"This is how I fight" by Rosie Garland (Nine arches press, 2025)

Poems from "Finished Creatures", "Ink, Sweat and Tears", "The North", "Tears in the Fence", some Flash magazines, etc.

Here are some typical poems -

• "Guardian" - from birth, a guardian looks over her. When she becomes a woman she makes it go away - "I burn the bows and arrows,/ the books" but "With no one to teach,/ I stop learning" so "I let loose/ an arrow of desire into the darkness,/ an apology and a begging letter to an old friend"
• "Portrait of a child as a black hole" - "She grows into a nothing,// ravenous and lonely ... Filling her void with everything/ she aches for.// Light and love vanish over her event horizon ... She knows she's dangerous ... Alone because of her need/ to be the opposite". I think by now poets should do more with the black hole idea - after all, it's over 50 years since Bekenstein-Hawking entropy was worked out - the surface area (not, as one might think, the volume), grows in proportion to the information absorbed, etc.
• "Ten things I've been", a list, ends with "Space left blank for your own message"
• "The logic of the situation" - "girls with shields up and huddling out of sensor range ... girls on stun" see Spock and become "girls discovering a being who shares their struggles, who understands the vigilance needed to conceal a core of magma ... who realise, for all his difference, he is not lonely"
• I like "You can knit this lovely garment". I'd call it Flash and maybe the author does too. The garment could be "self". Her mother knits; patterns/codes must be followed. The persona realises that "The back of a purl looks like a knit stitch. The back of a knit looks like a purl stitch. They are the same stitch, seen from the other side". She promises to knit at college. She sends her mother a photo of a jumper she's borrowed. She buys one in a charity shop and unravels it. She buys a second-hand guitar.
• In "The flight patterns of red kites" "I think of Yeats' gyres and the phone number I can't delete yet ... Up she rises. With each loop she's smaller from my earth-locked position, though she's the same size to herself, however far she goes ... My centre is unholding."
• The last poem, "Downhill from here" sounds a little like a credo, ending with "Hug the mountainside,/ swig scalding tea. No milk, last/ scrap of sugar. Drink in/ that bloody/ view"

Some pieces, while continuing the mood of alienation and re-integration, of accepting responsibility for self, do little more than that -

• "The unwilding" concerns a wild child who rejoins society after years.
• In "You are rescued from the alien hive" the persona misses the feeling of being in communion, of blurring selves.
• In "Poem inspired by an imaginary painting by Leonora Carrington" the persona admires a woman "wholly at ease with her wildness", who's survived by having a tough core.
• In "If the human body is 60% water, it is also 40% dirt" the persona should "try harder to belong ... be like everyone else ... not [] go [] drowning in what I'm told I ought to be, rather than what I am"
• In "This could be a poem about panthers" the persona is nagged by a panther to get up and get on with her life. After about 40 lines, "Panther wheezes, I cannot go on feeding you". The panther shows her its festering wound in its side and abandons her in the city. Its last words are "You have to be the panther now". Compare and contrast "Guardian"

"Memento Vita" and "A dinner date with Fear" seem like companion pieces.

She takes inspiration from mythical females and female saints -

• From "Cassiopeia" she learns "Perfect girl or wicked woman, it's lose-lose ... fear never kept you safe".
• In "When the Virgin Mary steps out of her frame", Mary is studied by professors - "What sort of mother abandons her own child? ... Her frame beckons, golden and safe" but at the end "She hitches her skirts, takes a step into the unruly world."
• In "The Oracle of Delphi" the Oracle asks a huge amount for the book of the persona's life. "While I'm still reeling, she marches me to the cash point and empties my account" (pun on "reeling"? pun on "account"?)

p.15 and p.23 didn't seem very good. I didn't see what p.44, p.46, p.48, p.53, p.65 were trying to do, beyond the obvious - maybe they were beyond me. I think I understood p.64 but why the last 5 lines? p.66 is a diluted, stretched version of what it should be. I'm puzzled by the layout on p.63.

"I do not understand quantum physics until I see you dancing" is tricky - does the author know the saying "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics"? The poem has sub-headings such as "Decoherence", "Entanglement", "Superposition" and I can see how they might relate to the content, but they sound more like name-dropping, and "Uncertainty principle" seems misapplied.

The endnotes are excellent - short and useful. I prefer them to footnotes.

Other reviews

• Emma Lee (Garland knows that sometimes you need to blow your own trumpet to be seen, but that trumpet should be in tune, polished and that understanding its place in the orchestra doesn’t undermine the trumpet’s role.)