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.

Review by Karen Powell-Curtis of "Poems of a Nottingham Lace-Runner" by Mary Bailey

Mary Bailey published her pamphlet of thirteen poems in 1826 to raise money to support her nine children. Her poems offer an insight into the world of working-class women in the 1820s and, in particular, Mary Bailey’s life. John Goodridge’s introduction to this revised edition offers context to the poems in terms of time, place and social class.

Lace-runners were employed to embroider patterns onto lace, and in "Petition to the British Fair" Bailey writes: "How hard have we work’d, and our eyes how we’ve strain’d, / When those beautiful flowers we run." Later in the poem, we discover this work isn’t rewarded as well as it should be: 

          How pleasant’s the task, whenever we’re ask’d,
                 To work hard to beautify you;
          Then I’m sure you will own, with candour, unmask’d,
                 Good food and good clothing’s our due; 

          But the price is so low, that, sad to relate, 
                 We cannot these blessings obtain.

Bailey never views her nine children as a burden in spite of her poverty. "To a Lady who desired me to pray for the death of my youngest child" is her response to the woman who made this heartless suggestion. Her love for her children is clear in the lines "Her innocent smile shall my troubles beguile, / And make poverty light as a feather." In the final stanza she comments "lady, forbear to advise, / Till a mother’s affections you feel." In "The Author to Her Infant Twins," she expresses similar sentiments: "Welcome, dear little strangers, welcome here, / Altho’ to keen adversity you’ve come."

"The Locust" is addressed to her daughters and carries the message they should never be cruel. This poem gives us a strong sense of Bailey’s character. She is horrified to discover two young girls playing with "a poor little locust, pierc’d through with a pin." She tells them:

           To a nice school you go, where a lady doth teach,
                  And you much finer feelings should learn;
          But, I’m better than you, though my frock’s common blue,
                  While my heart doth such cruelty spurn. 

Bailey may have published her poems to meet an immediate financial need but two hundred years later they are still relevant.

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. 

Review by Karen Powell-Curtis of "Familiar Phantoms" by Sue Forrester

Sue Forrester’s debut pamphlet, Familiar Phantoms, transports us across time and place, from England to Africa and Asia. We tend to think of phantoms in terms of people, but Sue Forrester writes of places as if they too are phantoms. 

Her poems are rich with sensory details. In "Lamping with Lizard" we hear the "rustles, chirps and clicks" of Africa after dark and, by torchlight, we see "Iridescent bulbous beetles." We experience the fragrances of the "verandah scented with citronella" in "Small World," and the "jasmine blooms" in "The Scent of War." The poem "Cooking with Mother" offers taste and touch through the "production / of eighty doughnuts for the tea tent."

Forrester uses the power of objects to evoke the phantoms in her poems, and to link the past to the present. For example, in "One September Day," the Registrar’s fountain pen triggers a memory of a "21st birthday gift from Aunt Win," and simultaneously creates a new memory as she "Writes in the book, the forever book, / in the forever ink" to register a birth.

A "silver and black obsidian butterfly brooch" brings to mind another aunt in "And Apple Pie." In this prose poem, it is the absence of a particular object, a "silver-trimmed barrel" from which the aunt "dispensed chocolate biscuits" which represents the unique relationship between the niece and her aunt. Forrester writes, "And I mourn that biscuit barrel, swept away in a heartless house clearance, her daughters knowing only their mother, not my aunt."

"Needlecraft" is full of details revealing the love between a family. The central item in this poem is a knitting needle which has been repurposed to check "the lemon cake is done." The needle is the "survivor of the pair I used / when my big sister taught me to knit." This prompts the memory of sitting "on the little chair, / Daddy made for me," watching "my sister make a buttonholed loop / on the pot holder I’d knitted for Mum."

We gain a sense of a life through recollections involving cars in "My Brother’s Car." The poem ends with the moving description of the brother telling "a crowded chapel how he got to know / our father under a car" with "oil dripping onto their heads and hands: / a malodorous unction, full of grace."

The phantoms in Sue Forrester’s pamphlet are sensitively summoned but her poems never slip into sentimentality.

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. 

Review by Martyn Crucefix of "Dear Life" by Shanta Acharya

In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Edward Said describes the "contrapuntal" music of those living in exile: the awareness of at least two cultures providing a "plurality of vision," a simultaneity, ways of perceiving that wind in and out of each other. Shanta Acharya's new collection provides the reader with just such music. One of her most powerful poems opens "Alien, outsider, firangi, gaijin, exile / are some of the names of the pariah gods of exile." Born and raised in the Hindu religion in India, transplanted to pursue academic studies in the West, and having spent years working in the financial industries, the various strands of her music weave fascinating tunes. Her poems are concerned with identity, home, distance, love, and the world's violence, and succeed in addressing questions of faith more directly than most contemporary UK poets.

