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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

above marram grass

quartering short-eared owls

pursued by corvids

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

I diluted her –
she spat words,
fishbones

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

 

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

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

Review by Emma Lee of "Not Even October" by Tim Relf

Not Even October is a collection that looks back on the ordinary moments that shape lives, while hoping that life still has more to offer. In "Time is running out" a "welcome home" banner feels celebratory until the poet learns it’s "for someone you later heard was coming home for the last time" which gives it an extra poignancy.

There are poems that push at what poets are "supposed" to write or not write about, e.g. in "Roadkill," where "poets must not linger by dead objects in the road" and those who claim there are rules are 

          the people who claim prose poems don’t exist then spend hours picking
          at the bones of line breaks. You’ll find them staring off –
          heroically and tragically – in their author photos as if they’re trying
          to see beyond joy and love, beyond moons, shards, flowers, geese,
          lambs, crows, cow parsley, beyond the whole damn kit and caboodle
          of clichés.

The frustrations of bureaucracy and "computer-says-no" scenarios feature too. "Proof of life" drips with the exasperation of those captcha tests. 

The title poem is about lighting the first fire of the year as the chill of autumn begins, memories of "sleepovers, beaches, bike rides," and ending "I’ll sit and watch / today go up in smoke." "May" deals with the superstition of bringing hawthorn into the house, as the poet breathes "in a shower of speckled blossom. So much for that stench: / it’s a myth. If this is how death smells, well, perhaps / there’s nothing to be afraid of, after all."

There’s a wry humour and Relf relishes poking fun that those who impose restrictions while championing those who rebel, demonstrating how humans connect and evolve. Not Even October probes the everyday, asking readers to see the extraordinary in the ordinary and look again at what seems familiar in these lively poems.

About the reviewer
Emma Lee’s publications include a novel Stalling an Ambush (Pegasus 2026) and poetry collection The Significance of a Dress (Arachne, 2020). She co-edited Welcome to Leicester (Dahlia Books, 2016) and Over Land, Over Sea (Five Leaves, 2015), reviews for magazines and blogs here. She is Treasurer for Leicester Writers’ Club.

You can read more about Not Even October by Tim Relf on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Zbigniew Mirosławski of "Równolegości / Parallelism" by Anna Maria Mickiewicz

The release of the 40th anniversary of edition of this literary work is an important event. It is entitled Równolegości / Parallelism. The author runs the Literary Waves Publishing House. She is a member of the English and Polish Pen Club. She has been awarded the Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture and the Cross of Freedom and Solidarity. Her poems have received awards in competitions in Great Britain and Italy. 

The introduction to the latest work is written by Amelia Serraller Calyo from Spain. It begins with the poem "they were not the ones." The unspecified "they ... ordered the trees to be silent" and "gagged the birds." This is a reminiscence from 1985. The next piece "my mother" is about hard work, serving to help others. The poem entitled "secret of the manuscript" written in Oxford is a reflection on the atmosphere at the ancient university: among flowers, fountains, courtyards. All this opens up "spaces deafened." "An Angel in London" tells about a meeting with a young seller of carrots and tomatoes. With a pale complexion, with "wings a bit chipped," he seems to be out of place. 

Human fates unfold differently. This angel still faces the challenge ahead of him: of discovering himself while abroad. Walking around London, we wander with Mickiewicz to Regent's Park. We come across the moment of a proposal. He is among the invisible clouds, she is "tangled by a rose muslin." Their time together will be measured by a clock on a Victorian tower. We will notice a jaybird "full of fear." 

The poet travels around the world, visits California, the Cornish moors, the blue-drenched hills of the Greek sea, and reads carefully Joseph Conrad’s English writings. We learn about the encoded emotions of a mother who lost her son; she writes about it sparingly, with great distance but also with pain that cannot be hidden. It is embedded in the description of simple actions. What did he do, what did he not do; he "did not even drink water / but fed the cat / said goodbye to his mother / he adjusted his suit." Is shrapnel of the day in Aleksandra Palace like grenade shrapnel? Is it the arrival of a spring or of a war? The streets rumble, the puddles light up. They sparkle. A blooming bouquet, a green tree are enough to create a spring poem. At Forty Hall manor "the platonic soul opens spaces," an ocean breeze appears, and "time strokes the air tenderly / the sluggish sun treads on the waves of the stream." 

