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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 ...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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 ...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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 ...

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Review

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 ...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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 ...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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 ...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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.

...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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 ...

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Review

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...

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Review

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 ...

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Review

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 ...

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Review

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,...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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 ...

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Review

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...

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Review

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 ...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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...

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Review

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