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Reviewers' Opinions
published with our thanks
Extracts from reviews are also included on individual authors' pages.
 
Scroll down to find full reviews, as well as extracts, which are posted in chronological order.

Extracts from new reviews of 'A City Waking Up' by Sue Wallace-Shaddad

17/11/2020

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London Grip: Brian Docherty detects the voice of a woke woman in Sue Wallace-Shaddad’s new collection:

​"This short collection of 30 poems follows on from a 2104 self-published pamphlet, A Working Life, which according to Wallace-Shaddad’s wordpress site, ‘reflects aspects of her career with the British Council’. Only two poems in the present book, ‘The University of Khartoum’ and ‘The Talk’ might refer to the author’s working life. What we have is a sequence of poems set in Sudan, often specifically in Khartoum, with four dated to early 2019, concerning the political uprising there. (A BBC News website, 16 August 2019, and a Wikipedia article, ‘Khartoum Massacre’ are informative on these events.)

— Brian Docherty
Full review here: 
https://londongrip.co.uk/2020/11/london-grip-poetry-review-sue-wallace-shaddad/
And in the Suffolk Poetry Society's magazine, Anthony Johae writes:

"A City Waking Up – Sue Wallace-Shaddad

It is refreshing to read a pamphlet collection which takes us out of our customary milieu into
another culture. Although the author, Sue Wallace-Shaddad, does not hail from Sudan, she
nevertheless writes as an insider: someone who has not only lived and worked there, but who
also married a Sudanese academic, brought up a family in Khartoum and merged into the
culture of the country. But this is not a collection of poems focused on her, rather a series of
impressions of the place with which she and her family have been involved in the daily flow
of life, ending with the popular uprising in 2019, which led to the unseating of the President.
The title of the collection, therefore, captures both the city coming to life each day before the
desert sun scorches down and, in the last five of the thirty poems, the people of Sudan waking
up to the realization of a new era beginning for their society.
[...]
In A City Waking Up, Sue Wallace-Shaddad has depicted the diurnal rhythms of Sudanese
life with great poetic skill and lightness of touch. The last five “darker” poems, however,
remind us that underlying this cyclical way of life is a political narrative which is still in
process of unfolding."

— Antony Johae
The full review appears in the Suffolk Poetry Society Magazine (December 2020 issue)

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Review of 'Negotiating Caponata' by Rennie Halstead

23/9/2020

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First published  in 'London Grip', September 2020
https://londongrip.co.uk/2020/09/london-grip-poetry-review-carla-scarano-dantonio/


Negotiating Caponata
 is an enjoyable collection from Carla Scarano D’Antonio. The back cover text discusses the role of food in the book, and D’Antonio certainly weaves the opening of the collection round themes of food preparation, and the meanings and symbolism that food has in families. But don’t be drawn into too relaxed a view. The trials and tribulations of mastering Italian cuisine are nothing compared to the intricate – and sometimes painful – family relationships. These dominate the later part of the collection which is filled with an accompanying sense of loss.
Picture
In “Pajarita” D’Antonio muses on the ability of origami birds to carry her thoughts and feelings across oceans:
My thoughts are tiny ideograms
inked on wrapping paper,
hidden in the folds of my paper bird.

 
She envisages the paper bird:
 […]  flapping across the ocean
picturing our minds touching
like two hands pressing palms

 
But she also wants a response. She waits ‘… for you to reshape the bird,/ send it back to me.’
“What I was leaving” introduces us to the idea of distance and departure that characterises parts of the book. Here D’Antonio remembers autumns from different years with great nostalgia. In 2014:
leaves gather in burning rust and ochre,
streaks mark the skin red:
I love their way of dying.

 
whilst in 2015:
the trees turn gold and vermillion
purple and burnt sienna.
 
Now it’s there
a few days later it’s gone
,
 
But in 2018 the fading of the landscape in autumn brings memories of other times and places:
The full moon is ricotta cheese in a sea of blueberry juice.
 
Now I cook leek and potato soup,
[…]
the soup mashes in our mouths
tasting of childhood minestrone rich with curved macaroni,
our southern persistence beyond ourselves
pulsing.

 
The next section of the collection, ‘My Father’s Death’, has a very different and darker tone. In “Your illness” D’Antonio takes us through the pain and suffering of the dying:’ your body kept retching / bucketfuls of brown liquid / day and night.’ But the sadness for the dying is coloured by memory. The family history cannot be ignored, even at this point:
Mum held the tub under your chin
and cleaned the floor on her unsteady knees
forgetting all the past beatings and shame.

 
Similarly, in “Your last words” the past is not far away:
[…] you opened your eyes -
[…]
lifted an arm, tried to speak
(the last advice?
or threats if we transgressed,

 
but despite the mixture of pain and love in the memory, the poet-narrator
 […] opened the window to let in the mild April air
and waited in bed
listening to the silence of the night,
your body voiceless and still,
only my memory of you alive.

 
Following the father’s death, the poet is elected to conduct the final act. In “Dispersing your ashes” the poet asks: ‘Who else can do it?’ The final dispersion has great sadness and a touch of humour:
The ashes whirl in the wind, unstrained
mix in the roaring waves of the backwash
making it murky.

 
[…They] soak my skirt to the waist.
I wonder if they will leave stains,
[…]
the last specks fly and dissolve,
it lasts seconds.

