Review by Rachel J. Fenton of "Yes But What Is This? What Exactly?" by Ian McMillan

With its searching title, Yes But What Is This? What Exactly?, Ian McMillan’s Smith and Doorstop pamphlet asks what a lot of Brits did, indeed a lot of us everywhere did, about Brexit, capturing the regional and international mindset from the kick-off (yes, there’s football among these 16 poems, more on that in a minute). 

One of the strongest Brexit poems, 'Between Junction 35a and Junction 36,' begins: 'The truck pulled up on the hard shoulder / and a curtain at the back opened theatrically,' exposing the racist pantomime put on by some pro-Brexit politicians who would have the media believe migrant workers and refugees were to blame for the government’s throwing the UK into financial ruin. 

Financial crashes have historically been linked to the government’s funding of its military interests, and McMillan hints at this 'A Financial Crisis in Three Parts,' with the line 'They smile before / they start the waterboarding.' 

But there’s much more to this collection than money and Tories. There’s a sense that McMillan goes more personal with these poems than usual. Yes, there’s his hallmark funny observations, but there’s some real evidence of a man reflecting not only on how he arrived at the present time, but where he wants to go; something of a referendum of the heart takes place in just twenty-five pages. 

McMillan’s known as a Barnsley poet, but his concerns here, while grounded on home turf (another football reference), speak of more global issues that enable him to demonstrate his emotional intelligence as well as his wit, which, when it comes to gender isn’t always as on point as his geo-political politics, but it’s a small point given the empathy shown in this collection. 

His empathy for a player subjected to racial abuse during one of McMillan’s beloved football games replays in four stanzas, as if slow-motion, the moments leading up to the attack, grounding them in the poet’s living room. McMillan’s skill in ‘Lighter’ is that he makes the reader feel the action is happening in their living room. The only disappointment of this collection is that just when you think it’s all over, sadly it is. You’ll wish there were more poems. 

About the reviewer
Rachel J Fenton is a writer from South Yorkshire now living in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her poems have been published in English, The Rialto, Magma, and various anthologies, and her pamphlet Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York is forthcoming from Ethel Press in April 2021. 

Review by Serge Larocque of "Horizontal Rain" by U. H. Dematagoda

Sartre meets Nietzsche, meets Irvine Welsh: U. H. Dematagoda’s Horizontal Rain stands as a contemporary testament to male angst. 

The novel hits hard with a crescendo of emotion as the main character’s girlfriend leaves him, and sets the stage for the cycle of rebirth and death that steers the narrative. Each passage of the story hits you like a hangover, and follows the main character from one binge to the next as he “searches for the sublime,” whatever or whoever that might be. In any case, it's a futile exercise that gracefully and elegantly embodies the spirit of the Absurd. The anxiety that Dematagoda expresses in this novel is that no reader is very far from being the main character of this story. Every human is the common denominator.

Throughout the novel, Dematagoda expertly describes the evolution of human emotions and physical repercussions of anxiety on the body. The author’s prowess with the writing of feelings is unmatched, and the narrative encourages readers to remember times when they felt what is experienced by the main character - stress, sexual tension, fear, addiction, confusion, arrogance, love, loss of control, and the list goes on. The torrent of the narrative is only broken by long bouts of academic philosophical interlocutions veiled as casual chats over pints at the pub.

Dematagoda weaves a story that is both gritty yet elegant. Existential and nihilistic themes are at the forefront of the narrative, and Dematagoda presents these academic notions in ways that are easily digestible by readers. Continental philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would be proud to see the contemporary application of their maxims or concepts in this novel. This story takes its place in the vanguard of Scottish Absurdism and carries the torch passed on by novelists such as Irvine Welsh. 

Horizontal Rain by U. H. Dematagoda expands on the Scottish grit-novel and adds a philosophical dimension to the shock value this literary style naturally carries. 

About the reviewer

Dr. Serge Larocque completed his Ph.D in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. After living in Europe for a few years, he returned to his native Ottawa, Ontario, where he finds time to write between work and violin lessons.

