Poems from Cardiff Review, Poetry Wales, Alchemy Spoon, The North, and many other places.
The first poem, "Closet", uses apostrophes to denote possession, and hyphens. Other punctuation characters are replaced by spaces. I've seen this done in other books. This book uses the same style throughout. Symbols like ".", ";" and ":" which past writers agonised over are here all conflated into " ". People get used to it, one might point out, and after all, when one listens to a poem we deduce the punctuation easily enough. But when listening to a poem we have the advantage of intonation and body language. Why should the reader have to deduce? Besides, if whatever can't be heard is going to be replaced by spaces, what about the line-breaks? Most of the book's poems use line-breaks so that the stanzas all have the same number of lines. Why?
What I'm most puzzled by in "Closet" is the first stanza - "an average person's skin covers two square/ metres the standard height of a closet". But two square metres isn't the standard height. It's not even a height. And why put the line-break where it is? The next stanza begins with "age six I open Mum's wardrobe door" - so maybe the gaffe is because it's the child's point-of-view. But the subsequent vocabulary shows it's not. And why does "Mum" begin with an upper case letter? The event recounted is commonly dealt with in literature. Though the subject matter may be an apt introduction to the book's topic, the poem doesn't tempt me to read on.
Just occasionally in the book line-breaks bring out double-meaning: "Section Twenty Eight" has "caress your fibre// optic hand" and "grasp our pix//elated flesh". "Self-Harm" has "eighty per cent of wo/ men desire their men to be clean shaven". "Gaysthetics" has "atmos/phere" and "con/versation
"Steam room" offers the insight that strangers in a steam room will chat in ways that they wouldn't in a train. Doubled spaced it fills a page, which only emphasises its unoriginality. "To camp", "How to care for your pansies", "Stinkhorn", "We're animal", "Shaggy" don't work for me - found poems or list poems which sound too much like exercises. "This Gay Club Is My Church" might work as a performance piece.
I like "School mates", "Protect the beautiful landscape", "Queen", "Spill", "Heart Attack", "Tickled Pink" (a long poem that uses "/" like line-breaks or bulletmarks) and some fragments that are often at the end of poems - e.g. "I can't remember/ who first threw shame's stone in the sea of me/ but I remember each ripple" (p.22); "we stroke our slugs/ awake to eels electric blood// squeeze our girth like cucumbers/ buff each other up gold lamps// cocktail shake one another until/ ready to pour" (p.51). "The Weight" ends with "you brand me faggot which// means kindling I learn to burn my body disappears when you say poof"
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