 
But the poem expresses a desire for the final act to have a greater sense of occasion:
I wish it longer,
more solemn
conclusive in some way.
The sun is setting in a soaring blue.

 
The final section, ‘In Touch’ draws family memories together. First we meet “Grandad Ciccio and Grandma Orsola” in a skilfully written specular. D’Antonio creates a word picture so well that you can see the couple in your mind’s eye, as if in a sepia photograph. The couple sit ‘serene like ancient Roman statues’
with their first baby daughter on their lap.
He in grey uniform and high boots, she in black dress and hat
against a white background.

 
Grandad Ciccio’s ‘arm touches lightly her shoulders, / a bag made of silver-net hangs from her gloved hand.’
By the end of the collection we have a strong sense of the family, and it is fitting that “Volcano” explores the world of the mother. The poem starts quietly enough: ‘Crickets fill the lap of night,/ walls sweat the heat of the day.’ But the peace is a precursor to internal drama:
On the balcony she mumbles,
words bubble up from inside
boiling phrases she couldn’t say
to her late husband

 
She calls him ‘the bastard who squandered on his tart’ and complains about the daughter, ‘the bitch who calls me a crazy hag.’ But the anger and resentment is sharpened by the awareness of what she has lost. Beside the family grief, there is:
the shadow of the other man who came last night --
every night --
begs her to join him;
but it’s too late,
he’s back in America now.

 
And with no solution, no prospect of improving her situation, she watches as:
The city sinks into torrid August.
Sounds brood within,
murmurs beneath closed lips.
She is a sealed volcano.

 
I really enjoyed this collection. I confess to being a little unsure at first, when I ran into a group of recipe poems, but as soon as we started to meet the family behind the food and saw how important food was in their lives, the book came to life for me. The intensity of the family relationships is graphically captured with great sensitivity, and the sense of pain and regret that runs through the book like a watermark grounds the poems. The final poems look at the beginning of a new life, so the collection finally moves away from the trials of family life and the collection ends on a positive and upbeat note.
Rennie Halstead

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'Negotiating Caponata' by Carla Scarano D'Antonio reviewed by Rennie Halstead

23/9/2020

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This review was first published in London Grip here:
https://londongrip.co.uk/2020/09/london-grip-poetry-review-carla-scarano-dantonio/
​
Negotiating Caponata is an enjoyable collection from Carla Scarano D’Antonio. The back cover text discusses the role of food in the book, and D’Antonio certainly weaves the opening of the collection round themes of food preparation, and the meanings and symbolism that food has in families. But don’t be drawn into too relaxed a view. The trials and tribulations of mastering Italian cuisine are nothing compared to the intricate – and sometimes painful – family relationships. These dominate the later part of the collection which is filled with an accompanying sense of loss.
Picture
In “Pajarita” D’Antonio muses on the ability of origami birds to carry her thoughts and feelings across oceans:
'My thoughts are tiny ideograms/ inked on wrapping paper,/ hidden in the folds of my paper bird.'
She envisages the paper bird:
'[…] flapping across the ocean/ picturing our minds touching /like two hands pressing palms' 

But she also wants a response. She waits ‘… for you to reshape the bird,/ send it back to me.’

“What I was leaving” introduces us to the idea of distance and departure that characterises parts of the book. Here D’Antonio remembers autumns from different years with great nostalgia. In 2014:

'leaves gather in burning rust and ochre, streaks mark the skin red: I love their way of dying'.
whilst in 2015:
'the trees turn gold and vermillion /purple and burnt sienna. //
Now it’s there /a few days later it’s gone,'

 
But in 2018 the fading of the landscape in autumn brings memories of other times and places:

'The full moon is ricotta cheese in a sea of blueberry juice. /Now I cook leek and potato soup, /[…] the soup mashes in our mouths /tasting of childhood minestrone rich with curved macaroni, /our southern persistence beyond ourselves /pulsing. '

The next section of the collection, "My Father’s Death", has a very different and darker tone. In “Your illness” D’Antonio takes us through the pain and suffering of the dying:’ your body kept retching / bucketfuls of brown liquid / day and night.’ But the sadness for the dying is coloured by memory. The family history cannot be ignored, even at this point:

"Mum held the tub under your chin /and cleaned the floor on her unsteady knees /forgetting all the past beatings and shame." 

Similarly, in “Your last words” the past is not far away:

'[…] you opened your eyes — //[…] lifted an arm, tried to speak/(the last advice? /or threats if we transgressed,' 

​but despite the mixture of pain and love in the memory, the poet-narrator

'[…] opened the window to let in the mild April air /and waited in bed /listening to the silence of the night, your body voiceless and still, only my memory of you alive."

Following the father’s death, the poet is elected to conduct the final act.

In “Dispersing your ashes” the poet asks: ‘Who else can do it?’

The final dispersion has great sadness and a touch of humour:


'The ashes whirl in the wind,/unstrained mix in the roaring waves of the backwash/ making it murky. /[…They] soak my skirt to the waist. /I wonder if they will leave stains, […] /the last specks fly and dissolve,/ it lasts seconds.'

But the poem expresses a desire for the final act to have a greater sense of occasion:

'I wish it longer, /more solemn /conclusive in some way. /The sun is setting in a soaring blue.' 

