Visiting the Minotaur: Claire Williamson, Seren
Processing bereavement and progressing along the difficult path of recovering trauma are the excruciating steps that delineate Clare Williamson’s poetry. Her mother and brother committed suicide and she was abused verbally and physically when she was a child. These experiences are revisited and explored in her poems, which connect with ancient myths, mediated by pictures, dreams and lyrical visio...
30th June 2020
'Just like a chat down the pub': Luke Wright takes a break - after 100 consecutive online shows
There were times during his 100 consecutive online shows when leading performance poet Luke Wright felt that he “desperately wanted it to end, that it’s all been too much”. Whether he meant lockdown itself, or his amazing, marathon spoken word stint, or both, it didn’t really matter.
But he had s...
27th June 2020
Poems for the Planet: Mervyn Linford, Littoral Press
Mervyn Linford has been writing poetry and prose for nearly 50 years. He has had work broadcast on local and national radio and has been a featured poet at festivals in Essex and Suffolk. His publicat...
27th June 2020
CoronaVerses: ed. by Janine Booth, Attila the Stockbroker, Roundhead
Remember the start of this pandemic? The panic buying, the looting of toilet rolls? Seems a long time ago. Almost historic. On 18 March activist poet Janine Booth set up a Facebook group called Corona...
20th June 2020
192 Miles with Carla: Robbie Frazer, Dempsey & Windle
An intriguing poetic journey is delineated in 192 Miles with Carla, the debut pamphlet by Robbie Frazer. The 18 poems are unique and diverse and never banal in their imageries and structures. Skilful ...
9th June 2020
Haggards: Elizabeth Rimmer, Red Squirrel Press
Elizabeth Rimmer is the author of two previous collections of poetry from Red Squirrel Press, Wherever We Live Now (2011) and The Territory of Rain (2015). In 2016 she was the Makar for the Federation...
6th June 2020
The Healing Next Time: 'This is poetry about an issue that should concern us all'
Last year Write Out Loud reviewed a collection by Midlands poet Roy McFarlane that we described as "a serious and determined attempt to document in poetry institutional and everyday racism in Britain"...
6th June 2020
Grenade Genie: Thomas McColl, Fly on the Wall Press
Thomas McColl is engaging to meet, a quality that fully comes across in this collection of 25 poems that is deeply sceptical about the internet, kicks against the pricks of bureaucracy, and is laced w...
26th May 2020
Blood Rain: André Mangeot, Seren
I wonder how many of us can remember being taught about oxbow lakes in Geography? Reading the opening poem in this collection brought it all back to me. I can even recall the drawing that our teacher ...
19th May 2020
Litany of a Cardiologist: Denise Bundred, Against The Grain
This pamphlet of 23 poems represents the remarkable poetic distillation of a lifetime’s medical experiences and insights. Denise Bundred trained as a paediatrician in Cape Town and worked as a consult...
12th May 2020
Taking Flight: Aileen Ballantyne, Luath Press
The opening poem in this collection, ‘Full Moon’, should be regarded as an augury for a sequence later in the book. The poet is travelling on a Boeing 777:
I touched my leather rucksack,
...5th May 2020
thirty-one small acts of love and resistance: Steve Pottinger, Ignite Books
Steve Pottinger’s latest collection covers familiar territory for me. Three of the poems are centred on an incident at Wolverhampton Baths which is where I learned to swim and thereby gain sufficient ...
2nd May 2020
From Surrey to Sale, via Wales and Belfast: online open-mic accesses all areas
Hands up who’s missing live, “real” poetry open-mics? How many have taken part in their online equivalents? I dipped my toe in the water last night, joining the fun at Sale Write Out Loud’s second onl...
30th April 2020
These are the Hands: ed. by Deborah Alma and Dr Katie Amiel, Fair Acre Press
This anthology should be read at some time by all those who stand outside their homes on Thursday evenings clapping in support of NHS workers. Which is a lot of us. It wasn’t planned that way, but thi...
21st April 2020
A Second Whisper: Lynne Hjelmgaard, Seren
Poetry can surprise us in many different ways. Reading parts of this collection took me back just short of 50 years. When I was a student, I lived in a part of north London that was close to Golders G...
14th April 2020
No Far Shore: Anne-Marie Fyfe, Seren
The secondary heading of this literary-travel memoir - a combination of prose and poetry - is ‘Charting Unknown Waters’. And although Anne-Marie Fyfe had no thought of viruses when putting together th...
13th April 2020
Luke Wright live in his living room ... but not in front of the children!
Every night since the lockdown leading performance poet Luke Wright has been appearing on Twitter in his living room at 8pm – and last night was his 13th show. And what a treat for those confined to t...
7th April 2020
Pigeon Songs: Eoghan Walls, Seren
Born in Derry, Northern Ireland, Eoghan Walls has lived and taught in Germany, Rwanda and England, where he now lectures in creative writing at Lancaster University. He won an Eric Gregory award in 20...
6th April 2020
Penn Fields: Neil Leadbeater, Littoral Press
This collection contains a number of poems about what you might call unfashionable subjects – Midlands industrialism, a flight of locks through Wolverhampton, other kinds of locks at a museum, half-in...
30th March 2020
Crawling Out and Falling Up: Dónall Dempsey, Vole Books
Dónall Dempsey’s exuberant personality and imagination unfold throughout his latest collection. His poetry is inspired not just by romantic views or existential themes; clocks, baking, songs, animals,...
17th March 2020
Doing the Rounds: Audrey Ardern-Jones, Indigo Dreams
The title of this debut collection refers in one sense to the poet’s career as a nurse specialising in cancer genetics. However, the cover of the book portrays a globe, and Audrey Ardern-Jones’s poems...
15th March 2020
Instead, Let Us Say: Dawn Gorman, Dempsey & Windle
Award-winning poet, arts practitioner and freelance editor Dawn Gorman strongly believes in poetry as a participatory and collaborative medium and devises and runs community poetry events that include...
9th March 2020
Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God: Tony Hoagland, Bloodaxe
The American poet Tony Hoagland died in 2018 aged 64. This Bloodaxe collection can serve as an introduction for those previously unaware of him, and should leave them wanting to read more of his work....
28th February 2020
Anthology of Prose Poetry: eds. Anne Caldwell, Oz Hardwick, Valley Press
Despite what it says on the back cover, prose poetry is hardly at the cutting edge of contemporary writing. As the editors point out in their helpful introduction, it has a history that goes back to t...
18th February 2020
The Shadow Factory: Deborah Harvey, Indigo Dreams
Deborah Harvey’s fourth collection is very readable and accessible, augmented by notes at the back of the book. She has taken a range of themes, from ‘The Good Dogs of Chernobyl’, the first poem, to g...
26th January 2020
The Last Parent: Anne Stewart, Second Light
Bereavement, loss and love interweave in Anne Stewart’s latest collection. Her sequence ‘The Last Parent’, 31 poems that make half of the collection, stands out for its insights into the process of m...
16th January 2020
Sodium 136: Carole Bromley, Calder Valley Poetry
Carole Bromley’s Sodium 136 is her account of being diagnosed and treated for ‘A Benign Cyst Pressing on Optic Nerve’. This is the title of the first poem in this collection, in which we’re thrown str...
10th January 2020
Reel to Reel: David Cooke, Dempsey & Windle
A sequence of poems about the Grimsby fishing industry, from its boom years to its washed-up present, forms the admirable centrepiece of this collection. David Cooke, who lived and worked in Grimsby f...
2nd January 2020
