"Fingerprint" by Fiona Sampson (Genome Research, 2012)

These poems were commissioned by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. The main theme is supposed to be personal genomics. However, the theme isn't well followed, and I'm far from convinced by the poetry.

The project was eye-opening for some of the scientists she discussed ideas with - "instead of seeing the candlestick I suddenly saw the two faces looking at each other" wrote Dr Jeffrey Barrett in the introduction. In her preface she points out that "the nature-nurture debate long predates genetic research ... the question of how much we can change the kind of person we are ... is a question about free will", which is fair enough.

I like "When we met, myself and I,/ each cast the other into a kind/ of shining shadow -// my younger self ascending through me/ like a shiver, as I turned/ toward the house below." (p.15). I'm less happy about "A curtain brims -/ its white lip appears -/ dashing and slovenly/ like the girl on the Tube/ with her bedroom hair" (p.22), or "Sometimes what's opening/ is really closing, don't you see? Like a square,/ arcaded, cobbled,/ in Poznan, for example,/ where they speak German to tourists/ because of what happened /               in the squeezebox of history" (p.27)

"First flight" by Dickon Abbott (Northern Lights, 2001)

Several of the poems are rhymed - p.7 is abcc, p.9 is abcba, p.10 is in rhyming couplets, p.15 is abab, etc. I wasn't keen on the initial poems. I like the following from "Lifeline", about swimming - "hands cupped like moles' paws/ digging liquid. Time is different here/ - fluid, constant, free of the rhythmic tread/ of tired soles. As I count each length, I swim/ a year of my life". I like "Veteran" too, the final part of "Three Bridges", "Embarkation, 2am", and some of the title poem.

Overall however, the poems aren't interesting enough, either in their content or the way the express the content. Pregnancy ultrasound poems for example, need to be spectacular if they're to avoid cliché.

"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 

Other reviews

• Rebecca Gethin

"Giant in the doorway" by Marion Tracy (Happenstance, 2012)

Poems from Obsessed with Pipework and some Australian publications.

There's much about light, kitchens and doors. The first section is a sequence about a family trip, the persona a young girl, the mother having a bit of a breakdown. Except for apostrophes it's punctuation-free. Most of the poems have 3-lined stanzas , lines all about the same length. Here's an extract -

there's a lamp a table a bookcase with glass sliding doors and an album of pressed flowers she's upstairs putting lennie into pyjamas

The disruptions are minor. I soon settled into reading it as if it were "just prose" - indeed some of the pages could be prose (Flash sequences are all the rage nowadays). Madness is a tricky topic in that a straight depiction can sound poetic. So all in all, I had trouble reading this section neutrally, the easily poetic layouts not allaying my suspicions about the naturally poetic content.

I much preferred the 2nd part (individual poems) - "ECT" and "Constriction" are my favourites.

Other reviews

• Noel Williams
• Christie Williamson, Charlotte Gann and Michelle Smith

"The Secret Ministry" by Tim Dooley (Smith/Doorstop, 2001)

A winner in the 2000 Poetry Business competition. I feel I wasn't on the right wavelength for these poems - they don't feel slight, and have a variety of stances towards realism and narrative, so I expected to like them more than I did. "Détente" begins with "A fingertip at play/ inside you and my head/ cushioned on your breast, listening like a safebreaker/ for some loosening/ of the latch" which deserves a better ending than it gets.

"Honeycomb" by M.R. Peacocke (Happenstance, 2018)

I've been hoping to stumble upon a book of hers because people have recommended her.

In "On the way down" a couple save an old ewe. Maybe she now has another year of lambing. All the couple can do is continue "making old bones". I liked "Honeycomb" - more about bones. "Skin narratives" starts with "Body transcribes itself monkishly/ over seven years, each edition/ less well bound, the scribal errors/ grosser" which is neatly expressed, though greater accuracy (replacement speeds vary according to the cell type - neurons and stem cells add variety) might have made for a more interesting poem. I liked "Put", "These hands" and "Late" too, but not "Allotment".

Other reviews

• Charlotte Gann, Ceres Poets, Enid Lee

"Bookmarks" by D.A. Prince (Happenstance, 2018)

Poems from Fenland Reed, North, Stand, etc.

The first poem sets the scene with "You will return, they say,/ to our sticking place,/ here, where time stepped in/ between two pages breaking the spell ... Trust us to wait, despite your squandered time/ and all the promises you never kept". The bookmarks have their say, and come in various guises, tickets in particular - "They want to carry on, still be of use;/ they know their time's not up" (p.7). There's a ticket to Besançon's Museum of Time, train tickets, receipts, shopping lists, postcards - some hard to decipher, some contrasting hugely with the book they're in, some denoting when reading was abandoned. "Half a raffle ticket" is my favourite piece - "It's luck,/ no more, so much of us survives. That,/ and the constant need to mark a page".