The texts written abroad and those from home (memories or longings) create parallels. Now we know the reason for the book's title. The poem "Lublin counterpoints" recalls an old craftsman, Jan, who painted church arcades, and Stanisław, a carpenter. Their works have outlived their masters. Their silhouettes are remembered only by "the old ladies who peek out from behind the curtains." The action jumps to Manchester. Here we meet Chopin. We empathize with his mood. It is obvious that, suffering from lung disease, "he did not like the smog / … damp English weather," and crowded streets. Listening to the concert of the "Raindrop Prelude," we understand the loneliness of the genius, we admire the drops of music, like rain dripping "from his thin fingers, rapidly." In France, we get to know "walls of Aigues-Mortes." Ocne the only 13th century French port, it has now its moments of glory behind it. "An overgrown beach / a trodden grass / not knowing the scratching mowers' are a memento of departing into the void, like the crusades, the sixth and seventh, which set off from here. 

The juxtaposition of Socrates and Jaspers implies a comparison of faith in miraculous events and the self. The former will return to us in poems – "Socrates' cold gardeners" and "About the mystery of time." Everything is short-lived. Drinking coffee quickly on the Berkeley hills, we can only pretend that "we are still sipping something aromatic." Truly, drinking it during a meeting that is at the same time a short farewell, we do not have a moment to lose. 

An experience that is incomprehensible to "those who did pass across" but also to those "who did not pass across" is the state of war, whether it is a coup d'état or spruces in the Estonian forest broken like matches. They can be compared to broken souls. Echoes of such experiences slowly fade away, and we "put on earmuffs / silencing wars," opening the borders of independence. This is a reminiscence from London in 2024, 44 years after 1981, after General Jaruzelski's coup. 

Several texts are dedicated to personal experiences, for example the poem "birthday sun," another entitled "Was it worth it?" as well as "My Victorian house," and "I will return to you." In sum, this is another interesting volume, giving an idea of the scope of the poet’s work. 

The section "With a Reviewer's Pen" complements the poems very well. Here, we find the statements of Prof. Urszula Chowaniec, who emphasizes the compression of the poetic stanzas. Katarzyna Kado, herself a poet publishing, among others, in the Lublin’s Akant, draws attention to the alienation visible in the texts of Anna Maria Mickiewicz. Krzysztof Muszkowski, a veteran of the 17th Lviv Regiment and the 300th Mazovian Land Squadron, but also the secretary of Mieczysław Grydzewski, writes about the poet's emotions enclosed in "poetic landscapes." Dr Teresa Podemska-Abt from the antipodes writes about taming the world, with references to Polish and European culture. Dr Tomasz Niedokos, literary scholar, lecturer, researching the history of England, British media, and historical inspirations for cultural texts, draws attention to adaptation in the new country, drawing from the experiences of two cultures. Ted Smith-Orr notices Mickiewicz's "London Manuscript" and writes about "an emigrant poet ... who looks at her new surroundings" and describes her observations as "enlightening and bold." Krystyna Konecka reviews the volume Between Lublin and London. Selected Poems, writing about memory, longing, their magical influence on poetry, the economy of language, refined metre, and lightness of impression. Prof. Jerzy F. Fert develops the theme of symbolism contained in a minimum of words. Tom Wachtel from London appreciates conciseness, conveying the specifics and atmosphere of places. Adam Siemieńczyk appreciates the conversation "with the crying Socrates," its ancient and contemporary references. David Clark captures this poetry by calling it the "snapshots of fleeting moments," and comments on the meticulousness and "world of the inner self" of the poet. 

In this distinguished choir of reviewers, I was delighted to find some space for a few sentences of my own. I am enchanted by the apparent distance, responsibility for every word, consummate mastery, faithfulness of descriptions and identification with Englishness. On re-reading the poems in the collection Parallelisms, I recommend them to all lovers of lyrical speech and experts in Polish-British relations.  

About the reviewer

Zbigniew Mirosławski, born in Wadowice in 1958, is a poet, historian, editor. He graduated from Jagiellonian University. He is the author of 21 volumes of poetry and the prose works Day by Day and Family Stories. His poems have been translated into 13 languages and published internationally in literary magazines and anthologies, including International Writer’s Journal (USA), The Polish Review (UK), Polonika (Austria), and World Poets (Serbia). He has received numerous literary awards, including the Honorary Certificate of the Guido Gozzani Competition in Turin (2023), and distinctions from literary journals in Greece and China. He is the editor of the literary magazine Aspiracje (Aspirations). His cultural distinctions include the Meritorious Cultural Activist Badge, the Badge of Honour for Meritorious Service to Polish Culture, the Medal of the National Education Commission (2025), the 100th Anniversary of the Battle of Warsaw Medal, and the Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture, awarded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

Review by Christine Hammond of "Small Birds Singing" by Matthew Welton

Small Birds Singing gently canters across a city’s green spaces covering a twelve-month seasonal period from September to August. Observing and recording the everyday acts of life, stanzas comprise two lines typeset asymmetrically. 

