Interview with Suyin Du Bois

Suyin Du Bois is a poet of mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage, living in London with her South African husband. Her poems have been published in Propel, Iamb, Stanzas, Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (Fourteen Publishing, 2023) and Malaysian Places and Spaces (Maya Press, 2024), amongst others. She is a member of the Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective 2024/25. When not obsessing over word choice, Suyin spends her time building a profit-with-purpose start-up that seeks to ensure 24/7 access to nutritious, affordable food for NHS hospital staff. Eating Air is her debut pamphlet.

Interviewed by Laura Sygrove

LS: Eating Air opens with "Ode to Kaya," a poem that moves between childhood and adulthood. Why did this feel like the right poem to begin the collection?

SDB: "Ode to Kaya" was the first poem I wrote where food took such a central role, and it really opened up something in me. Suddenly I was thinking of all the different ways food could help me explore different areas of emotional interest. Since this poem acted as a gateway for me, I hoped it might do the same for my reader. Beyond that, it seeded some key context and themes for the collection which I hoped would help get the reader quickly into this world: the idea of multiple homes at distance from one another, the connective power of food, as well as tensions around identity.

LS: In poems such as this one, there is a sense that food and memory change when carried across borders. How has living in London affected your relationship to the places and traditions you write about?

SDB: Certainly, I think distance romanticises the worlds that you are apart from, and that we are more at risk of taking for granted that to which we have daily access. In my writing I am often trying to capture elements of the world that are not my day-to-day, to make my memories and momentary impressions tangible. Regarding living in London specifically, I love how culturally mixed London feels to me, how it feels like a place where I can be all the parts of myself. I do think it is a very positive influence on my writing in this sense. 

LS: Your preface connects food, poetry, and a sense of home, while many poems explore questions of identity and belonging. How has writing poetry helped you navigate the cultures, languages, and places that have shaped you? 

SDB: What a beautiful question. I love the reflective nature of writing poetry. It encourages me to ask questions of myself, to think about what I’m interested in communicating and why. There are parts of my cultural upbringing that are already bedded in, others I have consciously sought out for myself, and others I am only learning about now. I am still being shaped. It’s all a work in progress, and I think poetry has a supportive, parallel role to play in that. Beyond this, I love how poetry connects me to other people. I have some readers who have similar upbringings and background to me and others who have completely different ones. Hearing both these sets of readers highlight something I wrote that resonates with them is beautiful and fills me with a new sense of belonging. I honestly can’t get enough of it. 

LS: Much of the collection is written in prose poetry. What drew you to this form, and how do you decide when a poem needs a different structure?

SDB: Pretty much every poem for me starts as a brief note about a specific idea or memory. My Notes app is full of these! When I have time to sit down and write, I take one of these ideas and free-write to try to get down as much core and tangential detail as I can. From this free-write, I pick out the elements that I think make a poem, and then start writing toward that in a much more structured fashion. Usually this is where I start to introduce form. I'm firstly interested in making line breaks and stanzas work with my own cadence and pacing: I will always read my poems out loud throughout the editing process (a big reason why I struggle to edit in public!). Beyond that, I look at the overall shape and feel of the poem, and try to use the form to introduce some element of surprise or highlight particular words or ideas. 

For the slash poems in the collection, I still see these as line-broken poems rather than prose poems. In "Cut Scenes" this felt right at first due to the fragmentary nature of retelling memories that aren't mine, where I am inserting myself. Additionally, there was something about the poem being sliced up like steak that I rather liked! In "Every trip to Brussels must include a Sunday," again these felt like fragments of varying interconnectivity all stuck together in one big way, so the close separateness of the slash felt right to me here as well.

LS: In poems such as "Auntie Pixi’s Aga Agak," recipes become a way of preserving memory. What interested you about those moments where cultural inheritance feels both intimate and incomplete? 

SDB: While I very much embrace my two heritages, I feel a certain level of disconnectedness also for two key reasons (and perhaps others too). Firstly, I never knew any of my grandparents, they all passed away before I was born. Secondly, I can't speak any of my heritage languages fluently. As I've gotten older these things have bothered me more and I've mourned that feeling of distance, even in the context of love, with older family members who have now passed. This is a continuing area of interest for me.

LS: "Chinese New Year at Sara’s" explores the tension between inheriting traditions and reshaping them. Why was that an important theme for you to write about? 

SDB: I suspect that I or the things that I do will never be whole or authentic enough for some people, and so I'm conscious that I need to claim and celebrate these differences for myself. Knowing this and doing it, however, are not the same thing! Having said that, I actually didn’t realise that’s where this poem was going to go when I started to write it. It took me to quite a bold, declarative place all by itself. 

LS: The title Eating Air comes from Hokkien and Malay expressions connected to food, wellbeing, and travel. When did you realise it was the right title for the collection, and what does the phrase mean to you now?

SDB: I had these phrases "chiak hong" and "makan angin" noted down as a seed idea for a poem for a long time, and planned to explore how these idioms for travelling translate to "eating air," but I just never ended up writing into the idea. When I was getting my sample of ten poems together in response to The Emma Press open call for submissions, I needed to give the collection a working title in the proposal. I was struggling to find something within the sequence of poems itself and this jumped out at me when I turned to my Notes app for inspiration. It just seemed to fit perfectly with how the poems invite the reader to travel across the world with them. I also love how the title is intriguing in English as an unusual turn of phrase. I’ve had several people ask me the story behind it. Luckily, I was able to include an explanation in the preface, which unravels this for non-Malaysians.