The final section, "In Touch" draws family memories together. First we meet “Grandad Ciccio and Grandma Orsola” in a skilfully written specular. D’Antonio creates a word picture so well that you can see the couple in your mind’s eye, as if in a sepia photograph. The couple sit 'serene like ancient Roman statues'

'with their first baby daughter on their lap. /He in grey uniform and high boots, she in black dress and hat /against a white background.

Grandad Ciccio’s ‘arm touches lightly her shoulders, / a bag made of silver-net hangs from her gloved hand.'

By the end of the collection we have a strong sense of the family, and it is fitting that “Volcano” explores the world of the mother. The poem starts quietly enough: 'Crickets fill the lap of night,/ walls sweat the heat of the day.' But the peace is a precursor to internal drama:

'On the balcony she mumbles, words bubble up from inside boiling phrases she couldn’t say to her late husband She calls him ‘the bastard who squandered on his tart’ and complains about the daughter, ‘the bitch who calls me a crazy hag.’ But the anger and resentment is sharpened by the awareness of what she has lost. Beside the family grief, there is:

'the shadow of the other man' who came last night — /every night — /begs her to join him; but it’s too late, /he’s back in America now.

And with no solution, no prospect of improving her situation, she watches as:

'The city sinks into torrid August. /Sounds brood within, /murmurs beneath closed lips. /She is a sealed volcano.' 

I really enjoyed this collection. I confess to being a little unsure at first, when I ran into a group of recipe poems, but as soon as we started to meet the family behind the food and saw how important food was in their lives, the book came to life for me. The intensity of the family relationships is graphically captured with great sensitivity, and the sense of pain and regret that runs through the book like a watermark grounds the poems. The final poems look at the beginning of a new life, so the collection finally moves away from the trials of family life and the collection ends on a positive and upbeat note.
Rennie Halstead 
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Will Daunt reviews 'Sheer Poetry' by Roger Elkin

17/9/2020

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Sheer Enough: The Envoi Legacies
 
It’s fitting that the final Envoi should highlight the latest collection of a distinguished former editor, Roger Elkin. The title’s pun implies more than the scale of this book’s substantial achievement. It suggests that creative writing is like a sharp - or sheer - ascent.

“Sheer Poetry” is, of course, a subjective and shrewdly-picked cliché. Elkin is asking us, how do we know what makes poetry work? This was his metier and motivation in those twenty-four years as an editor: to entertain, highlight, expose and challenge. Since 2006, he has been free to shift those imperatives into his own writing. This book excels in its range, dexterity and humanity.

​To business: Sheer Poetry convinces equally at macro and micro levels. In its second half, eight poems explore ‘Ireland’s Blight’ and ‘The Politics Of Class’. Elkin mixes history with provocation in the former sequence. ‘Ireland’s 9/11’ – about Cromwell’s sacking of Drogheda’ – reproduces brutally the religious cant which was deployed to justify how Catholics could be trapped in a church, and burnt alive with their children:
 
            This was a righteous judgment of God
            upon those barbarous wretches…
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But there’s satire too: in ‘Beggars’ Meal – “Indian Buck”’ the farming of ‘foie gras’ geese is compared ironically to the fate of the starving Irish during the Famine; “… force-feeding never entered Whig thinking”, but it left grotesque malnutrition:
            … starvation limbs,
            visible gizzards,
            the jaundice-yellow of relapsing fever,
            livers swelling to collapsing.
 
There’s a clutch of personalized tributes to music and composers, one being for Elkin’s mother at a mini-grand piano, another for “Auntie Reenie” singing Tosca with a “honey-spun thread treading the scales”. Long-time Envoi reviewer Eddie Wainwright left his editor a copy of Mozart’s hand-written catalogue. Elkin’s ingenious response concludes by describing the doubt that drives a lot of powerful writing. Here, one artist’s legacy is passed on by another to a third:

            Eddie’s Bequest – better by far than mine:
 
            these words. But suspect Eddie might not like
            such notes; want silences to chart his wake.
 

Placed within this section is a playful piece about an abrasive chiropracticer who “swears at everything”. Yet her merciless prescribed routines allow patients to listen to CDs “just long enough” to:
           … resolve the problem of bringing things
            to resolution in Mozart’s piano concertos.
 
The genius of Envoi, past and present, beats heartily though this book, not least in its contents’ stylistic range. In ‘Dreaming of Flying’, Elkin’s insight and experience deftly wrong-foots the reader, with the fuguing lyricism of a refrain that bookends each verse:
 
            … in her bedroom a dangling, hanging reminder
            she’s always wanted to fly.
 
            She’s always wanted to fly
            not like angels in some da Vinci painting.

 
But the poem unpicks this form fittingly and naturally, as the persona’s wish takes literal and figurative flight from one reality – and another form – to different places:
 
            she’s always wanted to fly
            to fly
            fly
 
            wonder why.

 
‘Obsession Confession’ surprises the reader with a very different voice. Its single sentence recreates a profound loneliness through a streaming consciousness that suggests frustrated passion. The actual reason is something touching and devastating.

In the editorial to 
Envoi 135, Elkin’s advice to aspiring poets is ‘“Read, read, read!”’ What follows reflects what has been Envoi’s mission and mantra:
 
            Unless you open yourself to the influences of other poets then your own
            poetry might remain stilted and its potential undeveloped.
 