Effectively, this brings structure and order to the sheer volume and apparent randomness of the content. Often, it is used to juxtapose what may seem mundane with a reflection that encourages the reader to a deeper level of understanding of our reliance on and interaction with the objects around us: Thinginess and Thinkiness as Welton describes it, as seen here in "October":

a woman in the doorway, holding her palm out into the rain
in each window of the apartment block, a tall yellow flower

           on my desk, the stalks of apples I ate yesterday
                in a curving brick wall, a curved wooden door

is it thought we return to 

or that the thought returns to us? 

           

           a curving line of mushrooms in the grass
                 pigeons on a flat felt roof

almost as we’re watching, the bunch of tomatoes becoming plumper
the heap of shabby mattresses behind the hotel

            the more sporadically we follow the path a thought takes,
                  the deeper the thinkiness we drag ourselves into 

Journeying through the seasons allows the poems to draw heavily on nature for context and placement of both the everyday acts and surrounding items that are the backbone of the collection. It is here that the gentle canter has potential to move into more of gallop inviting the bigger questions, as noted in March:

the shadow of a breeze blowing through the shadows of the branches
our faces fizzling from the frozen rain

                            two small crows on the rusty railings
                            a heap of compost twice my height

the unending mumble in the things of the world
resembles the mumble of the unending wind
                  
                            a magpie taking a twig from one tree
                            to add to a nest in another

among the worn-out daffodils the pale new primroses 
the table lamp topples

things muster themselves
to meet our attention

Small Birds Singing is an innovative, book-length poem full to the brim with everyday observations, occurrences, items and natural rhythms that make up the fabric of our human experience. The appeal is wide, particularly for artists, poets and readers who love to walk, record and reflect. 

About the reviewer
Christine Hammond began writing poetry while studying English Literature at Queen’s University Belfast. Her early poems were published in The Gown (QUB), The Female Line (NIWRM) and feminist publication 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 again after a long absence and her poetry has been featured in a wide variety of anthologies including The Poet’s Place and Moment (Poetry in Motion – The Community Arts Partnership), The Sea (Rebel Poetry, Ireland), all five editions of Washing Windows – Irish Women Write Poetry, Her Other Language (Arlen House) and literary journal The Honest Ulsterman. She has also been a reader at Poetry NI’s Purely Poetry open mics in Belfast. Her collection Sojourn – Moments in Poetry is now available on Amazon in both Paperback and Kindle format. 

Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "The Walkative Revolution" by Alec Finlay and "Two Women in a Car Park" by Selima Hill and Moby Hill

  

Cornwall-based Guillemot Press specialises in carefully designed, often collaborative poetry editions. Alec Finlay’s The Walkative Revolution (2025) is an illustrated hardback combining poetry, visual composition and manifesto-like writing. Selima Hill’s Two Women in a Car Park (2026), with artwork by her son, Moby Hill, takes the form of a compact landscape volume. 

Finlay is a Scottish poet and artist whose work explores landscape, ecology, naming and access. When chronic illness constrained the poet’s ability to move through the world, he reconsidered what it is to walk, be a walker, or a "not-walker," and creatively adapt to limits. Hill is known for psychologically charged poetic sequences in which tenderness, menace and surreal transformation exist side by side. Although very different in form and tone, these collections share an interest in movement, stillness and thresholds: between participation and exclusion, intimacy and privacy, forward motion and rest.

The Walkative Revolution challenges a tradition in which walking is closely associated with freedom, independence and authority. Finlay’s statement that "a path must be walked / or it will cease to exist" presents movement not as conquest but as an act of maintenance. In essence, a path survives through repeated use, where walking becomes a relationship between bodies, landscapes and the communities that keep routes open. This idea is developed through the proxy walk, whose participants are described as "the walker, the recipient, the artist": a small cast list and a choreography of roles. One person follows the route, another receives the walk – as though by post, pulse or proxy – and a third turns the experience into artistic form, translating footfall into form and step into script. The encounter with landscape no longer belongs only to the body that physically covers the ground. Elsewhere, Finlay declares that "There can never be an excess of access." The line gives the collection’s politics a memorable directness. Access is not treated as an optional kindness or an adjustment to be added afterwards - a principle that changes the meaning of participation itself. The poet’s thresholds are therefore both physical and social: they include paths and boundaries, but also the assumptions that determine who can use them and whose experience of place is valued. I found the cumulative effect of motif, theme and manifesto – both lyrically and politically – reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

