"Tigress" by Jessica Mookherjee (Nine Arches Press, 2019)

Poems from Rialto, The High Window, Interpreter's House, The North, etc. I didn't think much of the first poem about her father arriving to the UK from Dhaka. I much prefer the second poem, "The Beginning of Flight", about her mother's arrival, taking in Blériot, Camels, Spitfires, and Enola Gay before arriving at Heathrow. I don't know what "Snapshot" is about. I like "The Truth" I don't know what "Sea-born" is about. I had trouble with this -

Moon Apple moon, crisp and cream pale, someone took a gentle bite out of her cheek and left me with nothing to suck but my thumb. As Dad drove her back from the hospital she kept watching me in the car, peering, twisted, from her passenger seat

I think the first line is comparing the moon to an apple. "cream" doesn't seem the right colour for an apple though, and there's a clash in my mind between cream (the food) and apple. The second line might refer to the cratered moon, though I think a moon=mother association is being set up. The apple's not alluded to again in the poem - I don't think these confused images justify its presence. In line 3 a child is missing what? Does she normally suck apples? Is she still being breast-fed? Neither seems likely. In stanza 2 why bother with "in the car"?

On p.24 "The concrete porch/ steps are now slippery, wet, and covered with slime" sounds too wordy.

"Our Father" includes "You were Varuna,/ lord of oceans, but you tricked us,/ turned into Uranium - our alpha particle,// then you dated the Earth". Well, Uranus was a sky god, and uranium was involved with finding the age of the Earth. Uranus married Gaia, the Earth goddess, so he "dated" (i.e. went out with) the Earth. The symbolism doesn't quite mesh, but its followable. However, I don't get "our alpha particle".

I liked "The Principal Boy". It begins with "I return to the theatre, after curtain call,/ all backstage, all eyes". Aspects of it puzzle me all the same. Stanza 1 mentions "I" and "You" (singular). Stanza 2 mentions "She", "you" and "We". Stanza 3 has "You", "we" and a final return to "I". I couldn't work out the cast. The final stanza makes it look as if "You" is the principal boy (i.e. a woman). In stanza 2 "She sits listening to you with dead ears".

"it" appears in stanza 1 of "The Bite Mark", entering the house "like a crumpled child" then lighting a halo. "It" morphs through the poem that ends with "It gently stings - singed kiss/ as it passes to wake us, it turns you into Orpheus// as I slip on its bite. My heart scarred with your wound, I keep it opened with my teeth". Rich surrealism or confused imagery? What can be kept open with teeth? I struggle with phrases like "I slip on its bite" and the punctuation doesn't help.

I like "Dream Dictionary" and "Tigress". I like the 2nd half of "The Cold Wife". "Self portrait in maroon and black" is good. "Mothers' Day" and "Vernal Equinox" are rather anecdotal.

"Stranger" ends with "They spread/ rumours that I'm the moon and chase me with silver./ I know I can't drown because I'm the water" With silver? I like "Darshan".

The poems vary in their stance to realism. Some are descriptive, some wrap realism in figurative language, some might be based on realism but the clues are missing, and some aren't trying to relate to the world. I think that some pieces are internally contradictory, which is ok for a poem if it works. It didn't work for me. Some of the pieces in other styles did.

Other reviews

• Emma Lee (Her poems are inventive and distinctive. They use familiar vocabulary to explore complex ideas in a search for a divided self.)
• Stephanie Sy-quia (One might call this Immigrant Gothic. Indeed, it is easy to imagine the claustrophobia the Welsh Mumbles would elicit in a man arriving in the country “the day Winston Churchill dies”, having travelled alone from Dhaka. For the wife who comes to join him, it is too much, and she soon becomes a pharmaceutically fogged Bertha Mason, placated by pills and deserving of pity.)
• Neil Fulwood (Tigress is a collection that deserves to be discovered, savoured, lingered over and returned to: a work, I believe, that will find its home in the subconscious rather than the coldly analytical.)

"The Europeans" by David Clarke (Nine Arches Press, 2019)

Poems from Magma, Strix, etc. The source material's partly from the media and reference books.

I'm not that keen on themed collections especially on contemporary themes. But I was impressed by David Clarke's previous collection, my kids are bilingual (Italian - one of them now lives in Sweden), so this book interested me.

