Review by Jonathan Taylor of "No Guiding Star" by John Mills

In Awakenings, the neurologist Oliver Sacks suggests that ‘if we are to achieve any understanding of what it is like to be Parkinsonian, of the actual nature of Parkinsonian existence (as opposed to the parameters of Parkinsonian motion), we must … meet [patients] … in a sympathetic and imaginative encounter …. They can tell us, and show us, what it is like being Parkinsonian – they can tell us, but nobody else can.’ This is precisely what John Mills succeeds in doing in his new pamphlet, No Guiding Star: he tells us, through poetry, ‘what it is like being Parkinsonian.’ In many of his poems, Mills, who has had Parkinson’s disease for some years, gives a voice to sufferers – and, in that sense at least, No Guiding Star is an important work. 

Mills captures from within what it feels like to experience Parkinsonian symptoms – the tremors, shakes, shuffles, and so on:

          and then it shook
          and then it staggered
          and then it fell …
          and then it slurred …
          and then it couldn’t write
          and then it couldn’t smile
          and then it cried
          and then it couldn’t.

The pronoun ‘it,’ used throughout this poem (‘And then’), is ambiguous: on the one hand, it refers to the illness itself; on the other, it also reflects the dehumanising objectification of the sufferer, through both his or her symptoms and others’ perceptions of those symptoms. Personified in another poem, the illness declares to the sufferer: ‘you are mine / to dispose of / as I wish’; and, to the well, the sufferer becomes an ‘it,’ a ‘thing’ to be ‘laughed at,’ to be stared at, to be ‘nod[ded] sagely’ over. As Mills makes clear in the poem ‘Conjugation,’ the sufferer’s symptomatic ‘fumbling is comical,’ so that ‘I laugh / You laugh,’ while ‘He cries.’

This is all part of what Mills calls ‘Parkinson’s progress’ – the gradual, degenerative aspect of the disease, as it progresses from one symptom ‘and then’ to the next, 'and then' to the next, and so on. ‘Conjugation,’ for example, moves from ‘the beginning,’ where ‘the verb was / Shake,’ through stares and ridicule, to the final verb ‘He cries.’ The disease is, in effect, a narrative, a story, not unlike Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, moving from symptom to symptom, episode to episode. Sacks claims that ‘we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale,’ in order to understand neurological illness – and, again, this is exactly what Mills achieves, in miniature form, in his poetry. 

If ‘And then’ tells the story of degenerative illness in linear form, other poems capture the stops and starts, the non-linearity of Parkinson’s, as it both ‘progresses’ and loops back on itself. In ‘Nothing on my mind,’ for instance, Mills plays with the order of repeated lines in each stanza to alter their implied meanings:

          Nothing concentrates the mind
          like a serious illness
          although it is all consuming
          I have come to terms with it. 

          Like a serious illness
          time creeps up on us all
          I have come to terms with it
          let it pass

         Time creeps up on us all
         although it is all consuming
         let it pass
         nothing concentrates the mind. 

Again, the pronouns here are significant: on the one hand, Mills is speaking for himself (‘I’), but on the other, ‘time creeps up on us all’ – we are all implicated in his personal experience, all of us subject to time and its degenerative force. There is a similar implication in the poem ‘What dreams may come,’ where ‘It is not the book / that trembles in the night / but the reader.’ The reader is both Mills and ‘us,’ we who experience the tremors, the symptoms, the illness through Mills’s vivid poetry, ‘meet[ing] them,’ as Sacks says, ‘in a sympathetic and imaginative encounter.’

What Sacks emphasises above all is that doctors – and, by extension, the wider public too – need to encounter the sufferer of neurological illness as an ‘individual,’ as a ‘“who” as well as a “what,” a real person.’ The Parkinsonian is not ‘only’ a Parkinsonian for Sacks, but also an individual, whose existence is not defined entirely by illness, who has a life beyond that illness. Mills’s pamphlet once again enacts Sacks’s theory, by featuring beautiful poems about pot-holing, blackberrying, and familial grief, alongside the poems about Parkinson’s disease. Mills’s pamphlet hence not only allows the reader to share and understand that disease ‘in a sympathetic and imaginative encounter,’ but also to share and understand the person beyond the disease. Whether or not some of the experiences of the person beyond, in pot-holing, for example, have things in common with the experience of Parkinsonism – whether or not they share certain imagery with the illness and its symptoms – is left to the reader to decide. 