LS: Food carries memory, grief, family history, identity, and belonging throughout the pamphlet. What does food allow you to explore in poetry that other subjects might not?

SDB: Food gives me a really concrete, sensory way into so many different subjects. I can start off free-writing about the physical experience of eating and end up somewhere completely different, abstract or even undefined, which I might otherwise struggle to get to or to articulate without the more tangible language of food. 

It felt really generative for me as well, having this theme of food to play with. I was constantly thinking of new meaningful food moments, and noting them all down. I was really conscious that I didn’t want to be writing the same poem over and over again though, so I kept pushing myself to make sure each poem took me in a new direction. 

About the interviewer
Laura Sygrove is a graduate of the MA Creative Writing programme at the University of Leicester. She is an advance reader at DartFrog Books and writes for The Publishing Post. You can read some of her poems here, here and here. You can read a review by Laura of Eating Air by Suyin Du Bois on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Review by Laura Sygrove of "Eating Air" by Suyin Du Bois

 

Suyin Du Bois’ debut poetry pamphlet is a tapestry of shared cultures, a smorgasbord of delectable delights and rough estimations; a rich blend of seasoned memories and flashes in the pan. Eating Air is complex, intimate, and oftentimes devastating; a journey into the past in an attempt to preserve the present, always just seconds out of reach.

Besides Du Bois’ poetry, I’ve thought of little else for weeks. Her work begs you to read the words aloud, to savour each syllable as the speaker savours each meal. Eating Air is a collection of flavour samples that dance on the tongue and settle in the pit of your stomach. Du Bois transports the reader across oceans to sit at low dining tables, folding meal trays at high altitude, beside hospital beds and roadside stalls, relishing the familiar taste of airline food and leftovers, sand-roasted chestnuts, French pastries, and makeshift noodle dinners.

For Du Bois, eating and writing are both acts of remembering and belonging, or of not quite belonging, and of longing itself. In her preface, she describes feeling poetry in her body in much the same way as food, where "certain combinations of words can have just the right mouthfeel." Food nourishes the body while carrying emotional and cultural memory. Poetry preserves that memory, remaking it through language: "I stir and stir like her until my spoon draws the right depths of lineage."

As a title, Eating Air feels both grounding and elusive, suggesting nourishment while gesturing towards something intangible: "store-bought surrogates," swaddled exports with their "layers thinned," family recipes spooned from jam jars for the very last time. Her work reads almost as a series of diary entries, reimagining transitory yet toothsome moments in a search for self through places, memories, and identities that resist easy definition.

Du Bois writes with complete transparency, embracing the discomfort of existing between cultures. She allows these tensions to remain unresolved, capturing the feeling of being both within and without. Her poems linger in that in-between space, searching for belonging without ever insisting upon certainty. My favourite line in the collection, "I insist we oil our bloodlines mackerel slick," is as tender as it is visceral, preserving heritage not as something fixed, but as something living and lovingly maintained. In Eating Air, nourishment is found not only in food, but in language and memory, and the act of returning to them.

About the reviewer
Laura Sygrove is a graduate of the MA Creative Writing programme at the University of Leicester. She is an advance reader at DartFrog Books and writes for The Publishing Post. You can read some of her poems here, here and here.  

You can read more about Eating Air by Suyin Du Bois on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Lisa Natasha Wetton of "Writing Elegies for Dead Men I Didn't Meet" by Cathi Rae

This is everyday life, simply depicted, suicide taken in a stride, elongated spaces between the words giving breath where there is none. The reader is given space to pause to reflect and then continue, taking in the gravity of this subject matter in as easy a way as possible. 

          "Is this real?"
          "Shit, I think it’s real"
          "He really really did it"
          running in real time
          while time has stopped for you.

Writing Elegies for Dead Men I Didn't Meet is a series of poems based on real-life stories, creating a narrative that shines a light on issues around men's mental health and the tragedy of male suicide. In her preface, the author refers to it as "a 21st century tragedy." She brings home the finality of life-ending decisions made in everyday circumstances, in order to make individual men visible in a culture that, as the collection quietly argues, has made them very easy to overlook.

Every kind of suicide and situation weaves through this collection. Teenage boys, middle-aged men, drunken fathers snatched from life in a moment that cannot be taken back. Some planned, some more spontaneous, all terminal and unchangeable. The sadness and tragedy are stark and unrelenting, with a wish that it could be something other. 

The simplicity of descriptions mirrors the commonality of suicide. Men of all ages are taking their lives under the compounding weight of circumstances that ground them down - feeling unseen, carrying shame they were never equipped to name, or simply exhausted by the effort of continuing. 

In the opening piece, "Slicing Through the Information Superhighway with a Scalpel," Rae writes about the process with which she created the content:

           my computer glitches
           won’t stop scrolling page after page
           name after name after name
           until I have to look away block away the tears
           writing elegies for dead men I didn’t meet.

Poem after poem, man after man, the weight of it builds and builds. These are not isolated failures, not men who simply couldn't cope. They are every age, every background, every circumstance. "Club 18 to 35" feels like the collection's breaking point. This is an almost-angry reckoning with what we are doing to men, and what we are allowing to continue.

Male suicide is becoming an often silent, global epidemic, with men dying by suicide approximately three to four times more often than women. Rae reaches out to shed light on an issue that must be addressed. These poems provide perspectives of people choosing to take their own lives and how, as well as acknowledging those left behind. 

