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.

Saturday, 8 June 2019

"Dung beetles navigate by starlight" by Sarah Watkinson (Cinnamon Press, 2017)

Poems from Pennine Platform, Litmus, Rialto, Antiphon, etc, with lots about science. "For Professor Alison Smith" begins with a diagram of an organic molecule.

It's impersonal. I liked the title poem - a sonnet. Some of the poems depend too much on the content - I knew about the parasite effect mentioned in "The Enemy Within" so I got little from the poem. "The First Green Human" looks very like Flash/Micro-fiction to me, and in the company doesn't do enough.

2 poems are shaped. "Getting the Bones Right" atomises the words into syllables (10 per line), each column of syllables centred. Between columns 5 and 6, unbroken and in bold, are the words "one" to "fourteen". Here's a extract

As  a    boy,  on   ly  eleven,   once   I   dis   cov   ered
a  dead  sonn  et 

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