"Note" (about advances in technology. Also love) starts with the finding of a note -

Back by 8. Don't wait. I've got the milk. Love.

It ends with

Why not a text? asks the child, all thumbs, not looking up from his screen. There is so much to explain.

Here's a note for "Hand-made" - in Cyprus, dolmuş are minibus taxis for sharing.

Other reviews

• Charlotte Gann, Mat Riches
• Emma Lee

"Faber New Poets 13" by Elaine Beckett (Faber and Faber, 2016)

I liked the first poem "Melting" more on a second reading - how various water-related details sketched the beginning of a friendship. I wasn't impressed by "Norfolk Winter '72", "The Woman Who Cries", "Dreaming of the Professor Who Gave Me the Sack" or "How on Earth Would We Have Managed" (about ghosts?). I liked "Killer Whale", perhaps because I read it as Flash. I can't see that "Hollywood Hotel" is worth writing. Even if it is, why all the line-breaks? So I think I'm missing something.

Other reviews

• Sean O'Brien (laconic, undeceived ... She works in a vein that many readers will recognise, at times recalling Hugo Williams in her patient orchestration of apparently “ordinary” language which she makes memorable by sentence construction and a good ear. ... Not all the poems here are so successful. “Dreaming of the Professor Who Gave Me the Sack” is almost there, but ends with a repetition that should have been ironed out. Yet Beckett’s unselfconscious alertness is appealing.)
• uncomfortable contemporary truths are again skilfully rendered in ‘How on Earth Would We Have Managed’, which has the quality of a found piece that utilises the authenticating elements of its voices to evoke the chilling thisness of the refugee crisis. It doesn’t always land on the spot, however: the latter poem doesn’t need its second half and the near industry standard dislocation that ends ‘Killer Whale’ feels a trifle clunky - Martin Malone (Interpreter's House)

"Faber New Poets 15" by Sam Buchan-Watts (Faber and Faber, 2016)

Poems from Poetry London, Ambit, etc. At least 4 are laid out as prose. Here's an extract from one of them - "I regret the many potholes in the road, each with a downwards view of the water, and how I freewheeled on through an air moody with bugs, assuming always that you'd be there to meet me on the other side, a point at which we can take in both views" (p.3). I don't get it. "Moon" is ok, though wordy. Here are few more quotes and comments

• "A hall lamp mistakenly read as a home life/ from the end of the drive by someone else's dad,/ returning the boy home from a birthday party" (p.6) - here as elsewhere a good phrase is wasted by the poem it's in.
• "[The Plastic Sacks] rest without tension, raised a smidgen/ like the gossamer fur of soya beans,/ a sleep shirt slipping from a girl's chest;/ ominous as B-movie graveyard mist" (p.8). I don't know what this is about other than being a list of distinctly sub-Martian comparisons.
• "it's not until we quiet again that we clock the car we're in is not in fact the thing we thought was moving" - this sounds inelegant, especially given that it's an ending. Perhaps its supposed to be, coming from a poem called "Car Game Logic"
• "There is a choice photo stashed in my wallet,/ its creased folds powdery with friction; his profile/ is divine against a backdrop of swirling marble blue". This comes from The Dogs, a Guardian poem of the week. Unsurprisingly, Carol Rumens can see more in it that I can. She writes that "his sometimes teasing diction and detailed imagery suggest he has taken lessons in technique from senior virtuosi like John Ashbery." He's a "sceptical, serious, versatile writer, alert to the uses of ellipticism ... an accomplished phrase-maker."

Rumens' mention of Ashbery and ellipticism are a perhaps clue to why I struggle with many of these pieces. I feel I could put together some good poems by scavenging from this pamphlet.

