Close: Emma Purshouse, Offa's Press
The endorsements on the back cover of the book were the first things that struck me about this collection. Instead of the customary kind words from her poetry peers, performance poet Emma Purshouse, in her first full collection for Offa’s Press, is praised by a postal worker, a herbalist and live-aboard boater, and a council worker. The latter says: “Close is close up in every way possible, close ...
14th December 2018
The Knotting Poems: Martin Booth, Shearsman
Here’s a name I haven’t heard for some time. When he died in 2004 he had become a relatively well-known novelist at least one of whose books had been nominated for the Booker. Nowadays, it is pretty much forgotten that he started as a poet, even writing a book about it called Driving Through The Bar...
14th December 2018
Like A Fish Out Of Batter: Catherine Graham, Indigo Dreams
I grabbed this slim volume from the review pile by my bed on the way out to a frantic day of driving between the vet, the hospital and back to the vet. I knew it would be a stressful day and wanted so...
8th December 2018
Somewhere Else Entirely: Ruth Fainlight, Bloodaxe
Born in New York between the two world wars, Ruth Fainlight has lived in England since she was 15 and has had a long, distinguished career as a poet, translator and writer of fiction, drama and opera ...
8th December 2018
Jinx: Abigail Parry, Bloodaxe
Abigail Parry’s debut collection introduces Spook, Jack of Hearts, Snake, Goat, Bette Davis and others in a cast of characters fictional, cinematic and historical, threatening and threatened, monstrou...
30th November 2018
Poems for the NHS: ed. Matt Barnard, Onslaught Press
Anthologies seem to be coming out thick and fast these days, often supporting the best of causes. Although it’s not possible to review them all, or even report their publication, here is one that cert...
27th November 2018
The Malvern Aviator: Richard Skinner, Smokestack
Opening The Malvern Aviator, Richard Skinner’s new Smokestack pamphlet, the words ‘not for the faint-hearted’ came into my mind. For this is not an easy read: Skinner’s eclectic gathering of source m...
23rd November 2018
Out of the Ashes: Frieda Hughes, Bloodaxe
In her extensive and valuable foreword to Out of the Ashes, which brings together work from four previous collections, Frieda Hughes explains that the importance of her parents’ poetry only dawned on ...
23rd November 2018
Bella: Nellie Cole, Offa's Press
The use of pause breaks instead of punctuation was the first thing that struck me about this debut collection from West Midlands poetry workshop leader and mentor, Nellie Cole. That may sound strange ...
19th November 2018
All That Jazz and Other Poems: Adrian Green, The Littoral Press
The first poem in the first poetry book I bought, way back in the early 1970s, consisted of two lines: “He breathed in air, he breathed out light./Charlie Parker was my delight.” The poet was Adrian M...
16th November 2018
Collected Poems: Ken Smith, Bloodaxe
How does one sum up the collected works of a writer when the book weighs in at a massive 630-odd pages of richly various poetry, in a way that truly does the man justice? From his first collection, Ke...
12th November 2018
Don't Oil The Hinges: Heather Wastie, Black Pear Press
It’s not a question of sitting around, waiting for the muse to turn up. As a local poet laureate you have to get on with the job, look for inspiration in all sorts of places. That’s one of the message...
5th November 2018
The House of Ghosts and Mirrors: Oz Hardwick, Valley Press
This collection is haunted by 50 years of the poet’s psychic and physical life. It starts at the end of life, and finishes with his birth, when he screamed “a slapped baby scream / that clawed my thro...
5th November 2018
Ghosting for Beginners: Anna Saunders, Indigo Dreams
Anna Saunders’s Ghosting for Beginners is a rich procession of phantoms and monsters. An undercurrent of anxiety for the material world grounds the collection: these spirits are anything but fey; thes...
26th October 2018
On the Wing: Ros Woolner, Offa's Press
Ros Woolner lives in Wolverhampton with her partner and two teenage children. Her poem ‘Sack of Night’ came second in the inaugural Wolverhampton literature festival competition. She works as a transl...
26th October 2018
Punching Cork Stoppers: Neil Leadbeater, Original Plus
The poems in this chapbook by Neil Leadbeater represent a love letter to Lisbon, to Portugal, and to its cork groves in particular. In the capital the poet hears fado music, a form of song characteris...
18th October 2018
The Other Guernica: Derek Sellen, Cultured Llama
Readers who are unfamiliar with Spanish art might be expected to find 65 poems on the topic something of a challenge. Yet such is Derek Sellen’s passion for his subject and so varied are his approache...