In "Finders," Rae bluntly puts it, 

          your discovery       just a delay
          in the everyday of commuting home
          a flicker of frustration
          and then reset
          Someone has to find you ... 
          someone who will keep that memory
          forever
          even if they wish they couldn’t
          who might prefer that you had stayed
          unfound.

Here, she acutely presents the devastating impact that ripples out from suicide. Lights go out on a life, as the world inevitably, indifferently, keeps on turning. This is a collection that deserves to be read widely - not as a comfortable experience, but as a necessary one. 

About the reviewer

Lisa Natasha Wetton (aka Lisa Life) is a regular contributor to the English pages of L’eco de Sitges, Barcelona. She is a Creative Artist, Coach & Hypnotherapist. She collaborates on Writing Retreats with American Author Will Bashor, with whom she co-authored Soul to Pages - A Weekend Journey to your Novel/Self-help book, a process used to support budding writers that incorporates meditation and visualisation sessions. She is currently refining edits on her first completed book, A Guide to Spirituality from a Working Class Girl. She has a twenty-year history working in Dance & Theatre and has been based in Barcelona for almost seven years. You can find Lisa at https://linktr.ee/NewLisaLife.

You can read more about Writing Elegies for Dead Men I Didn't Meet by Cathi Rae on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Martyn Crucefix of "Slow Burn" by Jordi Doce

The late John Burnside praised Jordi Doce as "one of the three or four living European poets whose work I most treasure." Slow Burn is a sequence of ten delicate, untitled poems of grief, finely translated by Paul O’Prey. It is not till later that the reader is told "death made its move" and Doce initially establishes an unsuspecting mood, comparing the human body to an ordinary "sunlit town square." The café chairs, the old men’s talk, the pigeons, the bell tower, form a "simple / homeostasis," a stability yet to be struck down. Likewise ordinary language (meetings, conversations) only functions up to a point, beyond which hovers "the god / of what’s left unsaid." 

Though distanced into the third person, the fifth poem portrays the writer as he used to be: "rummaging through things, / looking for their meaning." The switch to the present as he "peers through the window" comes as a shock: "He has stopped hearing the voice of himself." Doce’s verbal strikes have an unnerving delicacy. Another poem opens "Whose certainties were these?" and the juxtaposition of certainties with the past tense does powerful lifting in characterising the devastation of loss. The writer’s business is now left in "neglect" and any talk of peace or tranquillity is "to speak a dead language" or is at best "a craving for some plausible / sense of order."

A later poem takes up the earlier suggestion of the unsuspecting ordinary and evokes the shattering effect of grief through the image of a house having lost a room: "We dropped our guard / for just a moment / and it disappeared." It is here that death makes its move, "without / any hint, without any warning. / And took the whole house." The final italicised poem looks back at the sequence preceding it from beneath a sky that is "both itself / and something strange" and affirms that the flames of loss have passed across the flesh of those remaining, for whom, beneath their skin, "embers smoulder on." It is this residual grief that constitutes the mournful "slow burn" of this moving, melancholy, restrained, and exquisitely written chapbook.

About the reviewer
Martyn Crucefix: Between a Drowning Man was published by Salt in 2023; his translations of Peter Huchel (Shearsman) won the 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. A Rilke Selected Poems, Change Your Life, has been published by Pushkin Press, 2024. Martyn's blog is here. 

Review by Debasish Lahiri of "Debris" by Daniel Huws

Sometimes poetry can be the disturbance of clear blue skies, shaking the airline passengers, briefly, from their polite boredom into mild alarm, but merely coaxing a bird to bring out all its dance moves in a mid-air ballet. A quiet, precise quire of our disquiets, the poetry of Daniel Huws brings dynamism of drama, that of the recondite garret or the familial dinner table, to a laconic, punctilious close like the sibilant witness of sunlight through the window of the same room. Huws has always had that Welsh gift of using nature to narrate the seasons of "man," to feel the winds (and smoke) of time in the hair, and the tug at the hem of their clothes. Everything, or nothing, is mundane, or mythical.

In Debris, poetry from his two earlier collections Noth (1972) and The Quarry (1999) is collected alongside "uncollected" and occasional poems. Huws’s tribute to Christopher Reid in his "Author’s Preface" can equally be a testament to his own craft as a poet. Patience, a quality Huws admires in his editor, is his own great forte. When the needle on a seismograph is going mad as Hieronymo, when the world – of one individual, or the world as a civilization sees it – is going down, Huws’s poetry holds it all in the unshaking crucible of its palm, without "a single cumbersome word or phrase" or “a jarring note." The clarion call of mortality sounds through the bacchanalian mist of youth, clearly, in "The Party": "He took off his flesh and lay in his bones." 

Burnishing parergons – small moments, contemplations that sit askew to the straight highroads of existence, realizations that are of no consequence, but great import – with suppleness and poise, with an unerring eye and acute ear, Huws often produces such lines – "days of dying bred spite in our tongue" and "to have strayed in a wood which seemed like home."  

Huws pulses with the dark-vowelled flow that we find in Dylan Thomas, but he keeps that well behind an English dyke. This is his particular Welsh-ness. However, like sand between fingers that tide does sometimes breach: 

          With the voice of a flower, the voice of a child,
          You cried against the iniquity
          Of blackness, blackness clammy and choking
          …
          Your only resource was to flourish death
          In a brilliant flare of uncomprehending.