"Looking For Myself" eloquently explores the theme of identity and Acharya states the complexity of her position: "Single, female, first generation immigrant, no security, / intelligent, neurodivergent, born to be different." This difference is often associated with the poet's spiritual beliefs, her scepticism about the either/or of rational Western thought which she counters with the Hindu concept of divinity as neti, neti (not this, not that). But prayers often go unanswered, and the poet has to come to some sort of negotiated settlement with the silence: "All I seek is a place in your temple / to sing."

This poet's singing voice is particularly evident in this new collection in its use of the ghazal. This couplet form, with its return at the end of each second line to a refrain, perhaps suits the "contrapuntal" songs of exile, the voyage out, the returning back. A particularly powerful example (the title phrase serving as refrain) is "Find Me," with couplets addressing the plight of a child refugee, an old woman, the disappeared, the dead in shallow graves, and "the bones of exiles." "Things" is a marvellous listing ghazal (infinite things, love of things, I-don't-know-what-to-believe-in things, nothings) culminating in Acharya's final imperative of faith, seemingly unshakable despite the horrors of the world from which her poems never shrink: "Waking to the mystery of the Thing of things, / live in peace that passes the understanding of things."

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. 

You can read another review by Claire Cox of Dear Life by Shanta Acharya on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Review by Martyn Crucefix of "In a Cabin, in the Woods" by Michael Krüger, trans. Karen Leeder

In the midst of the Covid pandemic, German poet Michael Krüger was also beginning to be treated for leukaemia. He retreated to a wooden house near Lake Starnberg in Germany and began to dispatch poems – 30-40 line meditations from a life-preserving quarantine – which were published to great acclaim in Süddeutsche Zeitung. This book contains 50 of them in superb translations by Karen Leeder.

With his own mortality standing so close, the small things loom large ("the flies can hear me") and picking details from beyond the window, or from memory, he is "amazed / at the richness, the lustre, the splendour." In contrast, the stricken world at large provides a new vocabulary: "Today: herd immunity. Let’s see how long / that lasts." Krüger’s work has always glittered with vivid images. The sunlit glint of the nearby lake is "like a huge barrel of mercury, / about to spill over." If that image is full of foreboding it’s no surprise and, even hidden away as he is, Krüger never loses his sense of wider concerns. As the spring birds arrive, military aircraft ("windowless, big-bellied, camouflage beasts") pass overhead carrying lethal hardware to poorer parts of the world.

There are moments of despair. Gazing into the mirror the question is whether it is "still worth shaving" and there is a sort of disproportionate grief when his Lavazza coffee machine breaks down, "a linguistically gifted gadget / that could gurgle, groan, moan, hiss and beep." But the book is surprisingly up-beat and its serious business has to do with poem-making, bringing order and meaning to an off-kilter, deadly (and for Krüger) godless world just beyond his doorstep: "I have to give things / a truth they cannot find by themselves." So when the local farmer (and his son) mows the nearby meadow, it’s like "a ballet for two tractors," and after rainfall it is like a Dutch painting, and Krüger is moved to quote his great German poet-forebear, Peter Huchel, transmuting the natural world to human meaning: "it points / off into the grass / like a truth."

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 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 Rennie Parker of "Poems of a Nottingham Lace-Runner" by Mary Bailey, with an Introduction by John Goodridge

 

How pleasant to make the acquaintance of Mary Bailey, a lace worker ("Lace Runner") from the great industrial city of Nottingham. For here is her pamphlet, her only one, since she was dead by her mid-thirties; but available at last thanks to the combined efforts of researchers plus Five Leaves Press.

Bailey is adept at ballad metre, but this should not be surprising, as mill hands and fieldworkers alike would improve their monotonous hours by singing. It’s possible that she had popular tunes in mind when composing her verse:

          You ladies of Britain, we most humbly address
               And hope you will take it in hand,
           And at once condescend on poor Runners to think,
               When dress’d at your glasses you stand.
  

There is ample evidence of the love she feels for her children, with none of that reserve which members of the upper classes were meant to show; she works hard and gets about, rebuking mean girls and enjoying the small wins of everyday life on the breadline. I like the sound of this person; the Baileys appear like the numerous and chaotic family next door but where their priorities are in the right order. 

