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 along the Parrog, the old port area of the coastal town of Newport in north Pembrokeshire. I visited Newport a few summers ago, and must have seen those houses.
Karen Hayes explains in her preface...
24th September 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 published by Poetry Wales Press in 1984, explores change in a largely urban setting whereas Green’s book is...
24th 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
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 ...
24th 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
Archive of Review articles View all subjects