That quotation, and Sheer Poetry’s vertigo-inducing cover, might imply that Elkin expects the writing of verse to be a struggle. But it’s not that simple: the title poem’s actually called ‘Sheer Poetry: Considering the Egyptian Position’. This is a virtuoso study of intimacy and mortality through the experience of clinging to a rock face. The piece revels in intrigue and surprise, both qualities that Envoi editors have sought out so successfully over the decades:
 
            What if you should fall? Sheer poetry. Shakespeare
            knew all about that: arrival as death.
 
       In her fourth Envoi editorial, Jan Fortune describes the poems that she seeks for the journal:
 
            …what really matters is that they are distinctive; they chip away at me so that
            I have to return to them.
 
Elkin has a particular knack of achieving this, as shown by his portrayals of family. Who is the subject, in the unpunctuated intensity of ‘the brother he never really knew’? We can’t be sure, as the third person narration assails us with the same brother’s wrongdoings and failures. The peculiar exasperation that only siblings can feel for each other is underlined by a deliberate shift into the first person: the brother “bragged his big-headed time/ bad-ladding it around our town”.

​That perspective returns when the surviving brother learns of the prodigal’s demise via a revelatory cruelty:

                                                … found whammed out of life
            just fifty-seven heart bust apart and I only know because Sam contacted
            that effing git of a brother he never really knew.
 

Sheer Poetry shares many such personal histories. In Envoi 176, R.V. Bailey describes how, for Elkin the editor it was:
            a matter of importance that voices were heard, that words were loved and used
            with precision and respect.
 

This summarizes precisely the humane portrayal of Elkin’s many poetic characters. Whether remembered or imagined, they are alive in his words. Near the end of this book, a pair of poems characterise grandparents: a grandmother and her world view via the prints on her wall; a nonagenarian grandfather through skill at draughts.
  
Listen to the wonderful way in which diction, idiom and imagery are blended naturally in:
            his triumphant run, jack-jumping with a clacking
            accuracy that removes two, three, four black kings..
            He laughs his little laugh. Like life! It’s just a game.
            Best in both worlds, you know, not being huffed!

 
Repeatedly these poems are constructed around the unexpected, or the provocatively ambiguous. There’s the last piece, ‘Shoplifting’ where, with characteristic wit, the analogy of writing-as-theft is only suggested in a wry footnote. There are the fresh and intricate descriptions of ‘Mapping the Past’, an engrossing recollection of beach holidays, and their attendant parental spats. We are there, with the writer and a disconcerting sense of loss. Simultaneously, we’re left with enough room to envisage and wonder:
 
            Remember, she said, We’ll have time enough. But,
            once lost, is lost. And never, the right time to recover.
 

Sheer Poetry includes the very best of Elkin’s writing, being expansive, warm, humorous and wise. Adjudicating (and having just relinquished Envoi), Roger said that good poetry should include:
            sensitive use of language in the capturing of experience; the use of strong
            imagery; clear sensory articulation; a subtle handling of rhythm (not metre); a
            sense of the inevitability in the way that the poem’s argument develops and is
            resolved in the final lines; and for me, above all else an awareness of the inter
            relationship between content and form.
 

Look no further than Sheer Poetry to see these exacting standards exemplified.
 
 
Will Daunt (First published in the final issue of Envoi literary Journal October 2020)
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Carla Scarano reviews 'Grieving with the Animals' by Polly Roberts