In comparison, Hill brings movement and stillness into the more intimate territory of family, care and emotional knowledge. In "Happiness," a mother "wheels her large son in his wheelchair beside the stony / river, round the lake." She believes she is going "in search of their / happiness," but the poem quietly revises that expectation: "this, however, is their happiness." The journey around the lake has no triumphant destination; its meaning lies in the shared circuit itself. Happiness is not waiting at the end of the route or dependent upon some future change. It is already present in the act of accompaniment: in the movement beside the river and around the lake. In "The Body in the Bungalow," stillness takes on a more troubling quality. A man has been lying alone, "probably in pain." When a woman asks whether the pain might "not have been that bad," the doctor replies: "All pain is pain." The answer is simple but uncompromising. It marks a threshold in understanding: another person’s suffering cannot be reliably measured from the outside, nor dismissed as it is not fully visible. The final poem, "Unhappiness," also considers the limits of what one person can know about another. The speaker reflects that "All adult men have had their hearts broken" and therefore "he, too" must have experienced heartbreak, although "we don’t know how or when." The phrasing insists upon the son’s adult emotional life, while "we don’t know" protects his privacy. Hill implies that closeness and care do not give complete access to another person’s inner world.

The collections differ in their thresholds: Finlay’s are spatial and social, shaping who can participate, while Hill’s are psychological, marking the limits of knowing another person. Both resist the idea that freedom means constant forward movement. Finlay presents stillness as active and connected; Hill shows movement as circular and unresolved. In each, thresholds become places where agency, knowledge and relationships are rethought. What distinguishes these books is also the strength of their voices. Finlay’s inventive, concept-driven work reimagines access and place, whilst Hill’s compressed lyricism captures care, pain and intimacy without simplifying them. 

The books are also compelling as physical objects. Their visual and tactile qualities are not incidental but shape the pace and meaning of the reading experience. Finlay’s playful movement between poetry, manifesto and visual composition asks the reader to pause, adjust and approach the page in different ways. Hill’s compact landscape format, accompanied by some strikingly simple but haunting artwork, suits a collection concerned with circuits, boundaries and uncertain passages. Taken together, The Walkative Revolution and Two Women in a Car Park are two highly original contributions to contemporary poetry. They are the work of distinctive and compelling voices, but also beautifully conceived and produced books that reward close attention. 

About the reviewer
Dr Paul Taylor-McCartney is a writer, researcher and lecturer. His interests include dystopian literature, queer studies, children’s fiction and initial teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in a wide range of print and electronic media, and fiction titles he recently worked on as commissioning editor have won regional readers’ and publishers’ awards. His debut novel, Sisters of the Pentacle, was published by Hermitage Press in 2022, and his first non-fiction title, Cornwall Uncharted: Mapping Cornwall’s Queer History of Concealment, Culture and Creativity was published by The History Press (June 2026), to great acclaim.

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 Lee Wright of "New & Collected Poems" by Jeffrey Wainwright

Forty-eight years in the making, Jeffrey Wainwright’s New & Collected Poems takes us back. It begins in 1978 with his collection Heart’s Desire – a maiden voyage to bring love and war to the page, giving the reader every ounce of life’s frustration and elation. Wainwright allows the poems to spill from his pen like a gardener shaking earth from a bulb of garlic. 

In Selected Poems (1985), his verses are often as cold as sealskin, but it’s a cold we all must face, to understand what it is to feel human. Even the subject of love in Selected Poems barely moves grass. Love, like poetry, is present, but it doesn’t change the world. Wainwright remains tightly focused on the human mind. The poems wind around the reader like vines. He avoids happiness and instead writes of Thomas Müntzer, the deteriorating mental health of George III and dead sweethearts. What is in Wainwright’s mind cannot be touched. 

The Red-Headed Pupil (1994) is a gentle reminder that as the world changes, so we change. We are, as Wainwright points out, plasticine men, shaped by our surroundings. He asks the reader tenderly if they are content among the paving stones. 

The poems stretch from 1999 to the present day, and it is these newer poems that feel deeply personal. "Did you just give up and go" is a line I’ll never get over or forget. In another line he asks, "O my soul, where are you?" which is one of those questions we collect like scars on the body as we age. Is it possible to avoid becoming world-weary as we hold on to the years? Throughout New & Collected Poems, Wainwright is concerned with this question. And who will replace us when we’re gone? That too is something the collection left me asking.  