Other reviews

• Sean O'Brien (a poet of wit, deploying it in a war of attrition against apathy ... The challenge Buchan-Watts offers himself is to ensure that his sense of watchful disconnection doesn’t solidify into an attitude. )
• he has a knack for the poem as prose-vignette – a dangerous task, since it risks collapsing into a case of the young poet looking at stuff. Yet here are several successful pieces in the tradition of Woolf’s shorts or Stein’s early prose poetry, particularly his ‘study of two lamps and a painting’. ‘The Days go Just Like that’ and the following poem (the same title, held within quotation marks) are the best achieved in this collection, (Laura McCormick Kilbride, Cambridge Quarterly)
• something of a bravura display of style, control and range … ‘Car Game Logic’ is hugely impressive and ‘The Plastic Sacks’ artfully communicates its vague sense of threat hidden in the open view of daily ephemera and fuelled by society’s neurotic over-sensitivity to its own dirt and self-generated waste. … Only rarely does the verse over-balance. ‘Cowcium’, for example, veers a bit too close to the emptier end of the Me-Thinking-Cleverly school for my taste Martin Malone (Interpreter's House)

"Empire of dirt" by Thomas Stewart (Red Squirrel Press, 2018)

	petal	tree	mother	flower	garden	house
Miscarriages	✓		✓		✓	✓
Botanophobia	✓	✓			✓
Conkers			✓	✓		✓
Empire of dirt	✓	✓		✓

The poems (from "And other poems" etc.) share a pool of imagery as can be seen from the sample in this table. There are symbols of nature (flowers, moon, petals, trees, sky), and symbols of self (house, heart, blood). There's cultivated nature (gardens) and relatives close to the self (mothers, fathers). Added to that list are the transcendent lyricism of "moon" and "song". It's a group of symbols not so different to what Helen Ivory used in "The Breakfast Machine" (window, mirror, house, wall, room, sky, night, moon, mice, bird). Each poem helps elucidate some symbols, so readers can build up a symbol dictionary as they read this collection - the poems help each other.

Mediating between nature and self are doors (being knocked) and windows (there's lots of looking). There's a split between inner and outer ("I don't want to see outside") mediated by birds, moths, and bees. Integration and transformation is rare - foxes on heads don't work, nor do bees in beards, though in "real boy" a Pinocchio character begins to change (regress?) into a tree.

At times, integration with nature is a symbol for social integration - other boys in changing rooms or toilets. In "And Then The Flowers Came" when the narrator has cut him/herself off from the rest of the world, the last thing to get through are flowers - perhaps they represent beauty.

The title's in the lyrics of "Hurt", a bleak "Nine inch nails" piece that Johnny Cash famously covered. It's a low-tech world (Grindr's mentioned, satisfying an instinct). It's a tough world - people/things are red, dead, cracked or broken. Are there seeds of hope? No. If you eat them they might grow inside you - mummy said so. And in "Sunflowers" the seeds fare little better.

The style is such that the symbols can carry the argument at the expense of some realism - the symbols aren't always embedded. E.g. in "Miscarriages" "I killed a bird once. ... I took it out into the garden and buried it, ... I went back into the house to find red petals in the flour. ... The doctors said I could have had a sister, that’s why mum threw up every morning. The doctors said, we need to call your father, son, I said, go for it, he’s probably out back with the bird". Why red petals in the flour? Is the pun on "flower" accidental? Is the father buried in the garden? Has the memory of the father been buried by the son?

On occasion I found myself trying to break the code rather than appreciate the poem. In "the moon created a blurry light enough to see the men who wore foxes on their heads destroy my mother’s garden" I wondered whether the men were sly or red-headed. I wondered what the (old fashioned?) moon equated to. Why mother's garden? In the western tradition gardens are nature subordinated by humans. In the middle east, gardens are more likely heaven. So?

The commonest narrative pattern is to break/ignore something then try to connect with (or look at, or use) it hoping to learn.

• I dug my hands inside the animal, pulled out things it wouldn’t need. I scattered them around it, ornaments to demonstrate how it came to be. When I was done, I looked into its eyes and reflecting back at me were only my own.
• I look in the mirror and see a stranger looking back,

Another pattern is to write oneself onto the world -

• when you’re lost in the woods, with blood on your hands, paint poems in the bark of trees and sing to the ravens
• send me to the forest to a dark wood, to a land of fallen leaves, to a cold cave where I can scrawl my dreams in blood and the sap of a tree,

Or to ask the world for help -

• I always wanted you to tell me a truth (moths)
• it wanted to tell me sweet nothings and important truths (rain)

I don't feel I understand all the poems (e.g. "Skull"). Elsewhere I'm unsure about parts of poems. For instance, in "Conkers", the narrator recalls 3 suicides. Before that it begins with "When I smashed the conkers and laid them out, when I felt their broken pieces and gathered them up, when I smelt the vinegar of their cracked shells" - touch and smell. At the end "I could smell the conkers in the feathers of the pillow, I could hear their song in my dreams, I could feel them broken yet protruding through the springs of the mattress.". This ending has smell, hearing and touch. I can't help feeling that there's a conscious design here that I'm missing. Also towards the end of "real boy" (my favourite poem) there's "displaying my chest, made of wood, my bushy hair and eyebrows falling falling past my chipped teeth" - which uncharacteristically has wordplay - several puns alluding to wood - "chest", "bushy", "chipped", preparation for the ending where he grows leaves - turning into a tree like Daphne? Here, as elsewhere ("wooden bricks", "wooden bed", etc) there's a significance attached to "wood" (the substance) that escapes me.