The misted past catches up with us as the poet conjures for us places, straight out of the gizzard of time, and we feel a sudden damp in our boots from that old bog of years, or quarry:

          Ages ago,
          And I still stand
          Caught in the long afternoon
          In the old quarry,
          Face to the wall,
          Counting to twenty.

Huws’s Debris is a reminder that the pluck and spirit of "small" beings – women, men, children or flowers – ensure that the world does not end tonight.

          The slow way home was through the wood
          Which creaked with age
           …
          And in the November storm
          The red campion battled so late.

The occasional poems in the volume (addressed to Ted Hughes, Jean Hawkes and Lucas Myers) are rhymed with a friendliness and accord that is the bedrock of friendship that has withstood the ravages of time. Daniel Huws writes like the restorer of old paintings, the light that is always there in the dark-overtaken masterpieces and just needs brightening. If poetry can turn to sound a silence that is ever-growing in us, around us, as in Huws, then it will have succeeded in its labour.

About the reviewer
Debasish Lahiri has nine collections of poetry to his credit, the latest being A Certain Penance of Light (2025). Lahiri is the recipient of the Prix-du Merite, Naji Naaman Literary Prize 2019.

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 Maria Taylor of "Ambush at Still Lake" by Caroline Bird

It’s been said that humour often comes from a serious place. That concept can be easily applied to Caroline Bird’s Ambush at Still Lake. Themes such as parenthood, marriage, addiction and recovery are turned on their head in Bird’s surreal and animated collection of poems. In Bird’s prose poem ‘The Addict Impersonator Contest,’ addiction itself is quite literally turned on its head: 

                                                                                               True self-hate
          Takes years to master like the Handstand Scorpion Pose in yoga, or
          Jazz drumming…

The humour here is wry, perhaps even uncomfortable, but  it also dances with the truth. The poem ends with a distortion of the speaker’s mimicked addiction with real-life hurt. I felt the irony of the judges’ description of it being ‘the realest routine they’d ever seen’ and felt the punch of ‘Mum and Dad crying with pride.’ Bird understands how humour and tragedy cause friction when woven together. There’s an intuitive awareness of this that often has startling results. 

Throughout the collection, rich images and strange confessions jump out at you. Experiencing a Bird poem requires a suspension of disbelief which I was more than happy to go along with. We live in a strange and complex world and Bird’s poems allow us to navigate the strangeness in an engrossing, vivid way. In ‘Starter Marriage,’ for instance, the speaker in the poem invites everyone to their wedding, including a BT Operator who kept them on hold for ‘forty minutes in 2007.’ Is Bird perchance saying that we live in a society in which most individual relationships are based on shallow connections – or is it just straight-up funny? Or both? What I especially like about Bird’s poems is the reluctance to come up with answers. Instead the speaker and the phone operator dance together, ‘reminiscing / under a marquee of stars,’ to what else but the ‘synthesised’ tune of Greensleeves that brought them together. 

In ‘The Baby Monitor,’ a sinister scenario occurs when a baby monitor becomes a living being, long after the actual baby has grown into a child at ‘preschool.’ There is something universal about the monitor itself being an object parents fixate on – and perhaps that stress never goes away:

                I sat through parents’ evening
          Like a killer in the dock, Knowing
          The monitor was home alone 
          Crying to an empty room.

For all the humour here, it’s also surprisingly chilling! 

Bird’s poems have a spontaneous feel, as if they’ve sprung from a place where humour and pain co-exist. Perhaps when someone has been through a great deal, they appreciate that the so called ‘happy ever after’ of marriage is not a wholly trustworthy thing. In the collection’s title poem, ‘Ambush at Still Lake,’ it’s the placid lake itself which offers an answer of sorts to the manic nature of life: ‘We carry on / dying forever, always almost home.’ 

About the reviewer
Maria Taylor is a British Cypriot poet and reviewer. Her latest collection is Dressing for the Afterlife (Nine Arches Press). Her debut collection of poetry, Melanchrini, was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. She has been published widely, including poems and reviews in The Guardian, Magma and The Times Literary Supplement. She has been highly commended in the UK Forward Prizes for poetry. She also works as Reviews Editor for Under the Radar. 

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 Peter Raynard of "Our Fathers" by Michael Brown

 

In a world where on the one hand powerful men are abusing their position through predatory activity towards women, whilst on the other there are surging rates of suicide in men under the age of forty-five, it is important that we write to fill the picture with positive portrayals of men, by subverting the notion of what a "real man" is. Poetry has responded to this more recently, with books by Jack Underwood and Ray Antrobus gaining recognition.

Michael Brown’s Overton Poetry Prize-winning pamphlet Our Fathers is a welcome addition to this trend. Being both a parent (of a daughter) and a son himself, Brown’s poems convey tri-generational relations, relations with other men, and boyhood escapades.

The opening poem "In the Men’s Group" sets a sad scene of "a man whose wife told him he is a waste of space," and "a policeman sleeping on a blow up bed at his parents."

We then move to a short powerful poem "Shift" which is reminiscent of poems by Fred Voss: "The man made of shopfloor swarf put down / The battered gold and green baccy tin // The machinery in his head diminishing // At the sink his wife can sense the shift in him."

His relationship with his father is set in the family car, a place where measures of a relationship unfold. In the poem "In Late Summer, 1983" they are on the M1 taking Brown to live in another town. Looking at his father to "stare across the front passenger seat / at Watford Gap, or some other nondescript place he’d check on the map / to look at the way we’d come, how far."