18th October 2018
Swiftscape: Frances White, Seventh Quarry Press
Frances White is a member of a poetry group that was formed by the late Aeronwy Thomas, daughter of Dylan Thomas. She grew up near London and has strong family ties in south Wales. The venues she has ...
16th October 2018
This is Just to Say: John Woodall, Offa's Press
The title of this pamphlet collection is a nod to the well-known poem by William Carlos Williams which goes under the same name. Woodall’s poem, which echoes several of the lines found in the one by W...
11th October 2018
Mapping: Mark Totterdell, Indigo Dreams
One of the pleasurable tasks I was invited to undertake at my secondary school – one of the few, to be honest – was to devise an Ordnance Survey map from my own imagination, complete with all the nece...
6th October 2018
Passing Through: Geraldine Green, Indigo Dreams
By sheer coincidence, when Geraldine Green’s book arrived for review I was reading another volume of poems bearing exactly the same title by the Welsh poet John Tripp. Tripp’s book, which was publish...
30th September 2018
The Houses Along the Wall: Karen Hayes, Holland Park Press
I may well have fallen for this collection before I read it, as soon as I heard of its subject matter. The set of poems in The Houses Along the Wall creates a fictional history for 16 of the buildings...
26th September 2018
Kierkegaard's Cupboard: Marianne Burton, Seren
Marianne Burton trained as a lawyer and worked in the City. Her first book, She Inserts the Key was nominated for the Forward prize for best first collection. Kierkegaard’s Cupboard, the culmination o...
22nd September 2018
Flood: Clare Shaw, Bloodaxe
Floods inhabit myths, legend and our psyche. From classical tales and bible stories they appear throughout our literature. The flash flood in DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow springs to mind, as does Tom Wei...
18th September 2018
The Evening Entertainment: Matthew Paul, Eyewear
There is no shortage of exotic subjects in Matthew Paul’s debut poetry collection, which is said to have taken 30 years to put together. It includes poems about high-wire artists cheating death, a man...
14th September 2018
The Lovely Disciplines: Martyn Crucefix, Seren
Martyn Crucefix is closing in on his third decade as a poet of renown. His first collection, the wonderfully titled Beneath Tremendous Rain came out 28 years ago, when this reviewer still thought pop ...
13th September 2018
Quines: Gerda Stevenson, Luath Press
Gerda Stevenson is well known as an award-winning actor, director, musician and playwright, but is less well known as a poet. Her first collection was the autobiographical If This Were Real (2013), wh...
1st September 2018
The Dark Interval: Rainer Maria Rilke, Random House
What The Dark Interval first highlights is that the life of a poet is often interspersed with letters and other forms of correspondence which, taken as a complement to their poems, helps us to make se...
29th August 2018
Apple Water/Povel Panni: Raine Geoghegan, Hedgehog Poetry Press
Raine Geoghegan was born in the Welsh valleys, and is half Romany with Welsh and Irish ancestry. She holds an MA in creative writing from the University of Chichester and now lives in West Sussex.
...
19th August 2018
Housework: Susan Birchenough, KFS
This is a relatively short book – only 20 poems and a total of 30 pages – but it’s perfectly put together in a larger than standard format because of the nature of some of the poems. Susan Birchenough...
13th August 2018
Fault Lines: Laura Taylor, Flapjack
When I was young I played a video game featuring a character with a giant mace, who whirled through the battlefield dealing blows left and right, flames spitting out of the end of the weapon, lighting...
6th August 2018
Ten: Poets of the New Generation, ed. by Karen McCarthy Woolf, Bloodaxe
This is the third in a series of anthologies - the first was published in 2010 - which were intended to correct a perceived imbalance in the publishing of poets of black and minority ethnic (BAME) or...
30th July 2018
Way More Than Luck: Ben Wilkinson, Seren
I found Ben Wilkinson’s work, as represented in this collection from Seren, direct but nuanced. The poems are well crafted in a range of forms. The three sections of the book have distinct themes. Th...
22nd July 2018
The English River: Virginia Astley, Bloodaxe
I came across Virginia Astley way back in 1983 with the release of her first solo album From Gardens Where We Feel Secure - an almost entirely instrumental piece that fused ambient sound recordings of...
16th July 2018
The Book of Upside Down Thinking: Brian Patten, Forget Me Not Books
And now for something completely different, as someone once said. A priest halfway between Heaven and Hell, a tax collector, a magician, a philosopher, a blind man, a monk and a hammer, and quite a fe...
5th July 2018
Assembly Lines: Jane Commane, Bloodaxe
In a BBC Radio 4 broadcast (Start the Week, 21 May 2018) Jane Commane asserted that “poetry has a duty to look at the layers of history … the push and pull between the past and the present”, and this...