To borrow Wainwright’s line, "the fish in cold preserve their flesh," just as the ageing poet preserves his reputation in this collected works. 

About the reviewer

Dr Lee Wright holds a PhD from the University of Leicester in Creative Non-Fiction and has had numerous pieces of short fiction and non-fiction published. 

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 Rachael Clyne of "Killing Spree" by Jorie Graham

In the past I have found the work of this renowned US poet somewhat complex and impenetrable. Killing Spree, in sharp contrast, is spare and stark, in both words and layout. The book reads like a single epic poem covering all aspects of the disastrous period we are facing. How to do it justice in a short review? Many of the poems are thin columns covering several pages, reminding me of an image from the Matrix when streams of data pour down – known as digital rain. Graham manages through her fragmented approach and anaphoric rhythms to shower us with the impact of climate, disease, war and slaughter. We get the full picture through these fragments. Many of us, while still sheltered from the worst impacts, are bombarded daily with images of genocide, floods, fires, oppression, division and hatred. She does not shrink from an apocalyptic view.

A key poem for me is "The Falling," with the image of dice tumbling from the sky, as contagion, war, and slaughter that rain on random targets. And yet the words are more of a broad sweep, allowing us to fill the gaps with our own references and making the whole thing readable without it being a telling rant: "all the new & / improved / viruses shook out their mutations."  Graham talks of "famines, like / bunched veils, reeling with / their new contagions." She audaciously attempts to articulate her vision of the aftermath and how people will survive or not, with poem titles: "When The World Ended," "Tomorrow" and the final poem "Suddenly":

           – what thou lovest well
           remains – it says nothing
           but forgiveness.
           It says repeat after me. And I do.
          

          What have I done.

          Who will I become.

This is an impactful take on the most critical time in history.

About the reviewer

Rachael Clyne is a retired psychotherapist. Her collection Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams) is about eco-concerns. Her Seren collection, You'll Never Be Anyone Else, explores themes of identity and otherness, migrant heritage and LGBTQ+. She's currently building a collection that comments on the world state and challenges of ageing.

Review by Martyn Crucefix of "Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara" by Cathy Galvin

Some poems use form and language to weave gold from the ordinary stuff of life; others take extraordinary (even extreme) topics and much of the interest may lie in their subject matter; others engage with what used to be disparagingly called "local colour" – especially of place or identity – and Cathy Galvin’s debut collection is in part of this sort. Her great grandfather built a cottage on Mason Island, Connemara, after the Great Hunger (1845-52). She remembers visiting it as a child, but it now lies in ruins. Her wish is to preserve and empathise with what it represents of landscape, nature, the people, their culture and language. Her desire is contrasted to the cold impersonality of those who once studied these peoples on the edge of Europe as an inferior species, to the extent of stealing skulls from graves for closer analysis.

Much of the interest in Ethnology lies in Galvin’s representation of these (extra)ordinary lives, in learning their language, archival research, and imagining their day-to-day existence. The opening poems are rather fragmentary and one feels the "willed" pressure of pursuing her admirable aim. "Ethnology" itself is a fine poem in which an island child, having been studied by an ethnologist, recounts the kinds of human experience that he (definitely a "he") could never be party to: "I searched for seals, their singing / making me pause." Poems about Galvin's own mother, Bridget, are replete with familial emotion and are the better for it. In "Waters Break" and "Caoineadh," a freer lyricism breaks from Galvin, giving rise to a heartfelt keening or lamentation: "I stand on the granite, a flawed empty vessel // I pull you towards me, I shelter your body."

The third section of the collection is dotted with allusions (to Hughes, Heaney, Murphy, Synge, Friel – though most are linked variously to the Connemara landscape), yet it also contains a marvellous address to the personification of the ruined cottage itself: "Crossing your threshold, time after time, / I believed your buried mouth, / its falling walls and gaping hearth, had lost its tongue" ("Belly of the House"). The personal is political here as the point is made that these "marginal" lives – this is how the educated, observing "elites" (Galvin’s word) viewed the "peasants" of Connemara – were rich in language, culture and passionate life. The same idea contributes to Galvin’s concluding keening for her own son (who died in 2021). Her grief and sense of guilt are almost unbearably painful to read. After an autopsy, she buries his heart on the ancestral island, and we sense her anger that his difficulties in life were never taken seriously enough by the "elite" authorities, such as the DWP, the medical MDT, and those administering PIP payments, the termination of which "set him free / to die alone." If the poems struggle at times to compass the flood of feelings, this remains a book rich and painful in its portraits of lives lived over a century or more.

