As it seems to have been passed over, yet agan, in the publication of choice I'm taking the liberty of posting the review of my collection scratch, by the wonderful MulletProofPoet :

Scratch
Paul Sands

Sadly, these days, many poetry collections often come with a free side order of smart-arse, either that or they’re brimming with their own (usually misplaced) level of confidence, which gathers like dust upon their best selling, yet largely unread pages. Nottingham born Paul Sands though, with his second collection Scratch, hands us something altogether more solid, more real. This is poetry with its gloves off, an angled worldview, knocked off kilter by its own sense of disappointment and redeeming ability to spot obscured signs of beauty through rusted iron railings and filthy broken windows.

Lines like ‘pull your shoulders off guard/a silent sob sewn with angry years/asphyxiated by tea as the lizards feebly grope the summer’s eyes’ quickly assure us that there is a talent here which is so honed, so skilled, yet so down to earth, so grubby, that it’s less like reading a book and more like walking through an abandoned underpass whose walls are lined with piss and William Blake graffiti. Great stuff.