15/7/2020

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Picture
‘Grieving with the Animals’ 
by Polly Roberts
Dempsey and Windle 
ISBN 9781907435928 
£9
Nature and humans merge in the original, compelling lines of ‘Grieving with the Animals’. Mourning and bereavement are profoundly explored in an attempt to overcome the suffering and find new reasons to carry on. Nature is closely observed in an osmosis that makes the poet part of it. Humanity, animals and plants therefore combine in a harmonious empathy that helps the poet to overcome grief and accept loss. The poet’s narrative voice guides the reader through this process. The poems and prose poems are structured in sequences that set out the important steps of her healing journey.
The lines are double spaced to highlight the isolation and detachment the poet is experiencing. Sometimes there is only one line on the page, allowing the negative white space to emphasise the void that surrounds the poet’s existence. The recovery is slow and sometimes painful, resounding in well-crafted sounds and fascinating imageries:
The day before I received the news, two swans flew low
over my head. Their wings thrummed like a helicopter.
Eyes turned to watch the rescue vehicle, and instead saw
white bellies
…
Animals are in communion for you,
as are we,
nosing each other’s armpits
as we bed in
for warm companionship.
Because you went cold.
(‘Animals are in communion’)
The fragmented lines convey the unspeakable mysteries of feeling lost and alone after the death of someone dear. The poet looks for reasons to carry on living in the luscious landscape that surrounds her and in the animals whose vitality testifies to a wish to accept life as it is without asking too many questions. The poet therefore experiences her merging with nature as a metamorphosis, a change that allows her to observe her situation from different viewpoints:
Apparently,
I caw like a crow.
I wail like an elephant.
I moan like a cow giving birth.
I yelp like a puppy.
I sniff like a mouse.
Words no longer speak for me.
…
I stand on the precipice of the waterfall and peer over
the edge. An end of land strangely satisfying.
River moves on beneath me. A life force, fierce and
strong, going, gone.
River falls. Fast and heavy, top tumbling, desperate to
jump over.
River. A rushing sheet that slips and seems to slow
before meeting bottom. A reflected snippet of sky and
clouds along the way.
…
The world is alive. Every colour, every shade, every blade,
every beast.
(‘In Conversation with You’)
Nature speaks to her, communicating a renewed strength that has no precise goal; it is a flowing, living force despite the encounters with difficulties and obstacles. This process of transformation in communion with nature is crucial in the acceptance of the death of her dear one. She experiences ups and downs when periods of depression alternate with a deep immersion in nature that is her only source of comfort:
Grief momentarily slips away as I soak in rivers
and seas. I might have to live underwater soon.
…
I am a speck on the mountain.
Rings of light stream around me. Caught in a spotlight
I might be vacuumed to another world. There’s no further to go.
Wind pushes uneasily against my body, disturbed by this new 
surface.
(‘Un-Earthed’)
Emptiness and death seem overwhelming at certain points, but death never actually happens. Some poems have haiku structures, conveying in essential lines strong, moving imageries that engage the reader in the poet’s search for new purpose in life, which inevitably ends in death, leaving the survivors bewildered and alone.
The poet’s empathy and communion with nature are also connected with environmental concerns about global warming: the earth is drying and decaying under her feet. This is described in engaging, sharp lines that reveal a deep involvement at personal and worldwide levels. The line breaks and the punctuation highlight the dramatic tone of the poem:
It is decaying beneath me.
Retreating.
The colour of nicotine stained skin.
Dehydrating,
between each lessening puff of wind.
I lie on my deathbed of moss, yellow,
leaves, yellow,
grass, yellow.
Earth, panting its last words dry and hollow.
(‘It Hasn’t Rained for Weeks’)
Grieving and growing while aware of and in communion with nature work in parallel in the poet’s journey towards acceptance, an experience that eventually enriches her life and her poetry. The sequence ‘Except the Birds’ beautifully summarises this journey, which is also a quest for significance in the apparent dichotomy between life and death. The refrain ‘I still can’t believe he’s gone. Burned to nothing.’ (where the second half is slightly changed in ‘Burned to dust’, ‘Burned to air.’, ‘Burned to earth’ and ‘Burned to everything’) encompasses all the elements in an attempt to reach a wholeness that might give a sense of completeness but, at the same time, is vacant:
Faraway, the tide stirs. A crashing fizz for open ears on
a paradise below. White sand with no footprints except
the birds’.
(‘Except the Birds’)
It is a world in which humans are barely present, but this is the world where the poet finds her voice, which she can use to meditate and express her bereavement. Polly Roberts’s poetry reveals a sincere and engaging involvement in nature’s secrets that she explores through her grieving for the death of a person who was dear to her, conveying innovative imageries in captivating lines.

Carla Scarano (First published in The Blue Nib, July 2020)
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Carla Scarano reviews "In the Time of Rabbits" by Valerie Lynch

29/8/2019

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Carla Scarano reviews "In the Time of Rabbits" by Valerie Lynch

Picture

New themes and expanding images and metaphors are explored in Valerie Lynch’s second collection, In the Time of Rabbits. A wider conception of family relationships and identity is developed in recollections from her childhood and adulthood. The narrative concerns a woman’s lineage that goes from her grandmother back in the 1920s to her mother’s girlhood, marriage and relationship with her husband. The crystallised roles of wife and mother are contested in the narrator’s own story which includes break-ups and new lovers. Other themes are investigated such as aging, illness, gender issues, immigrants. The collection includes ekphrastic poetry and ends with a question suggesting that what we have just read is provisional though the aesthetic pleasure the poems prompt is undeniable.
The collection opens with a dedicatory poem to the poet’s son who helps young men to ‘give names to their fears/the fears of childhood//and clothe them for today’. In a similar way, Lynch’s poems voice those fears and ‘clothe them’ for today as well as for a past which is viewed through the lens of experience in a new open vision that resists closure and engenders unexpected imageries.

Lynch’s narrator can shape herself like sand, make herself ‘something different’ (“The Shape and me’), explore her life from a different angle. In her childhood ‘all things were possible/and waiting to be lived’ (‘In the Time of Rabbits’). The mother figure appears in several poems, as a young woman ‘so young, so vivid,/so unaware of her nineteen years/of innocence’ (‘Barefoot’); but she is also seen as formal and slightly frightened in ‘her wedding dress and wedding smile’ (‘Reading a photograph’). She is a shifting figure entrapped in her role of wife and mother revealing severity and self-denial:

The kettle sang carefully
around her head. The flowers and I,
dad and the kettle’s song
were anxious to please.
 
Perhaps
we brought her some rest
from the artillery
that garrisoned her smiles.
                         (‘The Strawberry Fields’)
 
She suffers ‘Absences’ and silences and misses a real connection with her daughter:
I told you HALF a pound, she said,
with us standing there in the road.
And this time, get the proper change!
 