26th June 2018
Point me at the stars: Noel Williams, Indigo Dreams
Noel Williams lives in Sheffield where he has been a key figure in its expanding poetry scene for many years. He has initiated group projects such as Speakers 2, Women and War, and offered invaluable ...
20th June 2018
Land of Three Rivers: anthology edited by Neil Astley, Bloodaxe
Hexham is a market town in Northumberland, south of the river Tyne, and close to Hadrian’s Wall. It is also the home of Bloodaxe Books, whose editor Neil Astley is renowned for the bestselling antholo...
7th June 2018
Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods: Tishani Doshi, Bloodaxe
Poet, novelist and dancer Tishani Doshi is of Welsh-Gujarati descent. Born in Madras, she received her Masters in writing from Johns Hopkins University in America, worked in London in advertising and ...
31st May 2018
We Are All Lucky: Ben Banyard, Indigo Dreams
Ben Banyard grew up in Solihull but now lives in Portishead, near Bristol. His work has been published widely in print and online. We Are All Lucky is his first full-length collection and follows his ...
21st May 2018
The Glass Aisle: Paul Henry, Seren
Born in Aberystwyth, singer-songwriter and poet Paul Henry has had nine previous books of poetry published and is an established voice on the Welsh poetry circuit.
In keeping with his earlier work,...
11th May 2018
A Watchful Astronomy: Paul Deaton, Seren
Born in London and raised in Wales, Paul Deaton’s debut collection is as much about family as it is about nature. A difficult father-son relationship is at the heart of much of what he writes about. T...
5th May 2018
Citizens: Ian Parks, Smokestack
It rains in a lot of Ian Parks’ poems. I was tempted to work out the percentage. He is writing out of South Yorkshire and the post-industrial north of England, a home I share. Our urban landscape an...
30th April 2018
There are Boats on the Orchard: Maria C McCarthy, Cultured Llama
Author, poet and editor Maria C McCarthy, winner of the Society of Authors’ Tom-Gallon Trust short story award in 2015, has an MA in creative writing from the University of Kent. This attractively pr...
16th April 2018
A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry, ed. by Naomi Foyle, Smokestack
The Arab world is full of poetry, and always has been, but for most people, I suspect it’s a completely closed world. With the possible exception of Rumi, and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, badly trans...
16th April 2018
I'm Having the Rhyme of My Life: George Melling, Talentvine Press
Flapjack Press, an independent publisher of north-west performance poetry and poetry theatre for adults and children, also produce collections and anthologies for schools, workshop groups, festivals a...
13th March 2018
Belongings: Trevor Hughes, Kingston Press
This is not an easy review to write. Not because the poems in Trevor Hughes’ debut collection, Belongings, are “hard”, in the sense of releasing their meaning with difficulty. Not even because of the ...
10th March 2018
Looking South: Stuart A Paterson, Indigo Dreams
Stuart A Paterson writes in English and his native Scots, and lives by the Solway coast in Galloway. He is a past recipient of an Eric Gregory award, in 1992, and his pamphlet collection, Border Lines...
3rd March 2018
Basic Nest Architecture: Polly Atkin, Seren
Polly Atkin teaches English studies at the University of Strathclyde and lives in the Lake District, an inspiration for much of her writing. Basic Nest Architecture is her debut collection. At least ...
14th February 2018
Atlantic Drift: ed by James Byrne and Robert Sheppard, Arc
Subtitled ‘An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics,’ this is an important anthology not just for the poetry in it, but for the thinking about poetry within it as well. Most people, I suspect, don’t sit dow...
6th February 2018
Cry Baby: Gareth Writer-Davies, Indigo Dreams
Based in Brecon, Gareth Writer-Davies has been commended in a number of competitions, and has also been twice shortlisted for the Bridport prize. Cry Baby is his second pamphlet published by Indigo Dr...
29th January 2018
Missing Miles: Hannah Stone, Indigo Dreams
Hannah Stone holds an MA in creative writing from Leeds Trinity University. Her first collection, Lodestone, was published by Stairwell Books in 2016. She won the Poetry Business Yorkshire Poetry pri...
22nd January 2018
Curlew Calling: edited by Karen Lloyd, Numenius Press
The cover of this anthology of poetry, nature writing and images “in celebration of curlew” shows a distant, indistinct bird in flight, an image that is sadly appropriate.
According to the RSPB, be...
16th January 2018
Our Beautiful Scars: Jane Seabourne, Offa's Press
Wolverhampton-based poet Jane Seabourne has an MA in English literature and post-graduate certificates in education and mentoring. Now a freelance writer and mentor, most of her adult life has been sp...
3rd January 2018