Moreover, it’s important to know that literature was not only available to her but a realistic means of survival at the time. Literature was not an add-on or a hobby; it was part of the work she could do and where she might expect some benefits from that production, whether in sales, patronage, or as a springboard for a career. She knows what is popular at the time: there are moral instructions, appeals, an epitaph - but I find the most engaging piece is her verse letter, meant for her family in Staffordshire:

          Dear brother and sister the packet is come
          To let you both know we are safely got home:
          And, in this epistle I’m happy to say 
          My dear little Ellinor slept all the way …

The book was produced by subscription, same as the model used by today’s online publishers such as Unbounders; her patrons are listed at the back, numbering 90 in total with the vast majority of them being female - none of that idle sitting in drawing rooms for these ladies -  and it’s probably significant that Bailey’s two editions happened in the same decade as her vastly more popular compatriot, John Clare (who was only fifty miles away by stagecoach at the time).

As an insight into one woman’s life and experience, it’s beautiful; here is an authentic voice from those times, showing how a literate working woman thought and felt in the 1820s. Only the usual word of warning for any production like this: she is of course a supplicant, asking favours of the gatekeepers and upper class folk who could determine how she lived or died, or whether the literature should continue at all.

About the reviewer
Rennie Parker is a poet living in the East Midlands, and she is mostly published by Shoestring Press. Her latest collection Balloons and Stripey Trousers, a nightmare journey into the toxic workplace, came out earlier this year. She works in FE and blogs occasionally here. She is also on Twitter/X and Bluesky.

Review by Rachael Clyne of "The Postcolonial Flâneuse" by Ramisha Rafique

I am attracted by flânerie, the random wander in cityscape, and was intrigued by the postcolonial aspect. While I anticipated the gauntlet of sharp political comment, I found myself immersed in Rafique’s gentle reflections on gender, race and religion as she tours street cafes. As a Muslim woman she already disrupts the white male origins of the genre.

From lockdown in Nottingham to Paris and Marseille, from Istanbul and Syria she offers vignettes. She wants to be part of the flow, rather than a labelled stereotype: "She has become part of / the mass. She is him, and her, / and them." Rafique vividly engages our senses with "Café Soundtrack" – music, chatter, accents, clink of cups, adding visual notes – a man fiddling with his ring, a passerby’s cloud breath. 

One minute we are on a Nottingham street, the next we are in Paris where statues of past empire become sleeping places for the current homeless. "For Those Lost in The Kashmiri Diaspora" concerns her own heritage and continuing impact of a region divided by the British then recolonised by Pakistan and India. The book covers many themes: conversing with God through a foreign language, social decline in the face of climate change and the joys of girl-chat setting their world to rights over coffee and cake.  A museum visit hints at how its art treasures reflect colonial tastes and cultural plunder. 

With the poet’s light touch we are offered a smorgasbord of tastes, customs and meditations, that stimulate food for thought. She eventually takes us into her familiar comfort zones, e.g. "Arab Quarter, Marseille," where her uncovered head is disapproved of by an older woman and she is comforted by "the fusion of black tea leaves, mint, and sugar." All in all, this is a pamphlet well written and worth reading.

About the reviewer
Rachael Clyne is a retired psychotherapist. Her prizewinning first collection Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams) concerns eco-issues. Her pamphlet, Girl Golem (4Word) and her latest collection, You’ll Never Be Anyone Else (Seren Books), explore themes of identity and otherness, including migrant heritage, LGBTQ+ and relationships.    

Review by Doryn Herbst of "Afonydd: Poems for Welsh Rivers / Cerddi Afonydd Cymru" ed. Sian Northey and Ness Owen

 

Afonydd: Poems for Welsh Rivers / Cerddi Afonydd Cymru is a Welsh / English bilingual anthology of poems that brings together 50 talented voices from every corner of Wales. Each poet reflects on a personal experience of a Welsh watercourse. Exploring the river in all its forms, the works meander from the smallest brooks all the way to the wide estuary of the River Severn. The result is an impressive and diverse portrayal of Wales and its waters. 

In "To the nameless ones" / "I’r Rhai Dienw," Graheme Davies

           … invoke[s] them all: 
           These overlooked companions of the hill
           that make their way where only curlews call,
           and never had a name and never will.

           Ond fe ddathlaf nhw i gyd, 
           cynheiliaid anghofiedig pant a glyn,   
           sy’n gweu eu ffordd ymhell o sylw’r byd
           ar hynt anhysbys rhwng y grug a’r chwyn.

In "River Nevern at Newport" / "Nyfer yn Nhrefdraeth," Iris Anne Lewis writes: "This river knows two languages" / "Mae i’r afon hon ddwy iaith."

I read the English version of the poems and love how true they feel. The language is engaging and beautiful. I am sure readers of the Welsh will find each piece as inspired and gorgeous. Absolute gems are offered through sublime observations of the human condition, elsewhere, through an intense reach into nature. The book stitches together patches of history, landscape and life into stories that enchant with their depth. Shimmering layers mindful of all senses, touch, taste, smell, sights and sounds are woven through one tale to another. The poetry is lucid, and so much goes on beneath the surface, you emerge refreshed as from a dip in the cool of a clear mountain stream. 