          There are no guiding stars
          no landmarks
          just blackness and a tunnel
          you wear like a straitjacket. 

About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor is director of Everybody's Reviewing. His books include the memoir Take Me Home: Parkinson's, My Father, Myself (Granta, 2007). His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk

Review by Vic Pickup of "What Girls Do in the Dark" by Rosie Garland

Rosie Garland’s writing is wildly imaginative; in breaking the rules of possibility, her poems are liberating and powerful. 

The space theme in What Girls do in the Dark is striking, and how the poet weaves its darkness and beauty within the mystery and humanity of her poems, masterful. The opening poem, ‘Letter of Rejection from a Black Hole’ sets the scene for the rest of her book, as she tells us: 

          You have the right to glow. 
          It’s not your duty 
          to light up anyone else’s day. 

Garland entrances and empowers her reader in much of the poetry which follows, such as in ‘Eloping with a comet’: 

          Breathless with forbidden flight, I grasp his tail, 
          hang on. Drunk on escape velocity, I boot night in the ribs, 
          ride the sky till it runs out of I told you so’s.

It’s not all space dust and sparkle; there is turmoil here, too. Darkness comes in the theme of persecution and the fragility of life, which the poet explores in varying forms. In ‘The last pangolin,’ a precious and endangered creature is stripped of its scales: 

          Only when          
          the final petal is torn away, 
          do they discover 
          there is no 
          choke, no 
          living thing, 
          no answer.

‘The correct hanging of game birds’ is also barbaric and sinister - a descriptive account of ownership and pain: ‘Permit yourself the luxury of appreciation. This bird / is yours, now … Pluck right away and you experience the thrill of / naked flesh.’

The persecution of women is a focus too - as in ‘Saint Catherine’: ‘They will kill you / for being cleverer, / worse than laughing at their dicks. / You know all of that but / won’t stop. Can’t. You didn’t read the Library of Alexandria / to bat your eyelashes and keep schtum.’ The poem concludes: ‘the truth of it: woman answers back, ends up dead.’ That said, it is the great wonder and strength in Garland’s explorations of womanhood which overpowers this darkness.  

In ‘They are an oddness,’ the poet describes a female sea creature, who is taken home by her male owner and placed in a goldfish bowl which she quickly outgrows, followed by the sink and the bath. ‘You eat, and grow. Your tentacles climb / the tiles around the tub. You pool the floor with slime … You wrap your tongue around him, squeeze till he gasps.’ This glorious and disturbing image is fantastical, and in keeping with the otherworldliness echoed throughout Garland’s work.

We venture beyond the earth in many of the poems of this collection: In ‘The dark at the end of the tunnel,’ ‘A woman walks upon the ocean floor. / Her skirt balloons around her legs / with the slow grace of a manta ray … Her stride is a keel, her chin a prow. She cleaves the thickness.’ This is one of many poems where our subject morphs into something other: ‘She no longer employs the agony of air in, air out.’ Our subject inhabits places beyond our reach, beyond her physical being, quite often disappearing, as in the final poem ‘Bowing out.’ 

In What Girls Do in the Dark we contemplate vast expanses in space and time, beyond us. There is fear but with this mystical ability to shape-shift and explore beyond what’s possible there is power and hope - summarised beautifully in ‘Biography of a comet in the body of a dog’: 

          Every time 
          I toss hope away it brings it back, drops it 
          at my feet, tongue drooling a glittering rope.

And there is also power and hope in the final sentence of ‘Personal aphelion’: ‘Permit darkness, find light.’ Garland even manages to approach grief with positivity and beauty in ‘Now that you are not-you,’ my favourite poem of the collection (I’m not exaggerating to say it moved me to tears). The infinite wonder of a spirit and the letting go of death is so beautifully explored: ‘like fireflies stopped in a jar, / and dying is the slow unscrewing of the lid.’ 

This is a collection full of opposites; vulnerable strength, persecuted freedom, imagined realities, but ultimately any darkness is dwarfed by the incredible, shimmering and unfathomable beauty of space, and our insignificance and importance within it. 

