

About the reviewer 

Jane Simmons is a former teacher/lecturer who has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Lincoln. She is now a PhD student at the University of Leicester. As a reviewer for The Blue Nib literary magazine, Jane has built a significant publication history of writing about contemporary women’s poetry. A selection of her own poems appeared in the March 2019 edition of the magazine. Her pamphlet From Darkness into Light - poems inspired by the Book of Kells was published in 2018. Further poems have appeared in The View from the Steep, an anthology published by Pimento Press in 2019.

 

Review by Rob Jones of "The Coming-Down Time" by Robert Selby

Robert Selby’s collection of poems The Coming-Down Time is broad in its scope but artfully tethered. With themes of conflict, love and nostalgia running through all three of its sections, each part nonetheless leaves a different impression. The poems are sufficiently structured such that each variation from said structure, and indeed each rhyme, is heavy with significance.

The first section, charting the life and legacy of the narrator’s grandfather through a series of vignettes, quickly establishes a strong sense of place. The main character’s quietness and modesty is reflected in subdued, thoughtful lines and the more detailed description of the life and events which surround him. It’s warm and heartfelt, with a strong sense of narrative progression through the whole section.

The title of the second section, ‘Shadows on the Barley,’ reflects its more fleeting and impressionist nature, with stories and scenes conjured from places and objects. The tone and subject material broaden considerably; there are still specific references to war but there is more exploration of the trauma it creates. Several of the poems are deeply moving, even chilling, which can be jarring in relation to those which continue to celebrate warmth and homeliness. There is room for romance in a rural past, but it is clearly made up of so much more.

‘Chevening,’ the third section, is much more about the present. The past is still venerated as old buildings, memorials and traditions are described, and the characters and voices move through them with varying degrees of engagement. A romance is described in moments across the poems. The setting of present-day rural Kent is idyllic, tempered though that is with the very last poem’s imagery of propaganda and curation.

The Coming-Down Time, in its consideration and cadence, demands time in itself. Find a green space, sit down and read it aloud.


About the reviewer

Rob Jones studied English with Creative Writing options at the University of Leicester and completed an MA in Victorian Studies there. He lives in Sileby with his wife, sings with Leicester University Chamber Choir and dreams of working in heritage.

Review by Charles Bennett of "Longship" by Jessica Mayhew

Contemporary poetry sometimes feels a daunting and precarious place: the ground can give way suddenly, leaving years of wide reading, disciplined writing and artistic values feeling like outdated preconceptions which have no longer have validity. In the face of this multiverse – which might be more effectively labelled contemporary poetries (such is the bewildering variety of writings which now adopt the title of poem) it is a joy to welcome a wise, thoughtful and yet surprising collection from a gifted and reflective poet.

There are good reasons to buy and read this book. Here is someone who knows how to build a poem. The formal lightness of touch is exemplary – giving the poems a shape on the page as well as in the air. Often playful – a series of couplets often ends in a mischievous or profound triplet – Mayhew’s sense of timing, as the meaning of the poem unfolds and develops in its travel down the page, is a real joy. I found myself thoroughly enjoying the journey of the poem – and was delighted by the formal variety in which Mayhew shows how open form poetry always needs some subtle references to more formal elements to achieve its purposes: in the way a jazz improvisation of a classic melody both reinvigorates and refreshes the original. Free verse is, a Eliot reminds us, never really free at all – and it seems to me that poetry must display some kind of formal structuring or surrender its claim to being a poem. There are two, possibly three moments when her formal sensitivity deserts her – but prose poems like ‘Mistletoe’ and the uncomfortable long lines of ‘Cuttings’ only go to show how brilliant the rest of the collection is.

In its interplay with Norse mythology the book achieves an overall unity of purpose. Fortunately, the poetry is never over-reliant on our own knowledge of these myths; and the helpful notes supply solid support. A dancing and delightful collection, full of profound music and strong women, which echoes in the ear after reading, like chilly birdsong heard in a deep fiord.