Review by Charlie Hill of "Gamble" by Kerry Hadley-Pryce

Towards the end of Gamble, the excellent second novel from Black Country writer Kerry Hadley-Pryce, the eponymous lead character brings to mind – inaccurately – the opening line of a poem by Louis Macneice. The line is: ‘Time was away and somewhere else’ and it is this sense of temporal respite that Gamble is fondly (desperately?) imagining he can conjure from an extra-marital dalliance.

He’s wrong of course. Because there’s no respite here, temporal or otherwise, at least not until the very last line of the book (and that is less than convincing). Instead, delivered in prose that is as unsentimental and spare as it is affecting, Gamble is subjected to a relentless psychic-beat down as he scrabbles to escape the consequences of past behaviours.

It's a gripping, urgent read. Its depiction of a man left out of his depth by fatherhood and ill-health, and the distance between who he is and what he’d like to be, reminded me a little of a novel called Kids Stuff by Henry Sutton. What Hadley-Pryce does particularly well – and this is where Gamble echoes her equally accomplished debut, The Black Country – is depict the compromises and delusions of an airless marriage. That and the menace of the setting, of course. Here this includes the Stourbridge canal: 'If you look at the canal, it’s like looking at some people, you can tell there is a darkness trembling just beneath the surface there, being suppressed. There is a sense of complication. There’s nothing benign about them. Gamble, for example, fears what he does not yet know, and his anxiety escapes in wefts. He has a fair amount of insight into himself, he’ll say. Yet he’ll admit that facing the truth of it isn’t easy. It is mostly the insight that’s the issue, actually, because when you suspect, when you think you know something – some darkness or other might be shifting about inside you – but you try to ignore it, or replace it, or overlay it with other thoughts, other actions, then you’re asking for trouble, aren’t you?’

About the reviewer

Charlie Hill is a writer from Birmingham. His latest book is a memoir, I Don't Want to Go to the Taj Mahal, which is out now from Repeater Books. You can read a review of I Don't Want to Go to the Taj Mahal on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Review by Laura Besley of "Everything Inside" by Edwidge Danticat

          On the other side of the door was the same kind of sticker, with the NOTHING
          scratched out by hand and replaced with EVERYTHING, so that the altered sticker read

          EVERYTHING INSIDE IS WORTH DYING FOR. Next to that was another black-and-

          white sticker that read YOU LOOT, WE SHOOT.

- Edwidge Danticat, Everything Inside

Everything Inside is a short story collection by prize-winning Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat. Each of the eight stories explores the idea of belonging and how, or if, it is possible to achieve this when no longer living in your homeland. 

Danticat is a master of the opening sentence. None is greater than this one, which in a single sentence of 24 words, sets up the entire first story, "Dosas": "Elsie was with Gaspard, her live-in renal-failure patient, when her ex-husband called to inform her that his girlfriend, Olivia, had been kidnapped in Port-au-Prince."

Each story – varying in length from 18 to 39 pages – is daring in subject matter, creating a sense of danger and ramping up the pace. And even when the situation is more every day, for example in "Sunrise, Sunset," which is about dementia and the challenges of motherhood, this supposedly normal situation within a normal family is pushed to the very outer limits of possibility. 

All the stories are about the idea of home and whether we can truly feel at home anywhere. In "Seven Stories," two childhood friends meet again as adults: “‘Home, sweet home,’ Callie said, trying to perhaps put [Kimberly] at ease.” Using this commonplace phrase to welcome her friend is underscored with the fact that this is Kimberley’s first time on Haiti, despite being of Haitian heritage, and everything feels strange and new. 

Every story in Everything Inside is deeply moving and only strengthened as being part of a collection which I would 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. She tweets @laurabesley.

Review of Sheaf Poetry Festival (4) by Jon Wilkins

What a wonderful way to spend a weekend, indulging in the impressive poets featured in the Sheaf Poetry Festival held on YouTube and accessible to all via Zoom, Twitter @SheafPoetryFest, and on www.facebook.com/SheafPoetryFestival. The performances from all poets will be available on YouTube. Search Sheaf Poetry.