I suspect the pamphlet will divide readers. Some won't like the resistance to closure (should they reread the poem if they don't "get it"?). Some will find the elemental symbols intrinsically poetic. Others might think think them evasive rather than illuminating. As I discuss on Reality and Symbols I rather old-fashionedly like situations where (say) a symbolic apple doubles as a real apple. I think common symbols like flowers and windows have to work harder than original ones. That said, the restricted palette of symbols is put to several uses here, and their effects accumulate. There are no easy rides. And it's refreshing to read a book that doesn't have uniformly rectangular stanzas!

Other reviews

• Emma Lee

"In the glasshouse" by Helen Tookey (Happenstance, 2016)

Poems from The Compass, PN Review, Shearsman, etc.

A restless intelligence is at work here. Even when I felt I didn't understand a poem I often liked it. Those that didn't appeal to me still interested me - they seem carefully constructed even if their purpose remains a mystery. I can imagine other people liking them.

Symbols

Water appears in nearly every poem ("Like the Sorrows" has tears and a boat, "Mow Cop" has a watermelon - only the final "Sudley Field (Dusk)" is completely dry). There are specific links between poems (e.g. "Heptonstall" begins with "They are always speaking of beauty in this valley". The next 2 poems are entitled "beautiful error" and "Rheidol Valley"). Most striking however is the pervasive dream/Jungian imagery. I imagine the most common images could be classified as follows -

• paths connecting places
• boundaries between something and something else. These can be crossed - e.g. beaches
• boundaries between something and nothing. These can't be crossed - e.g. cliffs
• places to be - gardens
• places of transformation - ponds

"sea" and "wood" are the wilder, more infinite analogues of "pond" and "garden". "Jitties" are more confusing paths. In "Celandine" there's a path around a wood. Between the path and wood is an impenetrable hedge. Ah, there's a stile to the wood. In the wood is a clearing where there's a pool. In the dark water a naked man keeps swimming down. He's nameless. There are little flowers by the path and round the pool. The ending is "Only the small yellow flowers are named. The flowers are celandine". The impenetrable border and the border of no return around the pool are indicated by nameable beauty in contrast to the nameless body disappearing into the depths. The flowers are all we can know. Celandine is referenced in several pieces of literature, according to Wikipedia.

"Family Affair" also brings together some earlier themes - "This is the garden on the cliff, and this is the path". Later, "In the garden, the ponds are scummed with algae, the glasshouse doors hang askew".

"Speke Hall" is packed with the same family of images - path, woodland, pond - this time being described to accompany the walk of a couple trying to make it up.

Flesh sometimes merges into these symbols from nature - into water or soil ("if you put out your hand and the earth were to take it" (p.17) "Press fingers to dry earth" (p.28)).

I can't draw any conclusions from all this, except perhaps that there's an interest in the moment of transformation when there's no turning back and as yet no consequences; and an interest in the visible entrance to places of invisible change - event horizons.

Fragmentation

In an interview she says "I really enjoy using found text as a source for poems. For me, it’s a way of getting hold of types of language that I wouldn’t be able to generate for myself ... Sometimes I collage things together from different sources ... but probably more often I use some sort of fragmentation ... It’s partly about trying to bypass your own censoring, to allow a certain amount of chance and free association; but of course there’s always a process of selection and arrangement at work as well."

Repetition, fragmentation and discontinuities all help disrupt linear narrative, tempting readers to see through the cracks and connect at a more symbolic level - as it says in "Speke Hall", "none of these things mean much in itself    only that we are seeing them together"

• Repetition - examples include "Like the Sorrows" (33 lines each starting with "Like"), "beautiful error" and "Rheidol Valley" (where the last 2 lines are very nearly repetitions of the first 2), and "At the Ponds" (which begins with "She takes you to the ponds", then we're told about bodies underwater. The final section begins with "Well? she says, and you remember, back, at the castle, over the wooden castle" then repeats much of the earlier material using the same phrases).
• Fragmentation - "Rain Script" is a scattering of words. "Like the Sorrows" would be too, were "Like" removed.
• Discontinuity - "Prairie" flicks between 2 viewpoints. "Speke Hall" flicks between found text and narrative. "Jitties", by lacking punctuation and line-breaks, makes readers repeatedly back-track and re-parse.

