"Cyclone" by Robert Peake (Nine Arches Press, 2018)

Poems from "Under the Radar", "The North", "Poetry Salzburg Review", etc. There are long poems with several sections. There's a scattered sequence of 6 poems with titles beginning "The man with the kindest face". There are forms - "IV Mesocyclone" and "II Fulcrum" are palindromes (first line equals last, etc); "Selfie Smile" is in terza rima; and there are several sonnets. Some pieces are quite tight and crisp - see for example 'Letter to the Last Megafauna' and 'Village Panto', 'Technological advances' and 'Free will' online. "Insults for trees" (a list, with rhyme) and "Reading Dostoevsky in the John Lewis Café Welwyn Garden City" are one-offs that add variety. The register of the longer pieces is often like the following, from "Nomansland Common"

A voice cries out in a language you recognise, and the cloud - for that is what it is, just a cloud - retreats in spinal curvature over the hill, which is grass, then soil, then stone, a foetus in the centre, its open hand a gesture of greeting, of saying "goodbye"

The continuity is loose; there's atmosphere and mood-music without a narrative drive towards closure. This lends itself to the writing of palindromes, and makes it easier to join poems into sequences. Some sections of poems start rather cryptically. E.g. these, from the same poem

• In the section below, the poet isn't addressing insomnia, he's suffering from it. I don't get "dredge", and "slice" seems extreme.

  Summer insomnia, I dredge the grasping hedgerows, thorned tendrils reaching to snag and slice me (p.29)

• Here I think the poet's walk has taken him from the country into a town. It's beginning to rain, the liver-coloured pavement becoming spotted? The third line seems to allude to Communion Wafers - because of the size and shape of the spots? But what about the other associations?

  The green is going black, a loose rain, the spots on the liver widening, like pavement swallowed holy and whole (p.31)

• Here are more riddles.

  The ground is permeable, as am I - feather-soft in lamplight, packed dust under desert sun, cracks spreading electric, netting pulled tight to the corpulent thigh, mud-filled bladder (p.31)

In the main the layouts are based on regular shaped boxes. "II.Tar Pit" has stanzas of line-length 3/4/3/2/3/4/3/2. The layouts can be wilder - which is best of the two following layout options? "Don't speak to me of the darkness if you have not become the darkness" or

Don't speak to me                         of the darkness if you have not become                                the darkness

? Obviously views will differ, but I think the higgledy-piggledy layout is risky with that type of content. I like "Black Iris" which has the same style of layout. It's the first part of "Mood Diary". Here's the start and end - "How felt-like, this midnight,/ purpled/ to a bruise./ A fly in amber,/ the black eye/ searching/ for escape ...I come to you/ on my knees,/ wilting/ as I have/ always wilted/ in your redolence". Throughout the book there are other quotable phrases - e.g. "How long will we breath, mouth-to-mouth/ into the blue lips of our forefathers" ("Homesickness")

Other reviews

• Rachel Carney (Many of the poems in this collection seem almost out of reach, dealing internally with metaphors of grief ... As the collection progresses, each poem appears to become more out of control, more surreal, more hyperbolic ... Towards the end of the book, many of the poems turn their focus to the outside world, tackling philosophical questions about life and death, with an overriding sense of unease. Peake’s style is varied, but all his work is playful and considered, full of irony and interwoven with imagery that reflects the turbulence and chaos of the natural world. )
• Adele Ward (Cyclone has all the technical skill and emotional strength of a book written by a poet at the height of his abilities)
• Michael Dennis