About the reviewer

Martyn Crucefix is the author of eight original collections of poetry, most recently Our Weird Regiment (Shearsman Books, 2026). His most recent translation is of Jurgen Becker’s Foxtrot at the Erfurt Stadium (Shearsman, 2026).

You can read more about Ethnology by Cathy Galvin on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

 

Review by Gary Day of "Our Weird Regiment" by Martyn Crucefix

There’s something about Martyn Crucefix’s poetry that reminds me of a theremin, an early electronic musical instrument that was played without being touched. Two antenna detected hand movements and translated them into eerie, vocal sounds. So these poems, without quite touching the substantial world, nevertheless register it in all its oddly ephemeral density. "Our Weird Regiment," the title work of the collection, recounts a visit to a stately home. It is an exquisite poem, mixing up past and present in images of quiet but devastating power. Who are "the weird regiment"? Tourists, the dead, the conformist crowd and more, all forming a splendid enigma. 

"Heal Thyself," a reference to Christ’s remark in Luke 4:23, serves as a preface to the three sections which make up the collection: "Ida Belle," "Flint" and "Homespun." The poem articulates themes of, among others, direction, displacement, timing, loss, self-disintegration and self-renewal. The imagery is a mixture of the surreal, the matter of fact, the biblical and more. Metaphysical poets were known for their startling conceits and Crucefix is part of that tradition. In an ICU "the emptying beds / cleared swiftly as a busy table service" ("Olly and Pepper Are Safe"). He is also a brilliant imagist. In the same poem we have "the dazzling fireflies of raised phones" and in "He Made This" "naked willows / will be upholstered in inches of snow." 

No contemporary poet makes more use of allusions than Crucefix. St Augustine, Bede, Easter Island statues, Breughel, Brecht, Henry de Montherlant are just a few examples. They are integral, not decorative, stitching together past and present, amplifying the value of both. Crucefix is a highly intelligent poet acutely attuned to the multiple disintegrations of our time. He offers little in the way of consolation but these poems, these oscillations, are one reason not to despair. 

About the reviewer

Gary Day is a retired English lecturer and author of several books including Literary Criticism: A New History and The Story of Drama: Tragedy Comedy and Sacrifice. He is also co-editor of The Wiley Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789. His poetry has been highly commended in a number of competitions, most recently in the Write Out Loud Echoes competition. His poem "Spooky Action at a Distance" won last year's International Brilliant Poetry Competition. His work has appeared in The High Window, The Seventh Quarry, The Dawn Treader as well as various other magazines. 

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 Paul Taylor-McCartney of "The Language of Now" by Anne Caldwell

Anne Caldwell’s The Language of Now is a collection of prose poems that moves quietly but insistently through memory, landscape and the fragile textures of everyday life. Rooted in a northern sense of place, the book also engages with illness, ecological unease and the emotional afterlife of recent years.

Caldwell has become one of the most assured contemporary practitioners of the prose poem, and this form suits her especially well. These pieces are compact but spacious, lyrical without becoming vague. They unfold in paragraphs that seem at first conversational, then deepen into something more meditative. Her work returns repeatedly to bogs, backstreets, moorland, weather and overlooked urban edges, yet these are never simply settings. They are charged spaces where memory, vulnerability and the more-than-human world meet.

Caldwell’s restraint is one of the collection’s greatest strengths. She lets emotion gather around an image until it becomes quietly affecting. In "Wasp’s Nest," the speaker listens for "the ragged edges of our lives," a phrase that captures much of the collection’s mood: vulnerability, endurance and the sense that contemporary life often feels slightly frayed. In "Widdop Gate, High Summer," the moorland is described as "egg-shell delicate," and later as "a map of the whole world in miniature." These small phrases open outward with surprising force.

Some of the most moving poems connect strongly with questions of class, culture and language. "Boundary Lane, 1974" in particular stirs that recognition. Its backward glance towards a childhood street, and towards the social world carried in place and speech, suggests how deeply early surroundings shape us. Caldwell’s attention to ordinary language and remembered environments prompts a nostalgic return to childhood: to voices, habits and local textures that once seemed fixed. What these poems understand so well is that growing into the present often means letting go of much that was once familiar in order to make way for the new. 

The title poem suggests another dimension of the collection’s thinking. Caldwell writes that the language of the present moment "now drifts away like a driftwood smile … or a Spring moon waxing and waning." These images capture the book’s underlying concern with impermanence: the sense that language, memory and even identity shift continually with time.