Individual poems

I liked the first poem, Glasshouse. It begins/ends with "in the glasshouse we are all listeners/ we all make confessions/ the air alive as rain whispers tell us ... and the glass will hang always in its perfect instant/ complete still but fractured utterly". She wrote elsewhere that "fundamentally it’s about that tension between wanting or needing to change things about yourself or your life, but also the dangers and difficulties associated with that". I liked the second poem "Prairie" too, and "Speke Hall". Not so "Jitties" (no punctuation or line-breaks) or "Happy Valley, Cromer" (don't know what it's meant to do), or "Rain script" (too fragmented for me), or "Poem for Carola" (too plain, too many dreams). "Celandine" is attractive. "Family Affair" is wordy - deliberately, no doubt, though "We feel always the presence of their recent departure - an abdication we cannot account for" could have been shorter, and the concept of a departure having presence makes me think too hard.

Other reviews

• Jessica Traynor (Sometimes the spaces between are the site of loss, as well as becoming.)
• Marion Tracy (There’s a repeated theme of unease often expressed with images of water and people underwater ... ‘Celandine’ – my favourite poem of the collection.)

"Broken Cities" by Katy Evans-Bush (Smith Doorstop, 2017)

Poems from Ambit, PN Review, etc.

There's no "Here and Now".

• If it's Here, it's now and then - time stops, or "time has warped" (p.8), or there's a comparison of the present with the past ("Field of Fire, 1555", "Prior Bolton's Oriel Window") often concerning London, nostalgia and decay. In "Snowing" (the day after a cremation?) "What was black and grey the previous day has turned to grey and white. Already Dad's dust must be sinking down".
• If it's Now, it's here and there - abandonment or displacement (parties in ocean depths) though little movement. There's an immobile cat owner in "The Broken City" - "Who are those people? you ask, pointing a finger at the foot of your bed". In "The Great Illness" the character is wheelchair-bound. Train journeys are unpleasant.

"Prior Bolton's Oriel Window" describes an early 16th century scene of a Prior safely watching from on high his monks. He had a house built high in Harrow Hill to avoid dying in floods like the monks, fools and sinners below him. This is compared to us watching our own Prior Boltons on screens, "and they see us, with their data-gathering technology".

"Don't Look Down" is mostly in rhyming couplets with irregular line lengths. There's sing-song rhyme - "Oh, retro moon of London,/ How analogue you are!/ We lost all our signal,/ Down in the cellar bar" (p.21). We're told that

Bing sure could sing: it made him so rich he could afford to spend all his Christmases on isthmuses.

but we can't all be so lucky. Anyway "crooning is a form of nostalgia" and "Tony Soprano/ at the piano/ plays like there's no tomorrow./ There is no tomorrow."

I was distracted in "The Milk God" when the poem left its realist beginnings, wondering who/what the God was (a big plastic bottle? a dead person?) - "Next to the sink sits the granddaddy, the sun,/ of all milk bottles. This mighty being/ stands tall and kind of bearded, his translucent plastic/ body almost mystical. Visible inside him/ where it radiates heat, and the smell that forms their atmosphere,/ is the source of his power: a hardened orb/ of golden orange". I had more trouble with p.18, p.19, p.20-22, p.23 (I think a poem that compares the underworld with the London Underground, and Tube stations with Stations of the cross needs to do more), p.26, p.30, p.31 - perhaps an indication that she's taking more risks while I've become more conservative. Does "Gyb" on p.31 mean "Got Your Back"?

Other reviews

• Pam Thompson
• Angelina D’Roza
• Jennifer Wong

"The Great Vowel Shift" by Robin Houghton (Telltale Press, 2014)

13 poems, none over a page long. The acknowledgements section is as extensive as some books', mentioning The Rialto, The North, Agenda, The Interpreter's House, and wins in 2 competitions.

A glance at the titles ("The Last", "Closure", "Ellipis", "Still here", "Fermata") reveals an interest in time and permanence. Often the more specific subject matter of the poems isn't obvious. I needed help understanding what "The Last" was about (my initial guess was 'fantasy lovers'). I found "River Ouse, Rodmell, 1941" less of a riddle, though unless one realises that it's about [Woolf's] suicide by drowning, one might be puzzled. Its symbolism of pebbles as death-wish grows stronger towards the end - "Pebbles lean into her, take us they say, take us, the floods are coming// but like Noah she must leave some behind, the unbelievers". "Geography Lessons" (about the lesson of maps - edges mattering more than things) ends well too - "Under the droop of nightfall she dreamt of borders/ between lands, some fading like horizons in a storm,/ some slicing through countries like cheesewire/ and guarded with lights, other just wide, wide rivers/ where boys watch from the opposite bank"

"East from Seahouses" proceeds at a prose pace even when using imagery. The persona's on a boat in drizzle to see puffins, etc. "I think of those football matches on TV in the seventies// when each team wore grey, the shirts had no name but we knew/ who was who". "Still here" deals with a topic (London's hidden tributaries of the Thames) that I've seen used before, bringing little that's new.