About the reviewer
Before establishing himself as an academic, Charles Bennett was the Creative Director of Ledbury Poetry Festival, and has acted as writer-in-residence for Wicken Fen. Additionally, his work with choral composer Bob Chilcott has seen him hailed as a memorable and mesmerising librettist. He lives on the edge of Northamptonshire & Leicestershire with his wife, daughter and dog. His latest collection is Cloud River, published by Cinnamon Press. His website is http://www.charlesbennett.net/ 

Review by Sue Mackrell of "Hand & Skull" by Zoe Brigley

These are poems that leave a mark. They are

          the little grooves pressed from seams onto skin: hardly
          perceptible: lines crossing: pinking the flesh ...

(‘Poems with Seams’)

Zoe Brigley’s use of language is scalpel sharp in a collection which is wonderfully diverse in style and form. The delicacy and strength of Victoria Brookland’s ‘cut up’ images (‘I Too Am a Rare Pattern’) enhance and reflect the poems. There is anger and brutality but also beauty and tenderness. These are poems which cross boundaries. Hands are held out across time between women from myth, history and literature, and those today who are fighting for justice, humiliated by discrimination, silenced in courtrooms, and vilified in the press and social media. The lyrical horror of the opening poem draws on the Mabinogi, where honour codes and vengeance have disturbing contemporary resonances. An underlying theme of the collection is Celtic myth and the fragility of the veil between life and death:  

          Teens commit suicide in my home town: 25
          dead, no older than 19. They hang 
          from ceiling lights and branches. Nothing to do 

in a South Wales town where the ‘spat stone teeth of the foundries' are redundant 
        
          ...We ride the Mari Llwd, star-horse of the frost,
          her cranium stripped to yellow bone. Her head
          lurches on a stick from house to house:

(‘Letter to a Horse’s Head’) 

Violence against women is confronted and exposed. ‘Beatitudes for the Women’ draws on a language of abuse and legal discourse: ‘if you said yes once why not / sleep with one more’... a bus driver ‘hurrying you now to step / onboard lightly on the edge / of what is about to happen ...’ 'not long afterwards a man took/ photographs.’ The power of a photograph as a tool of violation is a recurring motif: ‘He opened the lens – and I did as I was told - / ....And he hung / me in pieces on his gallery wall’ (‘Letter from Georgia O’Keeffe’). ‘I said / Once there was this photograph of me / taken by a man / I loved ... It is the moment before / something terrible happens’ (‘Poem on the Edge’).

Several poems convey a chilling sense of women’s lives constrained by a need for constant wariness, for vigilance: ‘You know the women through every manmade thing / that men have used to trap them’ (Sonnet for a Hole in the Glass’). ‘I try not to look when I pass, though / they gaze at me with praise or disdain’  (‘The Amish Roofers’). ‘The garden gate creaks and someone is / behind me, always behind, but / don’t give in...’ (‘Beatitude for the Meek’).

‘Forgetting Poem’ addresses the hugely difficult issue of forgetting, forgiving, of striving for a neat ending where there is none. There are no answers, only questions about how to deal with denial, dismissal, self justification, or a meaningless claim of remorse in a society which colludes with the abuse of women:

          A woman flew out to meet her rapist, a man 
          from another country, absent for years.
          How liberating, she said, to forgive
          and forget. But what if your rapist is not
          a handsome man in a collarless shirt, not
          close to tears, or poised to make it 
          up as best he can? What if mercy isn’t asked for
          and cannot be given?’ 

‘The Eye in the Wall’ portrays an abuser: ‘Like looking / through a hole in the wall, he thinks of her again, / wonders if it was wrong, assures himself it was / right.’ But in a neat parallel, in ‘Sonnet for a Hole in the Glass,’ also based on contemporary court cases of rape and abuse, women are encouraged to ‘Punch a hole / in the glass: cracks spidering: ice too thin to carry / the weight of men: one eye to the gap just / wide enough for you to read their names.’ 

