Literary reviews by Tim Love.
Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.

Wednesday, 24 March 2004

"The Ghostwriter" by Mairi MacInnes (Bloodaxe, 1999)

Some sonnets and couplets, but the rhyme was so loose in places ("else"/"unfinished"; "mine"/"wrong") that I couldn't always work out the rhyme scheme. I also had trouble wondering why in some poems alternate lines were indented - continuation lines? Not much imagery: I like "his intensity,/lit from within like a projector that's jammed/and overheating" and "arguments from the silence/under my hissing tyres/repeated again and again as though/I do not take them in" but "he bursts from the hedge/like a sneeze from the throat" sounds odd.

There's something of moderate interest in most poems. The "Engagement" sequence appealed to me most.

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