"The kids" by Hannah Lowe (Bloodaxe, 2021)

Poems from The Dark Horse, Magma, The North, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Rialto, etc.

Nearly all are sonnets of sorts - some short-lined and rhymeless. They have the padding of dutiful sonnets, and the book is padded out with poems like "Try, Try, Try, Again". Here's the last half of "Technology" -

or a map - one that showed the 'heyday' of the British Empire, the pale blue sea around the places half the kids had sort of come from once, shaded rich and bloody red.

Surely the red empire map is cliché by now, especially in this multicultural context, and the quotemarks around heyday make me wonder who the poem is written for - maybe for the same people who might think that "The Only English Kid" or "Love" is better as a poem than in prose. It looks to me like poetry for people who say they don't usually like poetry.

• "The words/ just slithered from my lips like a half-sucked sweet/ while my classmates sniggered and I heard/ that laughter squeeze around me like a trap net// or a draw-string sack" ("Mr Presley") - the imagery isn't striking, but the voice is of a schoolgirl, so that's ok for a while.
• I saw/ the other girls were scattered on the grass/ and the nearest girl, I knew without seeing,/ was surrounded by a school of boys/ as if she were a dying jellyfish/ in the wash of the morning tide. And the smallest boy/ with a stick or something like it, prodding, prodding. ("The Pitch") - an uncomfortable mix of poet-voice and girl-voice. Did the girl really think it was a stick?
• My daughter is quiet, so quiet I sometimes wonder/ if she's there at all ("Daughter") - relaxed language, space-filling
• My parents taught me smoking. The midnight nip/ to the Esso garage for twenty Players,/ the kitchen-table vigil, lighting one tip/ from another, then another ... Though still some lonely nights I spark one up/ and that red light in the darkness leads me back/ to where they're waiting, holding out the pack ("Players") - neat
• The sky is snowing, Rory, and overnight/ the earth's been eiderdowned in feather-white ("The Sky is snowing") - I've used the phrase in the title so it must be cliché, and if the redundancy of "eiderdowned in feather-white" is for emphasis it doesn't work for me.
• the virus still flew/ on the air like lethal amoeba ("Zoom") - needs fixing.

I'm unsure about the technical virtuosity too. A tell-tale feature is that when the message of a poem arrives, the rhyme, line-length, etc is looser. The lines of "The Size of Him" are so long that in order for it to be only 14 lines the poem's in landscape. There's no rhyme/syllable pattern I can discern so why stick to 14 lines? Why is the mundane "The Unretained" in a zigzag shape? I can't see what the lines that are equally indented have in common.

The content's not strong enough to compensate. Teachers seen as individuals beyond their role - from the teacher's PoV then later from the pupils. Pupils knowing teachers' first names. "Don't stand so close to me" poems. Parents' death. Single mother. A mother likes it when a youth stares at her in the street. She wants to feel wanted. Then he introduces himself as an ex-pupil. I've seen it before. I like the plot of "All Over it", and several of the anecdotes, but I don't see how the packaging and padding help. I'd concentrate it into prose. I suppose the idea is that these anecdotes and insights eventually create a whole that's greater than the sum of the parts. I'm still waiting.

Other reviews

• Tanvi Roberts (These closing lines strike at the heart of what this collection can afford us: a view of the teacher not as all-knowing, invulnerable educational authority, but as perpetual student and something altogether more human. After reading the formally skilled, humorous and compassionate poems of this collection, we would have good reason to doubt Lowe’s own assessment of her poetic mastery.)
• Alan Buckley (despite the gravity of its themes, The Kids is far from being a heavy read. ... She has an easy, conversational take on the iambic pentameter line, and is skilled at finding both full and slant rhymes that don’t come across as forced. This results in poems that feel contemporary, yet still have a sense of the language being heightened into song ... A recurring theme in The Kids is how hard it can be to connect with another, however much we might want to)
• Carla Scarano (The poems in the collection develop in intensity and expertise, and include appealing imageries and skilfully crafted lines. The traditional eight-plus-six line sonnet form is the anchor throughout, but Lowe is willing to go beyond some readers’ expectations about tone, voice and content.)