In ‘Vesuviennes,’ the redacted text suggests how those who challenge the system are silenced and erased from history. These 19th century French feminists were ridiculed and caricatured for their refusal to conform to gender expectations and for their transgressive dress: ‘ugly, comical, funny-looking, masculine ... women with monocles, cigars, and beards ...  men in skirts.’ Elsewhere in the collection are enigmatic, sensual, troubling and playful references to clothes. There is a ‘whalebone crinoline,’ a ‘bridal gown,’ a ‘mourning dress,’ and also ‘tiny shirt buttons,‘ ‘stockings and suspenders,’ and Katherine Hepburn’s ‘high-waisted pants.’

Images of transformation and shape changing are central to many poems. There are eagles, swans, horses, and ‘Syrinx, / the reed-woman, transformed into / a mournful sound: Pitys turned to pine, / rocked by the North Wind, and Daphne / who was at her end a sweet laurel. / We are all who have pleased too well’ (‘Dryad’). ‘Poem for Emily Doe’ paraphrases testimony from a witness in a Californian rape case: ‘Three nurses / prise flora and fauna / from her hair.’ The standard name ‘Doe’ assigned to give anonymity here takes on unintended resonances. Links between woman and nature are an ancient trope which permeates this collection of poems. In ‘Post Colonial,’  ‘She couldn’t blame the place where / it happened. The mountain, a blind / animal, innocent as any massive herbivore.’ The Welsh landscape has itself been violated by the ‘English cannon of colonialism.’ It is a place of bitter family feuds, where death is inevitable,‘the lamb we found dying in spring / snow. I covered the newborn thing with my coat, but the mother / ewe tore it away / with her teeth' (‘Letter on a Sheep Skull’).

Some of the most profound and heart rending poems in this collection are those about motherhood:
  
          ... I owe the world 
          for this boy, who knows the threading 
          of leaf veins, thrills at frogs, every moist
          unfurling tongue that snaps on a whir...

‘Can I protect this emptiness?’ (‘He Has a John Clare Chin’). In ‘Swan’ there is pain at the impossibility of keeping forever a ‘fluffed head on my shoulder: tiny / toes cold against my leg.’ The poems of loss in this collection are deeply personal. They are deliberately made public; there are no gaps and silences here; these poems speak the unspoken: 

          Until I had children, no one told me 
          that not all of them survive, that some die
          along the way. 

(‘My Last Beatitude’)

And in ‘Letter from Nemi’:

           ... After eight weeks, there is some blood, and 
           clotted tissue, dark red and shiny like liver. You overdress 
           tastefully, patterned collusion brilliant against
           your shiny white dress.

We hide the evidence, blot it out, make it tidy: ‘rain pulses shame.’ In the epigraph Claudia Dey suggests: ‘If we could perceive death as part of a pregnancy, we might just take women more seriously.’ For the men in this poem women are a distraction, a space to be filled: ‘Are women just a place / to put things?’ A woman has no right to refuse to be pregnant: ‘A woman died this week in Argentina, bled out inducing / miscarriage by tablet.’ This is a letter from the underworld, from Diana’s temple now beneath the lake. The moon goddess of birth and death, ‘a hunter / carrying arrows and a spear’ rides down oppressors. The poem ends with a haunting image: ‘a figure empty and white radiates in the blue storm light.’ In ‘Star / Sun / Snow’ children appear as natural phenomena, elemental beings: 

          1. Star
          You were the second...
         ... your
         head a pointed star trapped
         by my pelvic bone, but they trimmed, sliced,
         opened me up , and out you came screaming,
         slippery with my blood.

          2. Sun
          You were the third, big and radiant 
          in my stomach ...
          ... I couldn’t rest until the warm clutch
          of you was tucked beneath
          my breast.

          3. Snow
          You were the first, the one not 
          born, seen once onscreen shivering with excitement, or
          pain. 
          ...Now flakes, spin, 
          melt on the warm earth. If you had lived, we would
          have opened the door today, and I 
          would have said: Look, the snowflakes are
          trying to come in.