It starts well with "Invitation" which begins with "Meet me in the lobby of the Hotel Europa", with some recognisable characters, though there are some strange details and the ending is "And if we've ever cause to quit the Hotel Europa,/ let us not be consumed by recrimination/ and regret. Call it a dream,/ a happy accident. If you must, a lie.", which goes beyond observation. The next poem, "Letter in March", has an ababccdd rhyme scheme. It's more low key, more disappointing. There's more formalism later - "In the Snug" is a loose villanelle, "To a Mellotron" is abcdbefgh abcdbefgh, "To a stately home" uses terza rima, etc.

There are a few flat poems around p.30. I don't understand "Auden at Kirchstetten", though I know something of Auden's later years. "Sugar town" puzzles me.

Poems are addressed to pubs, stately homes, villages, TV, and phoneboxes ("I inhaled your reek of ash and piss ... untwisted your tarnished flex, flicked the squeaky flap for change". We see England at its most distinctive. I wasn't especially taken by any poem as a whole, though there are many appealing fragments. Here are a few -

• In blank verse "An Exchange" recounts an exchange visit - "The final BBQ was underdone,/ of course, but then some rebel spiked those beers/ that left us gassy on the coach and queasy/ lurching from Zeebrugge's quay. And England/ loomed, a salty headache in the dawn"
• "When the winter came, the Europeans were retreated/ into forests. People were wolves or wolves/ were people. These matters were increasingly unclear." ("The Europeans")
• "You could still put your finger// into the bullet holes in the masonry, just as a violin started/ up in that apartment over the café. The Europeans/ had much to say of poetry and much silence to say it into." ("The Europeans")
• "You knew that glamorous angst/ of sin-soaked quays and modernist salons, those anti-/ heroes tracing sweat-pricked lips with a brush of thumb" (p.15)
• "No doubt, I'm not the first to search the city/ for some sign, to scan its past in celluloid/ for that café where I may meet the guide// who's dodged me all my waking life -/ even while a surgeon elsewhere rubs/ his weary eyes, holds my x-rays to the light" (p.16)
• "the spinning punctuation of/ your fruit machines that trilled, mesmeric in the gloom/ between a first necked pint and each man's lonesome trudge// for home " (p.18)
• "At night/ their spires are styluses/ that scratch a dirge from heaven's/ whirling acetate" (p.25)

Typo on p.46 - "I am a solider"

"

Other reviews

• Ed Garvey-Long (If the Hotel is the poet’s metaphor for the European community, efficient, interesting and liberal, the Pub is poet’s metaphor for Englishness, isolated, bigoted, intoxicated and divorced from reality. Alongside Pubs, the rain is a consistent theme and an easy shorthand for a lot of English experience. ... in exploring this big ideas and the anger surrounding them, I felt the poems themselves lacked an emotional engagement, outside of the anger that runs through the collection. There were a handful of personal moments, but overall the book was about exploring these large questions about Englishness and Europeanness, ultimately though enjoyable, I feel the collection could have done more to explore the poet’s personal connection with the subject matter.)
• Neil Fulwood (‘Letter to George Gordon Byron’ is a showstopper, ... ‘The Vision of Albion' [] is the poem that actually does close The Europeans and Clarke foregoes the earlier howl of furious protest for something quieter, deeper, more insistent; a perfect conclusion to a collection that doesn’t put a foot wrong.)
• Carol Rumens (The final station of the cross, Leeds Central, has a particularly brilliant opening line, with its hard-punching Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: “Saw that bloke from that band you liked” and that almost physically cruel rhyme, “liked” and “spiked”. The quatrain ends with a gentler cadence, and a repetition of sounds (“eternal return”) that is like a fading spell. The return ticket expires. Places are seen for the last time. Relationships end. As ever, the poet chooses candour over consolation.)
• Anna Lewis (For all its sharp observations, the poetry is warm and playful in tone, its ambition to understand rather than accuse)

"The vision of culture and other poems" by Mark Howard Davis (Minerva Press, 1998)