Elsewhere the emotional register deepens into something more intimate. In "Lost Daughter," the line "I wrote a letter: Dearest Daughter, how I longed for you. To hold your butter-coloured toes in my hands" carries a tenderness that is both personal and universal. The image is simple, yet it holds an entire emotional landscape within it. 

What emerges from The Language of Now is a poetics of attention. These prose poems do not seek dramatic revelation. Instead they offer something quieter and more enduring: a way of seeing the ordinary world with renewed sensitivity. In a literary culture that often rewards urgency and noise, Caldwell’s work reminds us of the value of patience, listening and careful noticing. This is a subtle, moving collection that stays with the reader long after the final page, and invites return, offering a brief but beautifully crafted space for quiet reflection.

About the reviewer
Paul Taylor-McCartney is a writer, post-doctoral researcher and lecturer. His interests include speculative fiction, queer studies, children’s fiction and initial teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in print and electronic form. He recently published his debut children’s novel, Sisters of the Pentacle (2022), and his work as commissioning editor resulted in two titles winning prestigious regional awards. His first non-fiction title, Cornwall Uncharted: Mapping Cornwall’s Queer History of Concealment, Culture and Creativity, is due to be published by The History Press (June 2026).

You can read more about The Language of Now by Anne Caldwell on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Lisa Natasha Wetton of "Veer, Oscillate, Rest" by Carrie Etter

Carrie Etter has a way of simplifying complex and serious narratives into easily digestible, almost kindly delivered rants in this collection. Her journey into the sentence, which starts "If one can take a sentence for a walk," is where I really begin to smile - about twenty pages in, just after the main title poem. I found myself reading each poem twice or more. The expression of her words openly mirrors the endless flow of life, where there is no end and no beginning to all that is and how we move through it.

This is political poetry, yet not polemic. At the start, she delivers a cool, collected punch to the systems that govern us and observes how we respond. From stereotypical "trailer trash," she traces the literal patterns and content of life in America. With references to presidents, corporations and culture, "My America" touches on the gamut of everything American, poetically listing in a way that is at once complete and seemingly disappointed with the lot.

"Project Cannikin" goes a step further with its damning, cut-to-the-chase lines, such as "Up goes the island - twenty-five feet! Down come a thousand dead sea otters," and "(crushed skulls) (ruptured lungs) (snapped spines) / Nine-year-old Emily said, 'It was kind of like a train ride.'" This references the impacts of nuclear testing in Alaska in 1971. The casual but cuttingly direct descriptions make no bones about the disdain for such activity, simply shining a light on the same flippant casualness with which they are perceived by the desensitised child, Emily.

"Fat" and "Tornado" both have an air of critiquing the normalised, expected modes of behaviour and happenings in a damaging culture which is the result of its own addictions and consequences. By the fifth poem, "Night England by Train," the focus moves to the UK and its bleakness. The author manages to touch very briefly on significant points that sum up a place in a flash. The colour orange and a tail mentioned paint a picture of fox hunting and countryside, at least to me. The commentary triggers our own perceptions and expresses a sort of composed anger, calmly and matter-of-factly, analysing the troubles of the world in a pinpointed way. In "The Reckoning," for example, the demise of the NHS, racism, fear, lack, survival, conflict, accountability and prejudice are all addressed succinctly - almost list-like, again complete and thorough in its critique of the absolute mess that politicians are creating.

This collection made me wonder and made me laugh. Very human, social observations touch upon all the influences hitting our world, wherever we are on the planet - buzzwords normalised, behaviours that are not. There are nods to other poets, like "The Rival" after Sylvia Plath's poem of the same name, suggesting impressions of youth and possibly mild envy, and "One for London" for W.S. Graham, referring to wine and jazz and drunken moments in "milk-grey London."

Etter aptly denotes the need for expression regarding how much of the weight of the world we have to hold, in the line: "Language, I'm going to need you shortly, if I'm going to sustain the moment's teeming." This acutely describes how much we sustain without question. Narcissism, bipolar disorder, sibling rivalry, complexities and family in an overheard conversation: "Overheard in Chicago" depicts the tone of a generation of diversity and the mental health consequences of living through certain times.

These are my perceptions of what at first seems simple and then reveals a world in quiet nutshells - or eggshells, which would be more fitting for the fragility and strength that hold us all together. There is a lot in these pages. And the title Veer, Oscillate, Rest aptly relates to the way in which the author navigates the content. Reading the pamphlet left me feeling content with the chaos and transitory nature of everything in the world and how we all meander through it. This is essential contemporary poetry. Read it slowly. Read it twice.