In "Midnight pickup" at least 2 people are waiting for a bus, which first appears as a distant light amongst stars. The persona wonders when the bus-driver will see them, or if they'll stop at all. I presumed that the title would become a pun, so I guessed that the bus/persona interaction is being compared to a pick-up - "will the swapping of people, backpacks, jokes amount to anything here".

"Closure" includes "last night ... while dialling room service after phoning home" - an affair? Then there's "seeing the white zipper mark from belly to breastbone ... like a line between time-zones ... but a false heart had saved him". Ah - closure of a relationship and of a ribcage. A "false heart" is transplanted but also signifies false emotions.

"Closure" is gappy, gaps (one per line) sometimes replacing commas. "Ellipsis" (which doesn't do much for me) is gappy too. Most of the other poems though tidy on the page with regular stanzas have rather spurious line-breaks. An exception is "Left" which is a sonnet. I had trouble understanding it. The title's another pun - the persona's leaving their accommodation. I'd guess that "the chain held" refers to a buyers' chain. Later, "if I asked with which hand would you hold the roller" picks up a different meaning of the title. After that, there's "changing sides, consider which was best in mirror-image before pronouncing 'left'?", which I don't get.

I'm a bit lost with the title poem too. I can understand that The Great Vowel Shift was a gradual change that led to inconsistencies of spelling, etc (as the Notes explain). I can imagine this been used as a metaphor, but the final line - "Listen, I think you said, and laughed" - made me try to work out what "you" might really have been saying had the vowels been different.

When writing about Time, it's hard not to write about Loss too. In "When my sister is old" the future is more hope than expectation - "I will wait at the door with flowers ... I ... will remind her of twenty years she thought she's never have".

Other reviews

• Josephine Corcoran (‘The Last’ writes what was unwritten every month ... Contained and controlled, with as many lines as there are months of the year, these six couplets of poetry are assembled as neatly as discreet packages hidden in a scented drawer. The placement of the poem at the start of the collection is a declaration that this is as much a beginning as an ending.)
• John Field (In the pamphlet’s thirteen poems, Houghton’s presentation of loss is often contextualized by a wider sweep of history)
• Afric McGlinchey (only one poem didn’t quite work for me, and this was ‘Left’. While the images here are visual and vivid, I felt the reached-for pun was overly laboured. ... Occasional misuse of commas is mildly grating)

"A Present of Quince" by Jennifer Petty McMahon (mudfog, 2015)

Poems from Poetry Review, PN Review, Stand, and BBC Radio 3.

I like the flow of most of the poems - not too smooth or jerky. My favourite is perhaps "1. Waterlily 2. Lullaby 3. Piano Practice". "Deciding to excavate Sutton Hoo, 1938" is based on an interesting moment, and could have been far too direct in its treatment of time. I didn't like "Modernist Verbs" much though.

Some of the imagery is rather mundane - "Black undertow of tide/ rumbled foreboding" ("On the Beach"). "Record and Art" deals with how art records, using imagery which doesn't try quite hard enough - "The fluttering of nature is stilled in the hieroglyph ... While his flocks wandered, we heard the hopping pipe. Now heads are totted and numerals close the stops". Some of the imagery tries too hard. For example, in "The Milk Cart" we sense that the people in the cart feel like royalty, but "spokes rose and sank in homage to our throne" doesn't ring true. "Mustard Gas and Influenza" is a villanelle about a widow. The odd line struggles - "At last his parents low as she must stoop;/ They send his heirloom silver in regret./ The rest was coping when she could not cope".

Amongst the rest there are worthwhile phrases - "Her plump arms scabbed with dough,/ his boots standing empty, askew after a long day" (p.18), "In our turn, come lighter days,/ having mostly griefs to shed,/ we cast cotton garments, and with them/ all our years, a lifetime's dash/ to reach that nakedness/ no painting can redress" (p.31), "Death is extravagant,/ a spending all we know we have and more" (p.20), etc.