‘Name Poem’ is eloquent and heart searing: ‘Your name sings a feathery thing in the hand: / ...How impossible to sing your name! / This name of yours, delicate as a kiss on the eye,/ this name that sings a long drink of sleep.’ It is a beautiful elegy for a child who will never see snowflakes but whose spirit will always sing in the heart. 

An illuminating companion to this poetry collection is Zoe Brigley’s Notes from a Swing State – Writing from Wales and America (Parthian 2019) a collection of essays which give context and insight into the writing of these poems. 


About the reviewer
Since gaining an MA in Creative Writing from Loughborough University what seems like a lifetime ago, Sue Mackrell’s poetry, short fiction and reviews have appeared in locations and publications as diverse as Leicester public toilets (an Everybody’s Reading initiative!) to Agenda Poetry. She is enjoying seeing the world anew through her four grandchildren. 

Review by Tim Love of "Used to Be" by Elizabeth Baines

(This review was originally published here.)


The Mandaeans of southern Iraq had a demon called Dinanukht, half man and half book, who "sits by the waters between the worlds, reading himself". This demon could be the patron saint of Bainesland, where characters interpret symbols that seem to belong to the external world, but turn out being part of the character's past.

These 12 stories span a range of symbolic visibility. In the epistolic “A matter of light” set in May 1816, a self-proclaimed rational man dismisses strange events as interesting physical phenomena, tricks of the light worthy of investigation. Even when he entertains the possibility of ghosts, he dismisses the notion because he's lived too virtuous a life to deserve being haunted. But we learn he's a plantation owner and that his treatment of slaves wasn't perfect. The dark shadows and the “light” of the title take on racial overtones.

In “Looking for the Castle” the symbolism's more overt. A women takes a detour to visit her home town. She has problems navigating her past. Has so much really changed? Maybe the unfindable castle's really the misremembered priory. But what is she really seeking? Was her childhood a place where she felt safe, or was it a confinement that still restricts her? After all, the fence her father built is still there.

“Used To Be” includes another mindscape – two middle-aged sisters, actresses, are on their way to an amateur film-set. The journey of bridges and missed turnings becomes a metaphor ("And flashing past with the bridges are all my selves") then becomes another story to tell when they arrive late.

Further along the overtness spectrum is "Tides or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told". Fans of "show, not tell“ might balk at the 13 mentions of ”story“ or ”stories" and the discussion of narratives – e.g. "Would I mention my sense then that nothing had meaning and that my life after all was no story, or would I lie, since he recovered, and make those symbols fit a narrative arc with a happy ending?" - but to me it's like the stage magician who explains how a trick works only to surprise the audience later. What kind of story of herself does the narrator want to write?

The protagonists come in many varieties (male/female, young/old, presented in the first, second and third person), but they're all opening a debate with their past. Sometimes it's disowned - "I see her, my former self, as another person" - used as raw material to be melted down, reforged. Sometimes it illuminates the present. The settings encourage reinterpretations – film-sets, Brontë country, old haunts. Explicitly or otherwise, the characters are story-makers, reassembling their life-arc from stirred memories.

Whatever the uncertainty of the narrators, the characters are utterly believable. There's always the sensation of an underlying reality. Characters may exhibit enhanced free will once they've unshackled themselves from the past, but the real world is a given.

My favourites are “Used to be”, “Falling” and especially "Tides or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told" (which is much shorter than I recall it being). None of the stories are routine, which is no surprise given that they've all been published already in places like Carve Magazine, Unthology, Stand and Best British Short Stories. You can buy it directly from Salt.

About the reviewer
Tim Love’s publications are a poetry pamphlet Moving Parts (HappenStance, 2010) and a story collection By all means (Nine Arches Press, 2012). He lives in Cambridge, UK, teaching computing. His poetry and prose have appeared in Stand, Rialto, Oxford Poetry, Journal of Microliterature, Short Fiction, New Walk, etc. He blogs at http://litrefs.blogspot.com/.