Having earlier attended their Ecopoetry and Found Poetry workshop, I ended my Sheaf Poetry Festival experience by listening to a performance of poetry about climate change with Carrie Etter and Caleb Parkin. I was not disappointed. Using many of the techniques described in their workshops they proceeded to eviscerate climate change deniers with their powerful words and performances. Words can deliver change. The right words that is. Poetry can make a difference in raising awareness of matters of vital importance and we see this here.

Caleb Parkin read from work looking at gendered aspects of ecology. He talked about writing as if in drag. Taking on another persona to get your message across. And what a message.

Caleb thinks that who we have in charge is important in climate change. He read from poems welcoming change. 

Caleb felt that using schlocky pop culture in your writing means you can have fun writing your own works with ecological themes.

Inspired by Dylan Thomas he was able to combine the memory of Thomas and his work for a petrochemical giant. ‘By the Writing shed at Laugharne’:

          unliving water
          Neither fresh nor salty nor brackish
          Water which once had fierce appetites
          Now shredding like cellophane
          Popped like a dot of bubble wrap …

... giving us the sense of pollution of the ocean as we allow it to be damaged beyond repair. Simple writing, full of the horror of pollution and climate damage.

Carrie Etter read from her collection The Weather in Normal about her hometown in Illinois. She divided the book into three arcs about the loss of where she comes from. This started with the death of her parents, then the sale of the family house, and then the effect of climate change in Illinois. Throughout the collection, she shows a widening arc of loss. Not just her family, but the environment she loved and the loss of the ecology she had known. She is angry. She is disappointed. She is not sure if we can overcome the problems, but in her writing, she highlights them and brings the issue to new audiences. 

She performed a ten-minute prose poem from the collection and the images are etched in my mind. She is well worth a read and her readings tonight ended on a hopeful note as she described happy memories of her hometown. Beautifully written:

          … A song in the body
          The body in Illinois.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is sixty-five. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons, and loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years.  He has always loved books and reading. You can read a review of Jon's recent novel, Poppy Flowers at the Front, here. His website is here. 

Review of Sheaf Poetry Festival (3) by Jon Wilkins

It was a real pleasure to listen to the work of three poets; Tom Sastry, Phoebe Stuckes & Will Harris at the Sheaf Poetry Festival via Facebook.

Tom Sastry told us that reading his work was a pleasure for him. It was also a pleasure for us as he read a section from ‘a man’s house catches fire.’ He told us that 'the fire in the book is the worst thing in the world happening without being named …' He wrote about experiences that are unmentionable. His house is a furnace but he didn’t get burnt. We heard him tell us that suffering is isolation as he spoke about Covid. He had an interesting look at the situation in his poem 'Screening interview Bristol 2032' where he was asked 'Did you think it was enough to be kind?' and we have to ask ourselves: was it? 'The fire still raging and me not dead' perhaps sums up his outlook on life. A poignant look at contemporary Britain.

Phoebe Stuckes read some beautiful poems from her latest book Platinum Blonde as well as others from her catalogue. She conveys a cruel version of her life as in the poem which included the line 'My life is the joke and everyone is pointing.' Her narrator does not play the victim, she is too strong for that, but she does lay herself open to disappointment in relationships which she describes openly. The to and fro in her life is documented cleverly. In ‘Bad Girls Club’ she reminisces:

           How could you really know yourself
           If you’ve never had that fake hair extension
           Ripped from the back of your head.

So much is going on in those three lines about life and the social bubble she lived in. The sadness of love and loss is exemplified by the lines:

           Is it too late to tell you this is what love looks like
           Holding her name like a cough sweet …

It's a strange allusion but one we understand as the numbness pervades her mouth then heart.

In ‘Paris’ she tells us: 'All I think about is love and money, marrying for money and falling in love…' Then: 'I don’t want that kind of love or money. I want to be stinking drunk in a restaurant.' She knows what she wants and is tough enough to get it despite the tender nature of much of her work.

Finally Will Harris read some of his work. He found it strange reading to his computer. In ‘My Name is Dai’ we see a man disintegrating after the death of his wife:

          Try a little tenderness, mmm nuh uh uh. That was when Susie saw
          the haze descend. Like an explosion in a quarry the inward collapse
          rippled out across his face, throwing clouds of dust into the sky.
          I’m sorry. A man shouldn’t cry. I haven’t cried since I was a boy.
          I haven’t ...