About the reviewer
Vic Pickup is a previous winner of the Café Writers and Cupid's Arrow competitions, and was recently shortlisted for the National Poetry Day #speakyourtruth contest. Her debut pamphlet Lost & Found is published by Hedgehog Press. www.vicpickup.com  

Review by Jon Wilkins of "Lost Girl" by J. R. Summer

This is a mesmerising book. The cliché unputdownable is very apt here, but it is no cliché. I could not put his book down until I’d finished it. It intoxicates the reader as it delves into the trauma that is Bi-Polar Disorder. The condition is wrought clear to the reader as the Lost Girl of the title, Rebecca, suffers and self-harms her way through the story whilst high on recreational drugs and drink or low on her prescription drugs. Her case is extreme yes, but so relatable. Suffering under an abusive father and an alcoholic mother when her sister was taken away from her home, she has faced crisis after personal crisis, from childhood through to the current time.

She is able to hide the reality of the crisis that her life is from everyone, even her caring sister. Her whole life is a lie and we recognise this as the writing is so clever.

Her life now is tinged with violence and aggression. She metes it out but also welcomes it and she falls under the spell of an unsuitable married man where sex seems like everything, though she wants more. She follows him to Tokyo and her life spirals out of control as he rejects her, and she pursues a course with terrifying consequences.

Told in first person we really do feel her pain and live through the descriptions of the disaster that is her personal life.

My only problem is the ending, too abrupt and with too many things unresolved, though in a way that is also perfect as we can decide what happens to Rebecca after her final act of defiance.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is 65. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for 20 years and coached girls & women’s basketball for over 30 years. He regularly teaches at Creative Writing workshops in and around Leicester. He takes notes for students with special needs at Leicester University. For his Creative Writing MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He is also writing a crime series set in the Great War and the early Twenties. The first part, Poppy Flowers at the Front was published by Brigand Press, London in March 2020. You can read a review of it here. 

Review by Matthew Bright of "The Fear Talking" by Chris Westoby

A prologue to this review: I come from the same small town as the author; his older brother (who appears in The Fear Talking) was my friend through primary school; I got on the same bus, followed the same tortuously long route to the same college, studied the same subjects with the same tutors. Even the music overlaps to a startling degree. Reading this memoir was chock full of moments of incredibly specific recognition, from the pathways and hideaways around Barton and the Humber to the unnerving shock of being addressed with your name by the college principal you'd never met. But not only those—as a reader whose own adolescence and early adulthood suffered more than its share of anxiety there were so many other moments that resounded, seemed familiar: the constant imagining of worst-case outcomes; the excuses planned out weeks ahead; the endless, endless calculations. All of which is a long-winded way to say that reading The Fear Talking was a profoundly moving and uniquely personal experience for me, but what follows is—as best I can—a review for everyone else.

The Fear Talking begins when the memoirist, Chris Westoby, is sixteen years old. September brings with it the start of a new routine: an hour-long journey in a dusty, packed bus across country to Leggott College. But at the same time Chris is suffering from building, debilitating anxiety and the routine swiftly becomes something else: a nervous, nauseated journey to college only to return by the next bus if he's lucky, or on less good days he will let the bus go by and he'll while away the hours tramping around the fields surrounding Barton until he can safely go home and claim it's an 'early day, remember?' He obsesses constantly about digestion—worries in every situation that he might be about to experience a bout of vomiting or diarrhoea, plans every situation by his distance from a bathroom; this builds into a fixation on germs and cleanliness and a quasi-religious fixation with being 'punished.' His inability to articulate how pervasive the anxiety is complicates his relationships with those around him—his parents, his girlfriend, his friends.

The blurbs on the inside of the cover focus on The Fear Talking as a memoir of anxiety and its benefit to readers who wish to understand living with anxiety as the author has. In that regard The Fear Talking does a superlative job; it strikes the tricky balance of using repetition (the cycle of envisioning worst-case scenarios; the obsessive planning of timings to avoid disaster; the counting of tablets; the protective rituals)  to create an immersive sense of what it feels like to live this way. Footnotes run throughout as a bubbling ever-present sub-narrative that insert a litany of worries into mundane moments. On a purely practical-writer level, it's an astonishing feat to maintain this without it becoming frustrating to read; instead it conveys a deep sense of exactly how exhausting it is. Much of the tension of The Fear itself derives from the author's inability to articulate his feelings to those around him, but as a memoir it does an inarguably vivid job of putting it into words. As a window into the experience of anxiety for those who have never experienced it in this way, it's illuminating; as a reflection for those who may be experiencing it without yet having words to explain it, it's invaluable.