There is a confidence in the variety of form and sound of each poem, such as in "Aqua Terra," with off rhymes across lines, such as skill, kill, flint, and microlith.

Finally I like the way Brown ends the pamphlet with the poem "Cot Song" about the birth of his daughter (who is now a teenager at least), subverting a linear narrative, showing the fragility of a newborn life, the responsibility of a parent, and the signalling of constant renewal:

          Little limb reaching up

         for some response
         from us, such Gods

         who kept you
         in the cosmos of your cot.

When asked what a poet should do in their writing, Louis MacNeice said "mention things." Brown mentions plenty of things in a short space of sixteen poems. He is rewriting what a man is, and what men can be, in a world where other so-called men catch the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

About the reviewer

Peter Raynard is an independent researcher, poet and editor of Proletarian Poetry. His three books of poetry are: Precarious (Smokestack, 2018), The Combination: a poetic coupling of the Communist Manifesto (Culture Matters,2018), Manland (Nine Arches Press, 2022). A debut pamphlet (a heroic crown of sonnets), The Harlot and the Rake: poems after William Hogarth, was published by Culture Matters in September 2024.

Review by Rachael Clyne of "Janus" by Catherine Ayres

This is a thoughtful and beautifully crafted collection. Like Janus, Catherine faces both directions as she dips into memories. The months are in order, while the years skip back and forth. In her title poem, "January 2015 - a new sofa arrives":

          What might happen, never did.
          My heart’s a holloway, a healed wound
          but January’s naked on the lawn –

In February 2014, the narrator visits a Louise Bourgeois exhibition in "Spider" – a skilful villanelle circling around Bourgeois’ giant spider sculptures in her attempt to heal childhood trauma by "weaving her woman’s body into art." Ayres shifts from classic form to sharp imagery in "Ignoring Alicia":

          If I were you
          I’d have swollen eyes,
    a flick knife fringe

In March 2020 lockdown: "streetlights weep like snowdrops." Ayres delivers groceries to her mother who is gradually revealed behind the garage door, like Darth Vader wearing Sketchers. In May, she is a mother in a witty prose poem in Geordie dialect,  when her kids are berated by a neighbour for "hoying clemmies" (throwing stones). The poet then deftly shifts to June and a childhood friend in "Odbods," describing their bedrooms, "like conches, delicate and full of whispers." 

Ayres's poetry is grounded in love of landscape. September has descriptions of Gateshead’s "Dunston Staithes," and Ambleside’s "Dove Crag." October 2019 brings a recurrence of breast cancer and a second mastectomy, followed by a clifftop walk to a castle, where there is "no turning back from your wind-sucked gate, the grimace of its antlered mask." As we move through different spaces of her life, we glimpse it through Ayres' eyes. The book ends on Christmas Eve 2014 with "The single woman and the lights," as she untangles the mess of lights (and marriage breakup), then "slow dances" them round her tree. This is a book of courage, tenderness and subtlety.

About the reviewer
Rachael Clyne from Glastonbury is widely published in journals. Now retired, Rachael was a professional actor, then psychotherapist. Her prizewinning collection, Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams 2014), concerns our lost connection with nature. Her pamphlet, Girl Golem (4word.org 2018), explores her Jewish migrant heritage. Her latest collection, You’ll Never Be Anyone Else (Seren 2023), is a journey of reconciling identity and otherness through childhood, relationships, LGBTQ and ageing. 

You can read more about Janus by Catherine Ayres on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by James Nash of "Remembering" by Julie Gardner

This is a tender and moving collection celebrating and memorialising two lives, the poet’s mother and her own husband, but succeeding, as all good poetry does, in finding universal truths about our common humanity and shared experience of loss.

Deftly constructing a history for her mother who died at forty-seven, and recording the emptiness after her husband’s death, these are quiet but truthful poems that bind us into the ordinary, but somehow extraordinary, emotional textures of human lives, and show us how we survive in the aftermath of tragedy.

This is from ‘Moving On’:

          After the van had gone
          I mopped the kitchen floor
          then went upstairs, stood awhile,
          as empty as the house itself.

Julie Gardener is a fine poet, content to let her readers ‘join up the dots’ if you like, but also happy to acknowledge the influence of other poets like Grace Nichols and Jacob Polley. She is playful in terms of form in ‘Rondo,’ riffing on nursery rhyme (a motif which appears in several of these poems), but ultimately what we have in this fine collection is a poet using simple and gracefully chosen words to explore the territory of memory and grief. The almost Wordsworthian reliance on everyday language gives these poems an emotional reach and power that is refreshing and unusual.

This is from ‘For Arthur’:

          Widow sounds so sad and slow
          and I am neither, though I will
          forever wish you here.

The photograph on the front cover of the poet’s mother is blurred; the poems inside reclaim the misty lives of those who have gone before, mother and husband, and prove again and again that art can construct great memorials. The gift of this brilliant collection is that it allows us to connect to our own loss and mourning, our own ‘remembering’ if you like.

About the reviewer
James Nash is a poet based in Leeds. He often writes in the sonnet form and his next collection, Notes of Your Music, will be published by Valley Press.