He read from ‘The white jumper’:

          We were sitting upstairs and in the whitest end-of-day light
          the walls white too it felt not just like we were above
          ground but that in spite of being in Covent
          Garden we were on a ridge above a
          forest looking down our feet in
          thicket dark our heads
          in thickest
          stars.

This is a wonderful story, telling us of his search for his white jumper. The format changes throughout the narrative and his reading caught this perfectly. You need to have a look at the full work.

Indeed all three poets deserve more attention. As a taster this was a wonderful introduction to their work.

Festival Director Suzannah Evans and her Team Angelina D’Roza, Brian Lewis, Katie McLean, Ellen McLeod, Amy Smith, and Elle Turner have done an amazing job curating the performances and events over the weekend of November 20-22. This was a pay what you feel festival and easily accessible to everyone and anyone on YouTube! To access: follow the poetry on @SheafPoetryFest and visit www.facebook.com/SheafPoetryFestival where the performances will be available after the weekend has finished.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is sixty-five. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons, and loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years.  He has always loved books and reading. You can read a review of Jon's recent novel, Poppy Flowers at the Front, here. His website is here. 

Review of Sheaf Poetry Festival (2) by Jon Wilkins

After yesterday’s wonderful introduction to the Sheaf Poetry Festival, I was lucky enough to take part in an "Ecopoetry and Found Poetry" workshop held by Carrie Etter and Caleb Parkin.

As I stated yesterday one thing about the pandemic is that it is opening up new windows onto the world of poetry, in this case through Zoom. The Sheaf Poetry Festival is led by Festival Director Suzannah Evans and her fantastically hardworking team of Angelina D’Roza, Brian Lewis, Katie McLean, Ellen McLeod, Amy Smith, and Elle Turner and held over the weekend of November 20-22, 2020.

Prior to the workshop, we were sent some downloadable documents about the threats of climate change and oil development to Alaska.

I will concentrate on Carrie Etter's workshop. Immediately she engaged with the audience and a conversation was started. She explained to me and 24 other participants what Eco Poetry and Found Poetry was.

Ecopoetry is any poetry with an ecological basis.

She spoke of Found Poetry and gave us a definition to work from by the Academy of American Poets (a great resource in itself). They thought Found Poetry was a refashioning of existing text, the literary equivalent of a collage, which is a beautiful thought.

Bringing these two concepts together, Carrie showed examples from the work of Wendy Mulford, Kathleen Jamie, and Peter Reading - all poets I will now engage with as their work seems to be innovative and extremely readable.

Carrie spoke of the four techniques to be used in Found Poetry: Erasure, Interspersal, Dramatic Monologue and Shape and described how they worked in the context of the poem.

Caleb brought up the question of plagiarism and told us we had to be careful but in most cases, we would be covered by free use. The exception was song lyrics as they could cost a fortune if used, but song titles were in the public domain.

Carrie spoke of changing the music of words which is a beautiful phrase and if you contemplate writing some Found Poetry, it is what you should keep in your head.

So we had the Alaskan documents in front of us and the writing began!

This was a pay what you feel festival and easily accessible to everyone and anyone. To access: follow them all on @SheafPoetryFest and visit www.facebook.com/SheafPoetryFestival where the performances will be available after the weekend has finished.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is sixty-five. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons, and loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years.  He has always loved books and reading. You can read a review of Jon's recent novel, Poppy Flowers at the Front, here. His website is here. 

Review of Sheaf Poetry Festival (1) by Jon Wilkins

One thing about the pandemic is that it is opening up new windows onto the world that I would never have thought of before. Visiting a poetry festival online for one. I took the opportunity of visiting the Sheaf Poetry Festival led by Festival Director Suzannah Evans and her Festival Team Angelina D’Roza, Brian Lewis, Katie McLean, Ellen McLeod, Amy Smith, and Elle Turner over the weekend of November 20-22. This was a pay what you feel festival and easily accessible to everyone and anyone. Oh, the beauty of Zoom and YouTube! Covid has certainly been a boon to both these platforms! To access: follow them all on @SheafPoetryFest and visit www.facebook.com/SheafPoetryFestival where the performances will be available after the weekend has finished. The website for Sheaf Poetry Festival is here.