Beyond this, though, The Fear Talking is also an adept picture of adolescence;  if the idea of a mental health memoir isn't something that might ordinarily catch your interest, Westoby is also telling a vivid coming-of-age story. It's richly detailed, well-observed and often very funny. He has a light touch in creating the 'characters' that thread throughout—especially in capturing both the crassness and subtleties of teenage boys and their friendships—and in building the small-but-significant defeats and victories that mark the path. Tensions rise between the author and both his girlfriend and his parents, the latter in particular skilfully handled. His sometimes-strained relationship with Emma is rife with complex contradictions—she is both support and catalyst for anxiety—and Westoby certainly cuts himself no slack. A note at the end thanks his parents for supporting him in writing a book that could 'only hurt to read,' but their inability to understand while still trying to help is sympathetic and moving. For a story that is so much about being scared, this is writing at its most fearless.

About the reviewer
Matthew Bright is a writer, editor and designer who's never sure what order to put those in. His fiction has appeared in Tor, Nightmare, Lightspeed, among others, and collected in his Lambda Literary Award finalist collection Stories To Sing In The Dark (Lethe Press, 2019). He is the editor of a number of anthologies and by day works as a book designer. With Christopher Black, he's co-author of the experimental novella Between the Lines, which was reviewed here. You can find him at @mbrightwriter on twitter, or matthew-bright.com.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

About the reviewer

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

Review by Sarah James of "Dressing for the Afterlife" by Maria Taylor

Even just a few poems into Maria Taylor’s Dressing for the Afterlife, I realise there are many options for how to approach this collection, many themes and threads that I can trace through it.

The opening ‘Prologue’ gives us dressing for the afterlife as learning to 'breathe again,' having stepped into the moment where 'you ended a former existence / and zipped yourself into the unknown.'

The examples of possible outfits to wear hint at the poems to come, as does the opening poem ‘She Ran’ with its list of things run past, the poet having taken up running at the age of forty. This culminates, as summer turns to autumn, with:

          I couldn’t get as far as I wanted.
          The lights changed. My ribs, my flaming heart
          and my tired, tired body burned.

In many ways, the following similarly beautifully pared, moving (and also at times humorous) poems enact and extend this opening, taking the reader through personal past experiences. Some read like the poet’s own; others feature advice, adopted voices and celebrity lives. The book closes with a counterpart to the opening poem ‘Woman Running Alone.’

Afterlife here is not what happens after death but the afterlives within this life, especially women as they age. 

          In summer I was a night-blooming flower.
          By autumn I was a hangover. Winter made me
          a Wall-Street Crash.

I used the word ‘personal’ earlier but this collection is personal in a universal sense, borrowing others’ clothes (experiences) and drawing out wider similarities and significances. This poem, 'I Began the Twenty-Twenties as a Silent Film Goddess,' is a film star talking (in industry terms), but it’s the continuing experience too of many other women now.

For me, Dressing for the Afterlife is also about finding, or reinventing, an individual’s sense of ‘self’ against this and many other backgrounds.

          I trespassed.
          At night I found myself ice-skating
          into someone else’s life.

I can read this poem ('Awake in His Castle') in a Bluebeard sense, but I feel it also chimes at a real life level – in trying to establish and make sense of individual identity, power dynamics and dangers at play all around us.

Another reading of the collection, not unconnected to that above and completely fitting with running, is the sense of everything in continuous flow. Water is a recurring image. 

‘The Floating Woman’ is a memorial to Lauren Stephen, half-sister of Virginia Woolf. The poignant Ophelia-like imagery has death / suicide as a sense of ‘returning’ to water, and life as rivers poured over the narrator. Everything feels fluid, form-changing, transient. This also applies to language: 'how every word / turned into water.'

Meanwhile, in 'The Fields,' 'rain dissolves / a  landscape you thought familiar' and the poem observes 'your place in this world an ever-shifting thing.'

Flow is present too in life’s dance and our steps of learning: 'We dance to learn about a part of ourselves / books can’t teach; it’s what our parents expect' (‘Learning the Steps’). In this case, that includes the moves of old island lives and leaping like salmon (water and flow), 'trying to catch scent of home, / as music pours through speakers like flood.'

It’s also in the passing and nature of time:

         People vanish into thin air every single day,
         even ghosts fade in time ….
         You’re no different. Look, here’s your own reflection.