It begins with a 10-page preface. Here are some extracts -

• "In an age where individualism is haloed with spotlights, where relativism runs amok, there are many clever and sophisticated people but few with real, intense, aesthetic depth of wisdom"
• "Everything is based on good contacts in the right places at the right time, rather than on serious evaluative criticism"
• "when I read any of the current poetry on offer (whether written by supposed first league or lesser poets) I am aware of a lack of structure, lack of form, content and style"
• "Once you slide into cultural relativism and it is deemed fine for everyone to pursue 'their own thing', all the critical apparatus and accumulated wisdom of tested craft and innovation become as nothing"
• "Relativism has enslaved our culture and nowhere more so do we experience this bitter truth than in the meagre, half-cooked microwave poetry of postmodernism"
• "today's postmodern conformism is due to the absense of any sort of intelligible poetics"
• "The world of the true poet is, in the last result, a unique world of personal joy and suffering. The sheer intensity of such inwardness seals this world off from any mere facile cleverness"
• "Poetry must regain its basis of meaningful patterning"

On the back cover it says "Explaining where recent poets have gone wrong, he harks back to a time when poetry actually meant something."

I think he's tarring a lot of people with the same broad brush. It's a pity he didn't name names. Geoffrey Hill? Armitage? Prynne?

I wasn't keen on "Letter to Milton" which ends "In conclusion, until you get a page/ in Poetry Review, forget your rage,/ for until then you have failed the grade,/ and misunderstood how money is made". "The Vision of Culture" also attacks some soft targets, this time from Modern Art - "There cheered editors and reviewers mooned,/ praising cryptic conformists to art's shame"

"To a Satellite Dish" has padding to fill the form but has a decent plot. The dishes that transmit "polished teeth in celluloid miles" makes him wonder if we are "doomed to drink your dry bowl ... fed from your spoon mouth's huge spawning yawn? ... lovelier shape is a bird's nest"?"

"Words to One Gone" is a dud. "My tree" mostly works for me. "The end of nature" is another poetical blast against the modern world, cars and roads this time - "Then came the termites' patented plague;/ a billion thirsting metallic hearts that/ droned in perpetual puffs of malignance,/ hurrying along the beast's great gashed pathways, they choked that geriatric creature". "Easter Saturday" might be good - I don't get it all. In "Hedgerows" the rhyme (not for the first time) gets in the way - "Scant the hedges for a pew/ where they might build a nest;/ for farmers deem them a pest/ and so birds have no rest". Its message isn't new either. Nor is that of "Words to a bluetit" that ends with "bright bird, it is not problematical/ to fly or die, but is to wonder why.". I like "The Journey of the Verb".

"Alive at Thirty-Five", in terza rima, is standard soul searching. "November Light" captures a moment when the sun pops out. I like "A word with death", though it's a little too long. I like some lines from "Thoughts in a Suffolk Church" - "Swallowed in this whale bellied hulk,/ my thoughts are magnified to dust". I can never understand why people bother writing (let alone publishing) pieces like "The Seeking", "My father's father", "Choice" and "The Dream of the Elms".

I like the idea of "The Golden Calf", that the idol is the self, but the development's disappointing. At the end it looks as if the idea is that the more metaphors that are piled in, the more poetic it is - "And the corn of greed crops bountiful from/ Lilliput's fields,/ where it's business as usual/ for regressed babes,/ enthroned in the counting house/ of en suite hell"

""

"Sarajevo Roses" by Rory Waterman (Carcanet, 2017)

Poems from many of the best magazines - PN review, Poetry Review, Poetry, TLS, etc.

I had to look up the title. According to Wikipedia, "A Sarajevo Rose is a type of memorial in Sarajevo made from concrete scar caused by a mortar shell's explosion that was later filled with red resin." That fits in with the efforts to highlight the past in this book.

I have a basic problem though - I can't always work out what the poet's trying to do. Here for example is the start of "The Avenue" - They found a man in the shrub that shields our lane - / one fat white hand not tucked in the pit -/ and cordoned off a patch. We had nothing to explain it// but The Post. First, there's a problem of line-breaks. Only the stanza-break does much. True, there's end-rhyme - the poem's pattern is abb cdc eeb which has a kind of symmetry. The syllable count of the first 3 lines is 11/9/14, which doesn't help. Why a single "shrub" rather than "shrubbery"? Perhaps it's a common usage. What does "not tucked in the pit" mean? If the only explanation was in The Post, that's how one would normally phrase it. The phrasing of the poem makes it look as if The Post is the explanation/cause of it. The stanza break encourages double readings. But why?