…
Trying not to breathe, I chopped him up,
 
minced the bits, and stuffed them
in sausage skins. Put mum in too,
then took her out quick. She often
sees my thinks.
                            (‘Sausages’)
 
The poems about the mother suggest repressed potential, an ‘otherwise’ that was silenced by education, social conventions and marriage. Nevertheless, the young narrator has a special connection with her grandmother, Granny T, who enlightens her about ancestors, their ‘feasting and song’. She lived in a ‘two up two down/cold scullery’ called ‘sookies’, ‘in the briskness of Dorset hills’ where there are no ‘published regulations’. If the mother expects perfection and obedience to social rules, the grandmother is looser and always welcoming, she leaves her be:
I cycled over to see you each day after school to sit
and not say a word, and have you not to say a word to me,
just leaving me be.
                       (‘The button box’)
 
The mother comes back in her adulthood. The poet watches ‘her face slide’ beneath her skin (‘Becoming and vanishing’); it is a legacy the poet acknowledges and dismisses at the same time in an attempt to achieve an identity which is necessarily different from her mother’s.
The relationship with her father is connected with bedtime stories from the war, as in the poem ‘German Boy’. During the first world war the father spared the life of a German soldier who stared at his bayonet holding out his hands. According to the rules, the father should have struck with the bayonet and twisted it in the boy’s body; but he did not and let him go.
Some poems show the sufferings and illusions of a broken relationship that are counterbalanced by a new love flourishing in later life:
You said you don’t do belonging;
you didn’t pretend.
I didn’t hear your words.
I loved the smell of your skin.
 
I loved.
                       (‘Herb Robert’)
 
The new love is not binding or stable, it is provisional but it seems to meet the poet’s desire and expectations. He fills unpredictable needs that her parents never fulfilled due to their stiff prescribed roles. The poet’s new lover was ‘always ready to leave’ and finally managed it when he suddenly died. However, not only is love temporary, but everything that concerns life and our humanity is necessarily provisional. This is because of our mortality as well as the sense of openness and playfulness that Lynch’s poetry suggests:
Morning holds the long slow sky
of winter, stretched thin over Chesil’s Reach.
 
Between shingle and sky, nothing moves.
 
Softly, a sea-mist slides across the shore,
its shroud holding me fast.
                               (‘Chesil’s Reach’)
 
The old sun arcs low
days briefly stutter
 
and shiver
 
A voice sings on the river
a herring gull screams
 
and dies.
 
Tomorrow
daybreak
 
will open early.
 
Streets rouse the sky
a boy flings by
 
on a bike.
                       (‘Equinox’)
 
In ‘Chesil’s Reach’ death is evoked in the word ‘shroud’ foreseen in the alliterations with ‘shingle’, ‘sky’ and ‘shore’. Contingency and mystery haunt the poem, while in ‘Equinox’ a lighthearted mood is present in the meditative pauses of the line breaks and especially in the half rhyme of the conclusion. The final image of the boy riding a bike points towards the future and the rest of life. The ordinary is therefore connected with the universal where ancient myths merge with everyday life, as in the poem ‘Promises’, and with a surreal world that has a touch of humour:
I see the mackerel march off
their slab in militant array.
…
‘It’s still alive.’ You stupid woman.
He grins. Dead long before you
 
got up today, I reckon.
I am watching mackerel eyes
as they meet mine.
 
You want it, or not?
                     (‘Mackerel eyes’)
 
Lynch reflects on words, images and how they construct reality. In her poem ‘Looking is different from seeing’ The cow she sees in the field is ‘a sort of bundle/of brown and white’ that does not resemble the cow of her picture book: ‘That isn’t a cow. I know cow’. Once again reality reveals itself as uncertain, sometimes disappointing and always conveying blurred images hard to catch or define:
 
I spin down my net
to catch the words
that fall in the black sleeps of night
before the sun drops in
and strangles them.
                         (‘Word-hunter 2’)
 
This thought is further explored in the poems that describe pictures. Lynch ‘feels’ the painting rather than simply describing it; it is a synesthetic approach that makes the reader experience the artwork with all the senses:
 
The wind is tossing sulky Thames water
across the road and into my hair,
freezing my neck, filling my eyes with tears.
 
Turner has wrenched me inside out.
His ‘Storm’ has lashed sea in my face
I’m wet as a cabin-boy on his drowning ship.
                                      (‘Water, drowned in light’)
 
This new collection is not only rich in imageries, it also reveals a widening of Lynch’s poetic and literary horizons both in her prosody and in her perceptions. Considering her age (she is ninety-two), Valerie Lynch is the living proof of the never-ending potential of imagination that creates alternative views, new beginnings and new possibilities.
 

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Carla Scarano reviews "Messages written on envelope backs" by Ayelet McKenzie

2/3/2019

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Ayelet McKenzie has lived in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, for 32 years. She has published two pamphlet collections, and two previous full collections, The Patient is Disappointing and Courting the Asylum. 