"Trouble" by Alison Winch (The Emma Press, 2016)

Poems from Magma, Poetry Wales, etc

When a pamphlet has a 2 page intro, the intro probably matters, especially when it's by Sarah Howe. From it I learn that the poems sometimes contain contrasting viewpoints/emotions, which sounds good, but on the minus side (as far as I'm concerned; I'm not an ideal reader) there are raunchy Middle English-inflected rhythms which isn't pastiche, and some extracts from long poems.

I don't get any of the poems, so I'll supply some extracts

• On this body is a head, I explain, and in this head is a pack of spaniels, a pack so dense they are a mind. And they fawn over men. Men made up of golden light, muddy crystals, kissing cherries (p.1)
• He availed himself of a flagon of pear wine and enlightened me on the characteristics of men, their manners, tastes, opinions. The bell tolled noon. As he stood his pink curved heels gave him a rakish height. I leaned in to taste his painted lips, stained as they were with snuff and pear and tannin. Innocent like a nymph, he murmured, or shepherdess (p.4)
• Dimwits!/ Eue was born of the nobliest// (Adames bon & blod)/ & in a terrestrial paradise - // see her vesselle's soule/ fooles see her soule ... (p.14)
• This is all we have./ Our souls are not birds,// they are sluttishly coupled/ to these bodies, their chins, verucas (p.19)
• this is morning sickness!/ Only oat cakes and ire/ to whip one through to the end of each perverted day (p.21)
• We seek the cool of buses en route to Homerton hospital,/ the seats' pelt is lotus flowers - / I'm a secret eater, I am what I eat, I'm alone like a rhinoceros horn (p.22)
• each time I visit/ you've enlarged your body's parameters into obesity (p.23)

Other reviews

• Jessica Traynor (references are worn lightly, in a witty collection which approaches the title’s theme of ‘trouble’ through a distinctly feminine (and feminist) perspective.)
• David Caddy (There is an overriding sense of female power and voice arising from various states of intimacy, and that chimes in well with other recent works by Dorothy Lehane, Sophie Mayer, and Sarah Howe. I greatly look forward to reading more of Winch’s poetry and warmly recommend this debut collection)
• Katy Evans-Bush (Though Winch’s sense of the movement through time is refreshing, and Alisoun feels convincing, her 18th century is less than convincing, with anachronistically courtly flourishes and wrong-period dishes)

"A different key" by John Mole (New Walk Editions, 2017)

14 pages of poetry, some of it from The Rialto and The Spectator.

"The Rebuke" is in loose couplets -

Which is why now In bereavement's wake, the undertow Of loss, I fear the doldrum drift From one false start to another, to be left Behind by what was once The creative certainty of chance

"A Granddaughter's farewell" is an anecdote - touching, though it doesn't need line breaks. "Piano man" is too light for me -

The audience roars And he rides its applause To the finishing line Then, taking his time, He gets up to bow As he wipes his brow

The final poem's final stanza starts with "But does it help me at all/ to write like this? Probably not/ so to those who have read thus far/ I give you leave to go, as I shall now, about the business/ of getting on with things,/ making the best of what remains"

I don't think I had comprehension problems with these poems. They seemed a bit middling though.

"Keine Angst" by Zayneb Allak (New Walk editions, 2017)

About 20 pages of poems (from The Rialto and New Walk) from a new pamphlet publisher. I'm having trouble with them. Some seem rather inconsequential - "I stumble along the train as it grinds/ across the land. It carries me/ south, towards a sea and sleep. ... Beyond the door is a garden, hosed cool./ I'll borrow its shade and later,// plant an orange tree and watch it grow/ strong enough for me to climb/ into its branches as they sway" (p.16). Some (e.g. "When I was acht jahre alt") are baffling. In general I can't see what they're trying to do. Too sophisticated for me.

"Selfie with Waterlilies" by Paul Stephenson (Paper Swans Press, 2017)

This won the Paper Swans Press Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2017 (not the only pamphlet competition the poet has recently succeeded in!). Many of the individual poems were successful in competitions judged by people as various as Ahren Warner and Clive Wilmer. So if you have any faith in the anonymous, peer-reviewed process (as close to objective assessment in poetry as you're going to get), this is the collection for you. I'll comment on a few of the poems, though the others are well worth reading too.

"Turkish Delight" is a welcoming start, already introducing us to double-edged emotions. The persona, on holiday in Istanbul, seems to get a call that someone is gravely ill, so they book a flight back for later that day, spending their time at the airport buying "Turkish Delight (which is heavy and must be carried)" and promising they'll "return one day to be consumed by the vastness of the Hagia Sophia".