His use of rhyme is rathyer alien to me. "It was" has lines ranging from 6 to 18 syllables, but the end-rhyme scheme is strict - aabbcaac. "Reunion" has 4 xaxa then a final stanza which only has assonance.

There's more trouble for me at the end of "June morning, Erewash Canal" - "May petals file across in fuddles of sun-dried snow". Why "in" rather than "like"? Are the petals in something that looks like snow, or do the petals look like snow? I presume that these are old (maybe month-old) petals ("May" being the month rather than an indication of hope), but are they really in lines/files? In an urban dictionary online it says that "Fuddle" is a word "used mostly in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, that means to sit comfortably and eat a variety of chocolates and sweets. Or cuddle up under lots of duvets and eat a variety of comforting sweets and chocolates". Or more generally it can mean "a confused state". Whatever, I still can't parse the phrase.

"Bleached Stars" begins with "From each fat coin spindles rooted and tugged at the shore wind" and ends with "And writhing from nub torsos across the sand spingles root and tug at the shore wind". I was hoping that I'd understand the phrase by the end. I think I must be missing something in "Sleeper" and "The Heritage Centre" too.

I'm more at home with poems like "Family" where a childless couple sees a toddler causing a scene. Then "I think What could our life be with someone else in it? then You would be our life". Then "I set to, scrawling postcards to my parents: an only child must remember more". The parents are waiting for news ...

In "Between Villages" the narrator sees "furrows full of seed and cobbles ending by the village where we grew up" (I guess this is something to do with seeing the past as seeds, some of which fell on stony ground). Then "Slung above, the Plough's slack cord of lights is tiny in all this blackening blue". I presume the Plough's a constellation and not a pub. Then a man emerges from a cottage who "stamps off along the bridle path: he's a torchlight light jinking. We nod in passing.". They acknowledge a similar predicament, though they use light in different ways.

There's more on how a glimpse of the past affects the evaluation of the present in "Sot's Hole" where the narrator plus "her" revisit after 25 years a place where "she pulls him close - all he once thought he wanted".

Countryside imagery abounds - "the great aviary of a Welsh valley whirred and chirruped its fragmented continuum" (p.16) "Over the fields a stub of moon smudges the scudding cloud" (p.50). In "Brexit day on the Balmoral estate" it takes on a more symbolic tone - "sponge-and-matchstick trees", "a meadow pipit chats and teleports twig to twig to twig to", "squabbling geese materialise as dots ... not needing to process why they do", "two deer ... do not know there is no stalking today. They do not know there was stalking yesterday.". "Spurn" has cows who "each in turn turns off, like lights at night: when there's nothing to fear why unite, why stay alert?"

"St Thomas's" might be excellent - it's a bit beyond me. I didn't like the concluding poem, "Tuesday".

Other reviews

Peter Pegnall (Rory Waterman’s work is wonderfully intelligible; by that I do not mean facile or prosaic, but that his vision is clear, his language scrupulously chosen, his quest for meaning apparent and authentic. ... it tends towards meditation rather than excitement, perhaps, but it is very rarely without substance or craft. A poem or two may depend too strongly on an evocation to speak for itself and I am not hugely amused by the final piece, “Tuesday,” ... I’d like to consider closely a two stanza tour de force, “Love in a Life.” )
• Vicki Husband (Waterman often returns to a moment in the past, an unmarked crossroad where something almost went unnoticed until, revisited, it takes on its full significance.)
• William Bedford (Waterman has a flawless gift for the telling detail)

"Planet-Shaped Horse" by Luke Kennard (Nine Arches Press, 2011)

The narrator is a voluntary patient in a halfway house. Miranda is a pretty young mother. Girlfriend? Simon is his case-worker? There's an activist. There's golf. And there's a hermit/hermitologist. How much is merely in the mind of the narrator? The narrator thinks he's a writer - there are allusions to line-breaks, "first thought best thought", e.e. cummings, etc.

Miranda turns towards him "like a security camera". Simon's cat is called "Security Camera". Reality and representation are confused - an art project called I Faked My Own Life is mentioned, along with copyright infringements. In "Eyes", parts of his body are mapped to the hermitage, the golf course, etc.

There are many quotable fragments. Here are a few.