More than this though, it’s in the pace of the lines, the use of recurring motifs, choices of line-breaks and punctuation, including the end of ‘Mr. Alessi Cuts the Grass.’ Here, a noise like a neighbour pushing 'something larger than dreams / over concrete' expands into a whole poem that ends on the full-flow leaving open of all possibilities of 'but for a moment –'

That the final poem of the collection ends with a similar dash is even more significant in these terms, as well as inviting the reader to re-submerge themselves in the collection, re-reading for more possibilities.  

Other strong elements for me in Dressing for the Afterlife include romantic hopes and family love, and with them the sense of belonging, or not belonging (as present in some of the poems already quoted).

In ‘The Distance,’ the narrator’s family can’t get the hang of England, as lives are scattered into flats, people calling to each other from balconies instead of olive groves:

         Years later I throw open my windows to rain
         knowing my aunt’s echoes won’t travel the distance,
         I’m here, I say to water, can’t you shout any louder?

Meanwhile, in ‘Role Model,’ famous and seemingly glamorous potential role models are rejected for the woman next-door with 'a walk that says I know where I’m going.' 

And yes, all these loop back and together with the elements of water, dance steps, the essence of ‘self,’ the nature of life, society and time: 'Maybe time moves like a figure of eight, / surging forwards then back on itself' (‘Loop’).

That poetry can, maybe even has to, exist outside of time is evident hopefully in the scope of what I’ve already quoted. Imagination does too and this is inherent in many of Taylor’s poems here, including those that place deft light-hearted observations side by side with sharper emotional insights and lines.

In ‘Hypothetical,’ the 'conversational frolic' of a friend asking the narrator if they’d sleep with Daniel Craig is a wonderfully humorous poem. But it also speaks to the nature of the world we live in with its sometimes obsession with celebrity-status and lives turned into public drama.  ‘How to Survive a Disaster Movie’ is similarly deliciously light-toned yet profoundly chilling. 

These are some of the ways I have read this collection. The beauty of strong poems is that they leave space for the reader to find their own truths in them, having given the images, ideas and narratives to do this with. This sense of multiplicity of paths and routes – in life, identity and reading – is most explicit in ‘Choose Your Own Adventure,’ another poem that is simultaneously funny and heart / dream-breaking.

Reading and re-reading Dressing for the Afterlife, I’m struck by new and different striking images, lines and resonances. Each time, now matter how deep these may cut, I come away with a sense too of exhilaration, much like the woman of the closing poem:

          The rhythm fills her with flight – 
                                            and her wings,
                                                   what wings she has –                             

About the reviewer
Sarah James/Leavesley is a poet, fiction writer, journalist, photographer and editor, who also runs V. Press poetry and flash fiction imprint. Her latest project is an Arts Council England funded multimedia hypertext poetry narrative > Room. Website: www.sarah-james.co.uk.

Review by Gary Day of "A Sense of Tiptoe and Other Articles of Faith" by Karen Hayes

This volume stand out from many collections of modern poetry in its willingness to go beyond the here and now. In some respects it is a return to the metaphysical tradition, though the poems here lack the sinuous complexity of Donne and the piercing lyricism of Herbert. But how could it be otherwise? Karen Hayes is turning her eyes skyward after nearly four centuries of spiritual atrophy. True, there have been exceptions, the visions of Blake and of course T. S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets standing solemn and monumental; but neither a vital influence on the contemporary scene. 

Larkin’s ‘Church Going’ is Hayes’ point of departure, a poem that registers the loss of faith and the need to connect to something greater than ourselves. Hayes’ ‘At the Cathedral’ captures something of Larkin’s offering, particularly in the descriptions of architecture and accoutrements, but in her account the dead do not nudge us to wisdom, they are the sharpness of pain and loss. A contrasting poem is ‘Ralph,’ for me the most moving in the volume. Here nature transmutes grief into the glory of the garden. There are historical poems like ‘The Women Who Shaped the Church,’ redeeming those who helped to make history but were then forgotten by it, and seemingly pedestrian poems, such as ‘The Twelve,’ which convincingly fuses aspects of Christianity with the workings of the judiciary. 

Hayes is extraordinarily receptive to the whispers and ripples of the great unknown. It was easy for the metaphysicals. They believed and had the rich expressions to go with that belief. Anyone today who wants to grapple with the divine is faced with the enormous task of overhauling the language, of stripping it down and retuning it to the heavens. On the evidence of this collection, Hayes has made a good start.

