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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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
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)
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
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  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  '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…
Williams’ other strength is his inventive juxtaposing of personal recollections that make the reader think anew about the important themes of life. In ‘Memory is a Train that Only Stops at Certain Stations’, ‘Platforms filled with refracted light’ lead Williams to reflections on ‘The birth of each of your children’. Such intimate experiences are frequently integrated with Williams’ thoughts about wider current affairs. Posing questions about the role of technology in the world, the poem ‘Landings’ warns of the banality of the endless repetition of disturbing images streamed on our digital devices: ‘So it repeats, with a truck in Berlin/Burnt out coaches in Aleppo’.
If Williams sets much of his verse in the city, he also has an almost Romantic yearning for nature. The newest TVs can show us ancient forests and, in the urban environment, there is competition between man-made and natural phenomena because ‘streetlamps glow over moon-kissed cars’. The poem ‘Photo-shopping’ explains that these merged motifs are a result of the subjective preferences of the poet or observer: ‘We crop the world to make it fit/or make it fit the world we wish’. The milieu of most interest to Williams is Portsmouth and its surrounds. Nostalgia of an erudite and eloquent – rather than cheap or sentimental – kind animates ‘Lighting Up the Chiminea’, in which the lost landscapes of his youth, ‘the Hampshire chalk/these rolling fields’, are ‘soft memories of gold’. The reader comes away from this poem feeling that the Hampshire cliffs have as much personal significance to Williams as their famous white Dover counterparts do to the national psyche. There is an ironic component to the beauty conjured in ‘Spice Island Looking Back’ and other poems, as tacky, peeling piers are re-imagined as mournful artefacts of a lost age of pirates and smugglers. Long before Portsmouth’s neon lights and supermarket signs – ‘a wasteland of superstores’ – there were ‘Viking raids’ and ‘a trail of footprints/in tidal sand’. In Williams’ psychogeography, though, these modern features are as real and as valid as the ones now long gone. Williams is at his best when he combines the old and the new, the sublime and the ridiculous, the epic and the everyday, the internal and the external, as in this description of the atmosphere when Portsmouth FC are winning a match: ‘Fratton Park rising up over a lowering crowd/football floodlight masts a four rigged man-o-war’. In Landings, Williams has created a new poetic map of Portsmouth based on a fascinating inner life lived in a city by the sea. |
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