Saturday I watched performances by three Carcanet Press poets, namely Isabel Galleymore, Mina Gorji & Kei Miller.

Mina Gorji is an emigrant from Iran and her poems echo her upbringing and her travel. She read short poems full of simple rhymes and rhythms with haunting echoes of where she had come from. The unusual “Tenacity of Dust” is short and sweet and to the point. She wrote of the migration of Pinkfoot Geese in Norfolk in “Writing into Winter”:

          Across the sky …
          V M V W M V I
          More foreign than Icelandic runes.
          The skein of geese is spelling out a secret song.

As she read those words I could see the geese fly. A beautiful description. She talked of the relationship between nature and the natural. To highlight this she talked of the Oak Gall Wasp another emigrant to our country brought here to use their gall to make ink. Something else I learnt today! "Smuggled in Aleppo Oak / An alien acorn.”

She moved to the UK when five and her poems reflect this idea of migration and immigration of spiders in fruit or dandelions to the New World. Her story is all connected to this feeling of being an alien in a foreign world.

I don’t suppose you could be more of an alien than as a resident poet in the Amazon, but that is what Isabel Galleymore did and the poems she read showcased this.

Her prose poem on spider monkeys told us “ … each limb an animal of its own.”

When discussing the moth trap she captured the atmosphere of the Jungle when she wore a blouse that acted as a second moth trap. She found the atmosphere of the jungle full of sex and death, She had mixed and matching feelings of past and present of home and in Brazil. Her language is sensual. “I can’t stop the air indulging in me.”

She knows that “ … the more I let myself be touched the less I will be bitten.” We see and feel the crawl of insects upon flesh in hair, on clothes.

We meet the scarlet macaws and the visitors give them names, humanising them and then watching them argue and flirt as if they really were human. They try to communicate but fail and then they cant bear to look into each other’s eyes when they leave, having failed to connect with the birds.

She has however connected with the reader and as with Miona Gorij I think you should read more of Isabel's work.

Kei Miller read several poems and his final one about homophobia in Jamaica is stunning. His protagonist had to leave his village when he was outed. He said, “When I left I went through the bushes because if I’d taken the road they’d have killed me.”

Miller had hoped he'd never hear that again. Unfortunately, it was not to be. A dark and eloquently tragic anti-paean to homophobic attitudes.

What a wonderful introduction to the Sheaf Poetry Festival.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is sixty-five. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons, and loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years.  He has always loved books and reading. You can read a review of Jon's recent novel, Poppy Flowers at the Front, here. His website is here. 

Review by Colin Gardiner of "Maskwork" by Gregory Leadbetter

I read somewhere that poetry is an echo-chamber for the mind. I can’t remember who wrote that, but that idea stuck with me, and when I read or write poems I am always searching for the wave.

The poems in Maskwork by Gregory Leadbetter reverberate around the mind like tuning forks, illuminating hidden corners of the subconscious.

The instinctive nature of concealing one’s true identity is deftly revealed in the clear and direct syntax of the title poem:

          To teach the mask I make
          to tell the truth, I wear it
          as my own: feel its weight tilt

Leadbetter’s imagery is lyrical and evocative, whilst still grounded in the everyday. 

His style of magic-realism uses the effects of altered perception and the redemptive magic of music to reveal moments of self discovery and awareness that resonate with the reader:

          And then I was there: the blind road
          emptied into a field, as if
          where I stepped a sudden breath 
          had blown the earth to a sphere of glass.

I was particularly moved by the poem ‘Personal Computing’ where Leadbetter conveys the harrowing effects of dementia of a loved one through the prism of childhood memories:

          The future has come and gone.
          I am still watching the flickering screen
          waiting for all we have lost to load.

I found echoes of pure beauty and mystery in this intriguing collection of accessible poetry. I hope more readers will catch the waves too.

About the reviewer
Colin Gardiner has recently completed his MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. He lives in Coventry with his husband. He writes short stories and poems and has been published by The Ekphrastic Review, Ink Pantry, The Midnight Street Press and the Creative Writing at Leicester blog. More of his work can be read here.