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Her latest collection, Messages Written on Envelope Backs, explores an alternative to conventional “normality” with original imagery. The collection opens with a fascinating series of pen portraits of the overlooked people the poet has met. They all have a dreamy, unexpected side:

     She smelt of sweat, a faint urine and lilies,
     wore old clothes
     walked everywhere;
     with wild winged eyebrows and knotty hair.
                                                           (‘Mabel’)​

Battered and trusted
     like an old teddy bear,
     she shambled through life
     in her shabby jeans and T-shirt.
     Crazy as heck,
     with her ring-a-ding-ding ponytail
     and face full of curiosity and good humour.
                                                         (‘Liz’)

There are direct references to mental health experiences that expose a lack of empathy in the psychiatric ward:

     I go to see my psychiatrist,
     who is petite and slight
     with wrinkled woollen tights
     and hair down to her waist,
     she looks like a little girl.
     Prescribes tablets that make me fat.
     ….
     she thinks I am mad.
                                  (‘The Psychiatrist’)
The poem ‘Psychiatric Inmates’ also implies a ‘dark’ side: sedation. The effects of medication don’t allow for the human need to have some physical contact. Food has a symbolic significance; it is a comfort, it is ‘self-medicating’ and is meant to be savoured in bed, taking your time. This ‘wasting’ of time challenges bustling modern life, and points to an alternative vision. This is expressed in McKenzie’s precise imagery and in the slow rhythm of her short, evolving lines:

     she dropped her purse
     and the coins spilled out;
     scattered – and rolled away
     as if they didn’t matter.


     And he stood there laughing,     ….
...
     The sun laughed too

      and it was beautiful.

                            (‘Misadventure’)
In Messages Written on Envelope Backs there is a ruthless ‘reality’ to acknowledge beneath a surreal or dreamy view “where dry stone walls/cut into land and section it” (‘View’). Nevertheless, the poet keeps on “hoping you will come and track me down” (‘Lost Love’).
                                                     
                                                      Carla Scarano

                                                      First published on "Write Out Loud'. March 2019

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Jenny Hockey's Review of Trisha Broomfield's "Husbands for Breakfast"

18/2/2019

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Trisha Broomfield was born in Lincolnshire, grew up in Australia and now lives in Surrey.  As well as poetry, she’s a writer of short stories and unfinished crime novels. Husbands for Breakfast is her second collection.  She cites Thomas Hardy, Ted Hughes and the Liverpool Poets as her influences.

The poems in this collection derive very directly from women’s experiences; of growing up, sex, marriage and getting older – in the 1950s and the 1970s. They are often painful: unsatisfactory one-night stands; unplanned pregnancy; domestic violence; strippers; marital infidelity, and death in old age. So when a child describes “our very own policeman” who keeps us safe (her mother says), we find him halfway through the poem following her mother “up the squeaky stairs”. At this point the child and her sister “knew it was time” to get out their crayon tin and draw “waxy pictures” of robbers in stripey T-shirts.  They carry on drawing until “Mum reappeared with apple cheeks”. The crayon tin and the waxy pictures make this story persuasive, planting the event firmly in a particular period. I’m sure there was a 1953 Coronation picture on the tin and I can hear the dull rattle of wax crayons inside. No plastic wallet of felt tips.
This attention to period detail does haul some bleak experiences back to life. The woman dancing semi-naked in the pub, for men who had “more important things on their mind”, mouths “Mouldy Old Dough” as she twirls. This weirdly unforgettable song neatly authenticates the moment – though in the end this scene is all too familiar and did leave me wanting another layer to the poem.
Carefully-located memories of voices and words also trigger more amusing accounts: Auntie Vi who got so thirsty while shopping that she “couldn’t spit sixpence”; Steph (known as “Stiff”) whose Bouvier des Flandres dog was known by the children as a Bois de Boulogne, because after all it was “sideboard big” and “blocked out the sun”.  I enjoyed these distinctive phrases, her parents’ castigation of “Bea” who was “black as your hat”, “fat as a cat”, who “ate husbands for breakfast”. They anchor the poems for the reader, as they must have for the poet herself.
So there is humour along the way and sometimes the surprise of trust between the sexes; when a young man takes a girl outside during a party to attempt sex against a wall, he discovers she is 15 and a virgin. So he “leads her back to the lights”, “and that, my grandmother said, her eyes black buttons/in her bright face, was how I knew your grandfather was, the one.”  A teenage spirit of adventure also shines through, as in ‘Grey as the Sligo Sky’ which takes us through Ireland with “Daph and I”. The poem is typical of Broomfield’s work in its concern with the specifics; what the girls pack is “paper knickers, powdered milk, and teabags”.  Of course. And in the wholesome “green and brown” of the landscape, the reader sees how “our black eye-pencil smudged/and blisters blossomed in our/desert boots.”
Naivety, fun and making-do also shine through in ‘Painterly’ where two art students agree to paint their lodgings if the landlord pays. We half see the dénouement as the poem takes us room by room through the “shriek of shades” the young women have chosen. Then the landlord arrives:

     But … I thought you’d use Magnolia
     he gasped, pucely.
     Two art students stared at him wide-eyed,
     Why?

Along with her sharp eye for detail, it is Trisha Broomfield’s economy with words and her well-chosen line breaks that lodge these glimpses into women’s lives in the reader’s mind. A good example here is ‘Safe as a Peanut in a Tree’, where two sisters are allowed to use their father’s airgun to shoot the peanut tin targets he set up for them in the laburnum. It showed me not only an unusual relationship between a father and his daughters, but through the poems’s tersely downbeat humour, gave me a taste of how the family interacted. Clutching the airgun “like Kojak”, another well-placed temporal landmark, the sisters appear, crouched by the dustbin:

    letting the peanut tins have
     both barrels
     even though the gun
     only had one
     and the peanut tins
     were safe as houses.