About the reviewer
Gary Day is a retired English lecturer. His research mainly lay in three areas, the  history of literary criticism, the workings of class in British literature and the persistence of sacrificial ritual in the development of drama. He had a column in the Times Higher for a number of years and has also edited two volumes on the history of British poetry as well as the three volume Wiley Encyclopaedia of British Literature 1660-1789. He hates management speak, has been involved in amateur theatre for over thirty years and is still trying to write poetry.

Review by Peter Flack of "Brazil That Never Was" by A. J. Lees

 

I've never been to Brazil but I did once get within forty minutes of the border while luxuriating in the coastal enclaves of Uruguay so I understand the attraction of exploring in South America.

Andrew Lees' book is about Brazil and Amazonia as an unknown and perhaps unknowable mystery. From his opening, gazing down as a boy from the Overhead Railway on the Ocean Liners and freighters tied up in the port of Liverpool that plied their way across the Atlantic, he is steered towards his subsequent quest by a book given to him by his father. The book, Exploration Fawcett, describes the adventures of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, who from 1906, for almost twenty years, explored and mapped the jungles, rivers and gorges of Brazil. On his final expedition in 1925 he disappeared and was never seen again.

Fawcett, in his many reports to the Royal Geographic Society, recounted with glee the privations he endured and the fabulous creatures he encountered. These included a sixty-foot man-eating anaconda, a double-nosed tiger and cyanide-squirting millipedes. Each time, he emerged as the hero of his own tales, calming forest-dwelling tribes with a song, escaping cannibals and braving rivers where piranhas lurked to gobble down all but him. He even reported the existence of a valley where a large brontosaurus-like creature still dwelt.

As each new expedition began it became apparent that Fawcett's imaginings went further than inventing landscapes and incredible animals. Fawcett was now searching for a lost city inhabited by mystical beings who existed beyond time. Emboldened by dabblings in theosophy and the occult he came to see himself and his son as chosen ones. When he set off that last time he was sure he knew where he was going.

Lees is gentle in recording the consuming madness of Fawcett, last of the great Victorian explorers. Perhaps, in retrospect, his disappearance was his greatest achievement.

When Lees finally visits Brazil he finds that nothing is left of Fawcett's 'magical' kingdom. A salutary dose of reality.

I loved the book. I have now ordered a copy of Exploration Fawcett. It was that good.

About the reviewer
Peter Flack is a former teacher. He was co-founder of the Whatever it Takes literacy programme for Leicester schools. He also chairs the Everybody's Reading Festival.

Review by Laura Besley of "This Alone Could Save Us" by Santino Prinzi

 

          What would be lost if the moon were to disappear, how ordinary the sky might be
          without it.

- Santino Prinzi

The moon features heavily in Santino Prinzi’s flash fiction collection, This Alone Could Save Us. Sometimes a recurring character, always a metaphor for each of the powerful stories in this collection, the moon is steady, looming large above us, but also pulling away at a pace that is imperceptible to the naked eye. It’s in these gentle shifts that Prinzi’s stories shine.   

The first and last stories of the collection act as bookends, almost mirroring each other. At the beginning of the collection, people are desperate: ‘When we realise the moon is shifting away, we beg it not to go. We vow we can change. ’ By the end, this desperation is intensified, but has turned against the moon: ‘Following the will of the people, the government decide to nuke the moon .… Some people believe the moon is the source of all their worldly problems and it’d be for the best if the moon was gone.’ Prinzi’s layered messages in 'The Moon is a Foreign Body, We Can No Longer Trust It' shine as bright as a full moon on a clear night. 

This is a fabulous collection, exploring a range of emotions and situations. There is hope for Louise and her fourth husband, Edwin, who find their way back to each other in 'It Sometimes Snows in April' and the boy who is finally freed from his mother’s snapping in 'How to Make the Magic Work'; sadness for Clyde in 'Bonsai and Clyde,' and something in between for the characters in the title story. Highly recommend. 

About the reviewer
Laura Besley writes short fiction in the precious moments that her children are asleep. Her fiction has appeared online, as well as in print and in various anthologies. Her flash fiction collection, The Almost Mothers, was published in March 2020. You can read a review of it here. She tweets @laurabesley.