A pamphlet of poems from Dreamcatcher, Interpreter's House, Poetry Nottingham, The Rialto, Seam, Smiths Knoll and Staple. I've been in all those magazines. Many of them have long gone.
I like some of the lines - e.g. "You're a crowd of strangers at the crem" (p.23)
I like some of the poems - e.g. "The Long Loss" and "Driving home". "The house without memory" is an interesting experiment, based on "This is the house that Jack build". It uses rhyme.
There's a typo on p.9 - "An obedient hounds sleeps at our feet".
Other reviews
- Kirsten Irving (Barlow is concerned with the significance of intimate moments and quiet observations, from the blister on a palm left by a wedding ring to a phone call to a dented charm. This works well in the unspoken frustration of ‘A First Anniversary’ ... I don’t feel the observational style comes off quite as well in ‘The House Without Memory’.)
- D A Prince (It provides more nourishing reading than many full-length collections.)
- Tony Williams (the methods Barlow uses to explore this material are quiet, elliptical: he generally uses a slightly prosaic free verse, which needs the strong images he puts in to quicken things ... When things go wrong, when the sense of intimacy isn’t sufficiently realised, the poems can look slight (I didn’t like ‘Cauliflower Cheese’, for example); and sometimes (‘Shift’) I was left wondering whether a poem was slight or, rather, delicate ... My favourites here are the ones where Barlow allows more leeway to the strangeness of his imagination—‘Twins’, for example)
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