Review by Geoff Sawers of "Pain Sections" by Paul Ilechko

Ilechko's first chapbook, Bartok in Winter (Flutter Press, 2018) was, as one might expect from the title, taut and spare with few words wasted; a book of clean lines and compressed, even drilled, language. Pain Sections is looser, more expansive – the larger paper format suiting the frequent use of very long lines – but continues the poet's searching investigation into the nature of the body as an unreliable medium, as both cage and vessel. A series of unspecified medical procedures are undergone; perhaps inevitably there is a yearning to escape at times, moments of panic, of surreal reverie, of frailty and fear. A poem that starts "A body drenched in joy / thicketed / and bruised / overwhelmed with pollen" ends with the lines "the iron-tasting leaves that still / eclipse / the lamp-lit room" ("Marrow of Purity"). If it was important for the reader to know the nature of these investigations, presumably we would have been told. But since that information is withheld it gives a weird, dislocated feel that I suspect is deliberate, since the very unreliability of the interfaces between mind and body seem to be the crucial site of much of the work's focus. Cancer is mentioned, but that appears itself to be a metaphor for something else.

At this point in the book there seems little escape: "and I wonder if / inside of each of us / there is only pulp / as inside each other / we liquefy ..." we read a few pages later ("Bruising"). The body is as tender as fruit; the natural world is a constant metaphor, with the erosion of coastlines mimicking the potential disintegration of a human body. But soon the possibilities of communication, especially in "Breath as Wave and Breath as Particle," begin to offer a way out of this stifling trap. At times we find what may be whispered lovers' dialogues, though the voices are unspecified and unsettling. Just as Bartok in Winter frequently switched voices within one poem, this book expands upon that technique and ends with a lengthy dialogue poem. If I have a real criticism to make it comes at this point as this fourteen-page dialogue, which seems to want and perhaps be able to resolve the tensions set up earlier in the book, is at times abstract or unfocussed. The most overused word – "leakage" – is still important however as it comes to emphasise the many unsoundnesses of the body. Even though this dialogue section contains memorable lines ("as light that flows through the cracks of our investment / I sold my waters for profit / I sold my light for kicks") it slips at one or two moments into bathos and could do with further careful editing.

Nevertheless, Ilechko's unflinching attention to detail is at times startling; little curls of the romantic or lyrical never distract from his serious purpose. Small touches of very dark humour come through too at times. Looking back once more at his earlier book the themes were all there, but the language was archer, more stylised. References to various artists – Ryman, Borges, Hopper – seemed unnecessary when, in the latter two cases at least, their influence was quite plain to see. In Pain Sections, Ilechko's voice is much more assured, biting without being sarcastic, and unafraid to tackle the most difficult of themes.

About the reviewer

Geoff Sawers (he, him) is the author of several books including a collection of linked short stories, Friends of Friends (Diehard, 2024). He is a lone parent of a disabled child and lives in Reading, UK. You can read a review of Friends of Friends on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Review by Martyn Crucefix of "Mappa Mundi" by Paul O'Prey

Paul O’Prey’s beautifully designed chapbook from The Melos Press contains a mapping of the poet’s dealings with the world, though every step taken through the outer topography has a powerful resonance with the life within. The epigraph from Rilke’s Duino Elegies nudges the reader in this direction: ‘The world is nowhere, my love, if not within.’ The original Hereford Mappa Mundi was created around 1290 and is described in the opening poem with its ‘seas of fire, walls of flame,’ basilisks, and griffins. O’Prey takes these mythic elements as psychologically significant, rather than a primitive literalism: ‘More of a mirror than a map.’ These flames and strange creatures lie within.

‘South’ proposes an excellent exercise for poetry writing groups: ‘I take a pen and sketch my own mappa mundi.’ O’Prey’s own sketch straddles London, County Down, an unnamed southerly port of embarkation, tropical-sounding islands, a paradise-sounding garden. This outer journey again sustains, just bubbling underneath, its potential inner equivalent. There are several poems about the poet’s father, who ‘salvaged ships / during the war,’ and who worked and fished along the sea’s edge, absorbing it so much that ‘Last Rites’ images his last days as being subject to a ‘shipwrecked mind.’

These portrayals of English land- and sea-scapes enclose several poems at the centre of the book which look to the Mediterranean, the island of Mallorca in particular. Ramon Llull founded the hermitage of Miramar on the island a mere twenty years before the Mappa Mundi was made. The poem, ‘Miramar,’ vividly captures the island’s terraces, its stony soil, its few remaining hermit monks working the land. The ‘inner’ world here is explored in the poem’s meditation on the nature of prayer: ‘the accuracy of words / is irrelevant – intent is content.’ O’Prey’s mappings encompass the spiritual with the pun here on the content(s) of a prayer and the content(ment) it may bring to the one who prays. This is such a skilfully structured book of just sixteen poems, yet its lightness of touch belies the heights and depths of its journeying.

About the reviewer
Martyn Crucefix: Between a Drowning Man was published by Salt in 2023; his translations of Peter Huchel (Shearsman) won the 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. A Rilke Selected Poems, Change Your Life, has just been published by Pushkin Press, 2024. Martyn's blog is here. You can read more about Between a Drowning Man on Creative Writing at Leicester here.  

Review by Constantine of "Legion of Lost Letters" by Debasish Lahiri

Legion of Lost Letters is such a wonderful title, the alliteration bringing with it the promise of historical adventure and discovery, and it delivers.

These are poetic stories. To call them "Poems" is apt, yet I feel the need to mention that these, while not as epic in scope as the Greek and Latin poems of old, are no less complete in the picture they create. Most modern poetry, by contrast, tends to lend itself to a singular frame in time, a snapshot of an object or feeling

The book opens with "Ovid Contemplates writing his Fasti at Tomis," and while the form and meter are the author's own, I was amazed at how Ovid’s voice came through the piece.  Indeed I could hear the same voice and inflexions in my mind as I would hear when reading a translation of Ovid's works (I alas have no Latin).