He likes repetition - the next poem "The Rub" (another double-edged title - back-rub but also "ah, there's the rub") has "father" in 20 of its 24 short lines. "Balzac" uses end-rhyme, nearly half of its lines ending with a "sk" sound, the only disruption of the pattern being the final line - "in a Paris mosque, behind plexiglass" - which teasingly could have been regularised, like the decoration in a mosque.

"Baltic Women" sustains an extended metaphor - "Each time I look she's just as slender, the neck long, head in profile facing eastwards ... I like to admire her discrete Bothnia breast and Oulu fringe, her hair bunched in the Arctic Circle .. Upon her left wrist a sober bracelet, a fine silver link that sparkles from spires of Tallinn's old town to the White Church at Helsinki".

I couldn't appreciate the title poem, which Ahren Warner selected in a competition. I often don't understand Warner's tastes - this poet's range of tastes is far wider than mine. "Waistcoat of Life" is one of those poems produced by auto-translating found English text into another language and back again, and so on. "Insulin" is interesting. The first lines is "My father, in the public bar, sat luminous and sunny,", and the poem uses a wide vocabulary - e.g. "a decree nisi, insomniac, he began to linger by sluices". I think the idea is that each line contains the letters of the title, though I've not checked. Other poems could contain patterns that I've missed. Deathflake is probably my favourite, beginning with "Snow in Venice. Sudden snow." and later including "Death down your back. Footprints in the death".

Language (its sound and spelling) is rarely a transparent medium in this book. Sometimes it seeps into the foreground as in "Appeasement" which begins with "I want to know swathe,/ want to bathe in swathe,/ I'd scythe swathes of grasses,/ no, better still, swathes of heather. Lithe, I'd scythe longest swathes loose". In poems like "Scaffolding" however, content takes precedence. "I'm not malicious but have scarred a woman" it begins. Later, "Her tummy had collapsed so they were propping it up in Norfolk, freeing her husband home in Suffolk to oversee his extension". Later still "I caught her naked, darting from their half-finished bedroom to half-tiled bathroom. On the landing she [...] pointed to the crease and said You did this".

Other reviews/pages

• Valuation (plus an interview)
• Chris Edgoose (Stephenson takes a more-than-usual delight in language ... it seems to me that he uses this delight as a distancing mechanism, a way of stepping back from the objects of his poems in order to take a clearer look)

"The purpose of your visit" by River Wolton (Smith/Doorstop, 2008)

The first poem, "Thrill" is classic "anecdote becomes metaphor". Canoeing together amongst alligators, there's "the thrill: of comradeship, or proving all the voices wrong, and ridges of relentless hidden teeth". The second poem, "Reconciliation", mentions a crow bashing against a window, then says that the narrator no longer cares about the possessions that characterise her, because when there's a reconciliation - "All I know is that they fell away like ballast on a balloon flight, like the first step weightless and exultant into air". In "Gold", the persona seems to be floundering around, looking for something - anything - to believe in after a relationship's over, finishing with "You think of taking up smoking again but even that old god is good and dead".

Some later poems are more oblique - initially at least. Often a memory is described, then the persona's current surroundings are revealed (a train station, for example) then a connection is made between the two, or, more rarely, the juxtaposed descriptions are left to speak for themselves. There's a "scattering ashes" poem. I like "Sheffield - St Pancras".

Towards the end, the topics of immigration and Israel take over. The style becomes close to reportage - poems (poems?) like "Departures 4.30 A.M." don't do much for me.

Other reviews

• Rob A. Mackenzie (She employs plain vocabulary, free verse, and a fairly regular stanza and line length within each poem. There’s little new ground being broken, but the poems generally succeed in achieving their intended effect, which is rarely disguised.)

"Stations of the Boar" by Kevin Mills (Cinnamon Press, 2016)

A 17 page pamphlet, "Re-reading Lifris' Life of Saint Cadoc (c.1086)". According to the back cover these poems "interrogate how the presence of the past constructs a nearly hallucinatory sense of what it might mean to be Welsh". I'm struggling with the content and expression. Here's the start of "Prints"

I'll raise, perhaps, a chap- el here for Finnian whose faith could harness forest harts and keep our book uninjured by the pelting

The syllable count for all the lines of the poem is 6,8, 7,8, 6,8, 6,5, 6,5. I can't see much of a pattern there. Perhaps the idea of raising a chap is why the first line's broken. It's iambic, but some lines have more than 3 beats.

The final poem ends with a flurry of line-breaks - "The angel says I// must forgive you./       Enough for now.// May the land/ rise to meet/ you."