From farmland to mudflats, people-babble to water-babble, words roam through wild places, through the weird and the familiar. At the heart of this anthology is an intimate connection to the intricacies of love, the shape of community and value of friendship but also the dangers and contradictions of life, the risks of human existence.

In "Swimming at the Dwyfor" / "Nofio yn Afon Dwyfor," Zoë Brigley writes: 

           Before I left, she asked Are you going alone? By which she meant
           without a human companion, and she was right, though I 

           was not on my own, the golden water winking and shimmering
           on the surface, plunging over rocks and shifting silt … 

                     ... I found what I wanted 
           there in the water, a dark chill like the bronze of armour.

           Cyn i mi adael, holodd Wyt ti’n mynd dy hun? Golygai 
           heb gwmni pobl, ac mi oedd hi’n iawn, er doeddwn i ddim
           

           ar fy mhen fy hun, y dyfroedd aur yn wincio a disgleirio 
           ar y wyneb, yn llamu tros greigiau ac yn gogri llaid……
           

                      ... Darganfyddais yr hyn a geisiwn 
           yma yn y dŵr, ias oer dywyll fel efydd arfwisg.

With a keen eye, the authors explore just how precarious life can be but also how precious. Fragility / resilience, grief / joy, compassion / vigour are laid side by side. Open-minded and grounded in the everyday as well as the extraordinary, they ask what binds us together, what it means to feel at home in your own skin. We discover harmonies in the darkest places to reminder us of hope and the power of regeneration.

As we wander through these drenched pages, autumn gives way to winter, sings through to summer accompanied by the music of birds and animals, the ripple of flow and reed. There are ponies, mayflies, cats, trout, crabs, otters.

In "Shore Mares" / "Cesig y Glannau," Natalie Ann Holborow writes:

           The ponies sop to land’s edges, eyes huge 
           and tender, brown as cherry-pits. Churning 
           wet marram, briny earth, currents 
           bucking around them – the sound of something 
           disappearing – as if the Earth were swallowing 
           shock, alarmed at her own quick waters, 
           cockles rattling her throat like pearls.

           Mae’r merlod yn mwydo i ffin y tir, llygaid anferth 
           a thyner, brown fel cerrig ceirios. Corddi 
           y moresg gwlyb, y ddaear hallt, a’r cerrynt 
           yn troi o’u hamgylch – sŵn rhywbeth 
           yn diflannu – fel petai’r Ddaear yn llyncu 
           ei syndod, ei dyfroedd chwim ei hun yn ei dychryn, 
           cocos yn clecian ar ei ei gwddf fel perlau.”

A deep feeling for the natural world tackles how we pollute, exhaust, throttle, try to tame the river. These poems peck at our consciousness, shows us that constant intrusion destroys the countryside, brings floods to towns and village. We cannot flee the truth that human activity not only endangers vulnerable species but puts our own health and well-being at risk.

In "Will-o’-the-Wisp at Splott" / "Tân Annwn yn y Sblot," Gareth Writer-Davies writes: 

           the plastic mud returns 
           taking on the shape of what it captures
 
           rusty tools, old jetties, flint arrowheads 
           scraped debris from all ages ...

           dychwela’r llaid plastigaidd 
           gan ddwyn ffurf yr hyn mae’n ei ddal 
           offer rhydlyd, hen lanfeydd, blaenau saethau fflint 
           geriach garw drwy’r oesoedd ...

In "The Uninvited Guest" / "Yr Ymwelydd na Wahoddwyd," Tracey Rhys writes:

           I loved the Ogmore 
           until it came to stay, 
           bringing a soupçon 
           of despair

           Roeddwn yn gwirioni ar afon Ogwr 
           nes y daeth i aros, 
           gan ddod â cheiniogwerth 
           o anobaith

On the theme of belonging, the last poem, "Binary" / "Deuaidd" by Adele Evershed, ends with a powerful message about what it means to go home: "late sunshine   my shadow settles   back inside my body" / "heulwen yr hwyr   fy nghysgod yn swatio   yn ôl yn fy nghorff."

About the reviewer 
Doryn Herbst, a former water industry scientist working in Wales, now lives in Germany. Her writing considers the natural world and themes which address social issues. Poetry in print and online, including: The Wild Word, Ink Sweat & Tears, Mugwort Magazine and Poetry Wales. Doryn has a collection coming out with Yaffle Press in spring 2026 called A Barbed and Twisted Place.