With the next poem, though it confused me with the given date, I could again feel the authenticity of the voice. To be sure, the poems / stories here are the imaginings of the author. However, even so, they paint as real and vibrant a picture as one could hope for. Each voice is different enough that you can suspend disbelief and let the characters live out a life in your head. Some voices are colourful, using the most beautiful and descriptive of words. Others are less educated, and younger, but no less real or vivid. 

Most seem unwilling travellers, though. They have landed in Albion (except dear Ovid) and are trying to make the best of what they have. There are anachronisms in plenty for those in the know, and they are intentional as far as I can tell. Indeed the author warned me to "Look out for the anachronistic embedded in the authentic." ( Words I feel he might have mentioned in his introduction).

For myself, I am left a tiny bit wanting. Not with the poetry, it is beautiful. Not with the stories: they resolve as far as they should and with skill. But I wish the author had added a bibliography of works, papers, etc. that had inspired him. Still, this is a small thing in a wonderful work, and possibly I am the only one who would care. Indeed for those who love this period, these poems could be a wonderful jumping-off point for your own study,

In short, the poems are beautiful. The ill-fated Aelle and her lover now have a life lived in my imagination. I have seen Royal Roman elephants in Chester through eyes that were not my own and felt the remembered rays of a Latin sun under a northern sky. 

Read it.  

About the reviewer

Constantine is an autistic writer and father best known for Pablo on CBeebies and The Cats of Charnwood Forest. He left leicester university in 2022 after completing an M.A. in Creative Writing.

Review by Gary Day of "Selected Poems" by Hubert Moore

I do not know how I have missed the sight of Hubert Moore’s comet crossing my sky on its orbit round the poetic heavens. Thankfully I can now see what must have long been obvious to others: a poet who is acutely observant, piercingly lyrical and unwavering in his commitment to the breadth of human experience.

The Selected Poems come with a useful introduction by Lawrence Sail giving a brief outline of Moore’s life, his career as a teacher, the death of his first wife and his eventual remarriage. One of the many delights of the volume is the opportunity to trace Moore’s development as a poet. There is a whimsy about some of the earlier poems. Rabbits ‘look like / a group of friends, Romans and countrymen / lending an ear to each other.’ This fusion of direct observation and classical allusion is just one feature of Moore’s early style.

Another is an almost matter of fact description of mysterious actions such as letting down the tyres of a bicycle, apparently belonging to a complete stranger. A bicycle appears in a later poem about poverty. Moore’s social conscience is particularly marked in a number of poems about asylum seekers where he draws on his own experience of working with refugees. Poems of mid-career such as ‘At the Bottle Bank’ show a deftness in capturing the complexities of lived experience in a single image. Poems dedicated to his children and to his first wife are, at times, almost unbearably moving. Some of the more recent poems are cautiously receptive to experiences which transcend the physical.

Lovely lines abound throughout: ‘that rare gift of rhyming with oneself.’ You can do that, these poems suggest, if you can keep your feet on the ground and your eyes on the stars.

About the reviewer
Gary Day is a retired English lecturer and the author of several critical works including Literary Criticism: A New History and The Story of Drama. His debut poetry collection, The Glass Roof Falls as Rain, published by Holland Press, is due out in February.

Review by Jon Wilkins of "Sublimity" by Mary Gilonne

I have to say when Jonathan Taylor said a collection of poems on Norfolk was available, I jumped at the chance of reviewing it as I love all parts Norfolk and was fascinated in seeing how Mary Gilonne would interpret a place I hold dear to my heart.

Throughout the pages of Sublimity, I could smell the sea, feel the sand between my toes, taste the fish and chips, hear the gulls crying out to each other and see the multi-coloured beach huts at Wells-Next-The-Sea. All of this was brought to life through the wonderful word pictures and images Gilonne paints for us all.

The collection was so easy to read and the poems transported me back to places I have visited. Each poem afforded a glimpse and nudged forgotten memories of Cley, of Stiffkey, of the freezing North Sea, Blakeney and Mundesley. Painting pictures with words is such a skill and Gilonne has mastered this art.

The variety of different poetic forms in the collection is a joy. We are left guessing continuously as to what style Gilonne will use next to interpret her own vision of Norfolk and, as such, she challenges the reader to discover different routes to pastures new and old.

Throughout, Mary Gilonne captures the essence of what makes Norfolk different. This is a site of strange place names and mysterious habits, of arts and crafts, hobbies and employment: everything that makes an English county unique.

As regards the few places in the verse that I haven’t visited, I am now intrigued to do so. If Gilonne can conjure up the past for me in places I do know, how wonderful must be the like of Scolt Head, Bloodgate or Welney? The very names seem to tease and invite. I can’t wait and I will be taking her words with me. What could be better in a windy February, a warm coat, scarf, a thermos of coffee, cake and reading Sublimity sitting by the beach at East Runton. Bliss!

I really enjoyed these poems. They brought crystal clear reminders of times past that were special, that are special, to me. 

About the reviewer

Jon Wilkins is 68. 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 "Makeover" by Laurie Bolger

Laurie Bolger is an award-winning poet, performer and founder of The Creative Writing Breakfast Club. It seems that the poet Laurie Bolger and I have things in common – Irish working-class roots, an interest in writing and thinking about fashion ... and we both found and read grown-up sex books at an impressionable age.

