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 mourning, including administering the assets, and a great amount of paperwork.
Her mother died in 2004, and her father in 2013. When her father died, the poet seems to have felt the loss of both of ...
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 straight into the fraught world of the hospital and its patients, many distraught, confused and trying ...
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