If these are poems that tell it like it is, the women we meet are knowing, resilient and, from the tone of this writing, funny.
Jenny Hockey
First published in February 2018 by Write Out Loud .net
HUSBANDS FOR BREAKFAST by Trisha Broomfield
is available here
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THIS CLOSE by Linda Rose Parkes reviewed by Mandy Pannett in SENTINEL Spring 2019

16/2/2019

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There are so many striking aspects about this close it’s hard to know where to begin. One strong feature is the detail and clarity. A hush in my step is a good example – the way the narrator’s boots ‘squeak among quiet things’ such as ‘skylarks, lizards, mice sleeping in fields’. Likewise, in A glass of water, we are given a scene where ‘Bats are flying among the roses,/a snail pops its head out of its spiral-shell/and the trees are wind-rush notes of water’. Linda Rose Parkes’ use of language, as befits an artist, is rich in sensory details; the reader can both see and hear the tide ‘dark/and close, its deep mouth sucking the harbour steps’ (Going like the clappers). One of the most moving and unusual poems is Cow at duskwhere the mooing of cattle is not only sound but also shadow and a ‘fretting for light when light is missing.’
An intriguing, recurrent image in this collection is that of the door. It is the title of the very first poem The door sings its welcome. Here it is the kind of door ‘that trickles honey/in the light/and says come in/twice at least’. The door next to it may be grey and cracked but this one is ‘a honeycomb/a promise’. Symbolic then, a ‘portal’ (Wriggling, crouching), although the way through is hard and the door tight ‘on its hinges’.
Colour and light are significant motifs in this close, representing beauty but also the downside of life when those who set out with some hope end by ‘fleeing to nowhere in a mess of blue’ while others who had ‘the light before them’ end as nothing but ghosts ‘swimming for their lives’. (A clotted blue of good intention).
As previously said, there is much to enjoy in this collection. An aspect that most appeals to me is the way Linda Rose Parkes mixes myth, fairy tale, song, rhyme and narrative. Sometimes the allusions are subtle. In A little crime that lives we are told of a mysterious ‘she’ who is ‘small-boned as Goldilocks’ and the ‘crime’ is the theft of her ‘good girl crown’ which adorned ‘her lovely tresses’. A lost shoe takes the image of ill-fitting footwear and extends it into a metaphor for spirituality, a soul that is forced to ‘limp/towards the hope of a better/when one foot is shorn/of a glass slipper.’ All dressed up in her sea-green bow is delightful to read, musical and enchanting with echoes of Elizabethan songs and The Owl and the Pussy Cat and, one of my favourites in this selection, Exuberances: an assay, is witty and innovative in its associations, rhymes, musicality and form.
Darker moods and attitudes feature in this close and there is negativity, secrecy, absence and death. The figure who runs in her nightdress through the dark is ‘thin as air’ and ‘the cold blows through’, the narrator who drifts towards her has not come to light her way home with a lamp nor strew ‘luminous petals’ on the path. Late night music overheard from a neighbouring house is the moment ‘the dead slip in’ – the same dead who yearn for the comfort of everyday things but who end with empty hands reaching out for ‘a cup of tarnished sunlight.’ (A glass of water).
This is a beautiful collection and one I’d strongly recommend. What I am left with, most of all, is an impression of salvation, a feeling of hope, a great deal of love. If you only have chance to read a few poems in this close then immerse yourself in the final half a dozen, the poignancy of them, their tenderness. SLQ

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"How the Light Gets In" - Review in HQ Magazine no 50

6/2/2019

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'Patrick B. Osada lives in Berkshire – and I was born and bred in Berkshire...and as many poems in his new collection How The Light Gets In (Dempsey & Windle, £9) have their roots in Berkshire, this book comes into my hands already drenched in reviewer bias. The Royal County is rightly symbolized by the Oak and Hart, and these poems are equally dignified and animate, full of the tension between stillness and movement.
These lines from Warfield Visitor hint at what I mean; describing a Red Kite…
“Till, with a flick of his forked tail / he caught the breeze to head north-west. / Like nylon kites above Larks Hill, / this bird is tethered to its home: / a pull, Like Ariadne’s thread, / will draw him back to Beacon Hill / and Cowleaze Wood in distant Bucks.”

​I like the “distant Bucks” - a good handful of miles across the Thames beyond the Alfredian Burghs where the damned Mercians live...as any true Berkshire-Wessex folk will tell you. And that’s the thing, this is that rarity these days – a book of poems that, in the main, concentrate on a locality; not just its flora and fauna but also change. Here is the conclusion of Making Hay, about the 65 acre solar farm at Pingewood, Berks;
They promise they will seed a meadow here
where sheep can safely graze for thirty years,
now acres of dark windows face the sky
and on each frame a glassy panel’s ‘live’.

​So, new breed farming clearly has begun
to turn a profit harvesting the sun.

This is poetry in the tradition of John Clare, responding not just to the natural environment, but also to how it is changing. Sadly, it may have a greater impact on future readers, who may reflect upon this poetry as representing a requiem for rural England. I hope that I’m wrong. It is a good read – a refreshing landscape in a gallery full of portraits…
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