Makeover is a collection of the domestic, the small, the lives of ordinary working-class women, the stories of mothers, daughters, grandmothers, sisters and friends, all described with film-still precision. Her descriptive language is beautiful. She’s able to conjure up that moment, that childhood in ways that evoke a time and place even if you weren’t there and her pen portraits make me feel as if I know these women:

          Aunt Teasy    all horoscopes and nails
                      cursing and coughing
          like she emptying great bags of gravel
          straight onto the coffee table 

Bolger finds beauty in the smallest things, city flowers, the go-faster powers of a frilly swim suit, and the unspoken, when women hold onto lives, make spaces for themselves and challenge society’s expectations of what a good woman is.

This is a confection of a collection – easy to read in one delicious gulp and then return to again and again, always finding a new image, a justifiable blast of anger and defiance. It’s also the only collection I’ve ever read where Sylvanian Families get a name check.

About the reviewer
Cathi Rae is in the final year of an M4C funded creative / practice-led PhD. A new pamphlet collection, Just this side of sea-worthy, will be available from Two Pigeons Press in March 2024.

You can read more about Makeover by Laurie Bolger on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Richard Byrt of "The Truth at the End of the Night" by Malka Al-Haddad

 

The poems in Malka Al-Haddad’s collection, The Truth at the End of the Night, are powerful and very moving, as noted by Emma Lee in her Foreword, and by three reviewers at the start of the book. A strength of the collection is the inclusion of short and long poems. The shorter poems often include moving ideas and images, described with admirable brevity and economy of words. There are poems about the wars and atrocities in Iraq, as well as  love, home and hope. Some of the poems (for example, "American Propaganda" and "Love and War") include interesting juxtapositions of opposing ideas.

Black and white illustrations by George Sfourgas complement the poems movingly and effectively to portray the "pain, struggle, bravery and sorrow," which Malka so vividly describes. There are striking images throughout the collection. For example:

          I was told in secrecy that the land I loved
          does not want me to grow wheat or fruit here,
          I only grow cacti.

Vivid, surreal images are used to describe disturbing experiences: 

          Put my head in the chimney
          To speed up the burning of waiting and scattered memories,
          Put the spoons in the fridge.
          Put shoes to sleep on the pillow.

Some of the poems are redolent with memories of home – contrasted with the starkness of war:

          Remember if Tony Blair had not stormed my country
          With his war chariot
          I would now be drinking cardamon tea
          With my brothers and the children of my neighbourhood.
          If he had not occupied my country
          I would have fallen asleep
          On my mother’s pillow smelling of incense.

Malka’s "Introduction: Author’s Journey" provides an additional vivid account of her experience of war in Iraq over several decades, and its devastating effects on herself and her family.  Malka describes how "discovering poetry was life-changing" and how she "confronted [her] ... pain by working as an advocate in human rights issues in order to raise the voice of the oppressed, and that of [her] ... family." Malka also refers to ten years of rejected applications for asylum in the UK, and being moved by "the Home Office … from place to place":

After ten years of Home Office challenges,

still their hands are spiders mapping

bullets in the walls of my sanctuary.

Another poem describes the unpleasant experiences of being detained in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre ("Yarl’s Wood"). This poem is a contrast to the images of hope in "Psychiatrist’s Prescription":

          At sunset
          I go to the sea to complain about my bad luck.
          Feed the birds.
          Write poetry.
          Butterflies invite me to dance with them.
          The doctor said: All this is beautiful
          You do not need medicines …
          Keep singing with birds.
          This gives you eternal happiness.
          And you feel completely free.

Elsewhere, there are expressions of hope. I really like the lovely lines: "Exile is the place / Where the light releases your voice" and:

          My heart is a dark room
          And as I fell in love with you
          The wind opened all the windows and the sun entered me.

Malka’s collection ends with the lines: “and there the bird without sky was able to nest / And the bird rose soaring through the sky." As Pam Thompson writes at the start of the collection: "Love will always be home and family for Al-Haddad, yet in their absences, marriage and love of nature and the solace of specific memories, their images shining brightly within the poems: schoolbooks, birds, a grandmother’s song, a wooden table.” 

Some of Malka Al-Haddad’s verse is majestic and reminds me of the language of the 1611 King James Bible. I particularly like the stately cadences of:

          A campaigner against the madness of the military
          A speaker to liberate the inhabitants of other villages
          From the intensity of the horror of the moment
          He and his soldiers froze in their place like statues
          From that day on, he and his generals became statues.

A few lines later, Malka writes: "That’s why all birds now poop on the heads of statues" – a great and unexpected contrast to the lines above!  

In conclusion, I strongly recommend The Truth at the End of the Night. The collection includes moving, powerful and vivid descriptions and images of the pains of war, exile, and an appallingly difficult and long process of seeking asylum, as well as of hope, love and family.  All proceeds from purchases of the collection are "donated to City of Sanctuary UK." 

Congratulations to Malka Al-Haddad, to George Sfourgaras for illustrations which complement the poems so well, and to Camilla Reeve and Palewell Press for publishing the collection and making Malka’s work available to a wider audience.      

About the reviewer
Since retirement from his "day job," Richard Byrt has tried to develop his writing of poems. He facilitates Creative Writing at SoundCafe, Leicester: a charity for people with many diverse backgrounds and talents, who have experienced homelessness.