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 is collaborating on new writing projects with American Author Will Bashor, with whom she will be refining a draft of her first completed book, It’s all Made up – A Guide to Spirituality from a Working-Class Girl. With a twenty-year history working in Dance & Theatre and based in Barcelona for the past six years, she is happy to be delving into the world of words. See: www.newlisalife.net and www.equilibrium-events.com.

Review by Karen Powell-Curtis of "Have they marked you with arrows?" by Jayne Stanton

Jayne Stanton’s beautifully crafted poems chart the stages in her journey beginning with her cancer diagnosis, through treatment, and beyond. 

In "Recall," there is a sense of both fear of the outcome, and of the stress of waiting. The repetition of "a woman" controls the pace of the poem, and the detail of each step of the appointment forces the reader to pause and consider each action. In the following poem, "After the appointment," Stanton writes of the shock and disorientation immediately after diagnosis with the lines "You try to recall what you’ve just been told" and "You both agree – the cafeteria / seems farther away than usual." 

There are hints of Emily Dickinson’s poem "Hope is the thing with feathers" in "Many-feathered." In Stanton’s poem hope is "a scalpel in a steady hand" and "an evicted ductal carcinoma." In sharp contrast to the medical terminology is the image of a "rose that grows / in a pathologist’s petri dish."

"Platitudes" begins with the line "It’s a good thing they caught it early" and continues to list the cliches often offered to someone diagnosed with cancer. The layout of the poem, with space between each line, suggests how empty and unhelpful these words might feel to the recipient. 

The short lines in the poem "Radiology of the left breast" create a clinical effect. The use of the passive voice, particularly in the lines "Careful measurements are taken / and your skin marked up" and "You are moved into the correct position," emphasises the impersonal nature of the procedure.

Strength and hope are evident throughout Stanton’s pamphlet. Her poems are both unsentimental and powerful, and whilst deeply personal, they are also relevant to many women undergoing the same experience.

About the reviewer
Karen Powell-Curtis has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. Her poetry has been published in various anthologies and magazines. 

You can read more about Have they marked you with arrows? on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Debasish Lahiri of "Walking Away" by Martyn Crucefix

Only participles here: their ghosts fill the passing of present and present pasts in Martyn Crucefix’s latest pamphlet Walking Away. One does not need to stand in the mere of biblical lore to realize that the "end" is a process. To be witness to our parents – their touch growing cold upon the warmth of our grasp, often desperate grasp, and their memories slipping like wind through the parapet of our fingers, or sand – is to be in the arc, or archetype, of the end. Crucefix’s poetry talks as much of us who are left behind as of our parents who grow more distant, more alien, without being able to go anywhere. 

           You hear cars hiss along the road
           Cars hissing along the road

           Only present participles

In writing about his parents, and their misted lens of time, where everything is either disconcertingly different, or befuddlingly the same, Crucefix unravels the tyranny of that continuum called the Present. With the deftest of touches he paints a time, the only time where we can be partakers together, but also a cruel time with no recall or hope for a future recognition. 

           Mother of your brother and sister
           Mother of your three sons

           The same car speeding away

Reading this collection one can’t but feel that it all stands up or falls apart depending on the miraculous presence or absence of that hand or arm in the precipitate moment when the mind is afraid, limbs waver on the verge of a fumble and a silent swipe at balance comes up with aether. It isn’t merely furniture that has moved. Care-givers move through the house. A flux of children, wives and kin sweep through. The house turns out to be a Care-Home.

           Dining chair and coffee table 
           Shifted here and there

           Losing you. Your balance too

Walking Away has three shorter poems - "Video Call," "My Mother’s Care Home Room (as Cleopatra’s monument)" and "In This Quiet One-way West Country Town" – along with the eponymous long sequence of tercets, measuring the calculus of change in human life. Crucefix adapts the Japanese form of the Haiku brilliantly in his long sequence "Walking Away." This is a sense adaptation of the form, not necessarily a servile conformity to the 5-7-5 syllabic fiat, but a reinterpretation of the dynamic, emphasizing the break (after two lines or one), and corresponding to the idea of the Kireji or the divide in Japanese. Strictly speaking these are more akin to Senryu, poetry that speaks of human life rather than the natural world. 

Crucefix reminds us that living is a one-way road (not just in West Country towns). There’s no way back. Living is a walking away from the consolations of Time, an inexorable moving away of people dearest to us, our parents. His poetry stands up, unflinchingly, to this bruise.

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.