• I don't want to sound like a prophet,/ but last night I found over twenty things in Revelation/ that could be metaphors for the internet
• I bite into a tomato and when I look at it/ it looks exactly like the mouth which bit it
• In golf even having a drink with people you don't really like/ once the golf is over has a name, it is called the 19th Hole./ And why stop there? Your drive home could be the 20th hole. ...
• Miranda stands on the jetty knocking tennis balls into Lake sensible./ She is wearing an Edwardian swimming costume, off-set with a jewel-encrusted moth brooch,/ engraved with: 'THIS IS WAY TOO MUCH DETAIL FOR PROSE, EVEN'
• I make a cup of tea for each of the 68 cups in the house ... I arrange the cups of tea all over the ground floor
• [the hermit's] rumoured to live on the largest gold course/ in the country, one that cartographers leave off maps// so that it doesn't get too many members; in fact, all of its members are cartographers
• 'Not one of [the thoughts] matters,' he says. 'They're just the goopy// blue stuff in the spirit level. The bubble is what matters.' .... 'I suppose to you the owls sound like they're saying,/ "Ted Huuuuuuuuuughes! Ted Huuuuuuuuuughes! Well they're not"'
• In its glass the toothbrush leans forward/ as if condescending to admire a child's painting./ It is like the face of an old man whose eyebrows/ and moustache have grown to cover his whole face.
• 'The homeopathic cure for insomnia is a one-man-band', she says. 'And vice-versa.'

It's in titled sections, each made of regular stanza. Can any of the sections stand alone? They all have some weak lines, it seems to me. In any case, they're better read as episodic parts of a narrative. Fin has no stanza breaks. I'd say it's prose, in a Lydia Davis way.

Other reviews

• Charles Whalley (the comic, the writer & the madman are united by their refusal or inability to observe distinctions over different realities, or to privilege one reality over another ... his poetry, with its absurd observations & one-liners, owes a debt to stand-up comedy. ... Writers have a tendency to write often about writing, & there is a danger of it becoming tiresome quite quickly. Luke Kennard manages to explore this in an entirely new direction, without submitting to anything without involving multiple dimensions. It is a masterful collection, & a dazzling & slightly exhausting display of what can be done with two dozen prose-poems. As can be seen by the length & passing incoherence of this review, Planet-Shaped Horse is the single most exciting piece of contemporary poetry I have read in months.)
• Alex Campbell (The fact that this collection is a poem-play cannot be forgotten. There is a strong narrative thread running through the collection, which gives it a depth of meaning and character that no single poem could have achieved on its own ... Kennard’s work is clever, fascinating and with an off the wall, tongue in cheek sort of humour that is a joy to read or listen to. Perhaps though, we should take one final warning, from this collection; that “Like most jokes, the joke is on the people who pretend to get it” (Sobranies))
• D A Prince, George Simmers and Robin Vaughan-Williams (I heard Kennard read from it and decided it definitely wasn’t for me. However, when it arrived for review, I gritted my teeth—and had my mind changed. Highly intelligent humour like this is rare; there will be imitations, and they won’t come anywhere near this. ... The author-patient of Planet-Shaped Horse is more like the kitten who does understand about mirrors but persists in fighting its own reflection all the same, generating energy and humour in the process.)

"Poetry, Flowers, all sorts in blossom, figs, berries, and fruits forgotten" by Oisin Breen (Hybrid Press, 2020)

I've been following with interest the reviews of this book. Late Romantic? High Modernist? There are no acknowledgements, perhaps because sections aren't self-contained. It's not my sort of poetry, but I'm curious. Here's the first sentence -

Memories, stilled and muted harmonia,  silk-heavy in the russet wind,  like sinuous leaves with ice-cracked spines,  and a timbre of slowness, In a schema of licentiousness, Prompt, more so than age,  these liver spots on my translucent skin.

"harmonia"? "russet wind"? "sinuous leaves" that are "silk-heavy"? "schema of licentiousness"? Lines 2-4 and 7 are indented by one space, and aren't capitalised, unlike the other lines. I'm baffled and a little suspicious, though I'd be happy enough with "Memories, more so than age, prompt these liver spots on my translucent skin". Already there are tell-tale signs of word excess (I guess the clue's in the title!). Had I less time on my hands I might well have given up at this point. Instead I read the book quickly, saving extracts that I've pasted below. Out of context though they are, I hope they'll give you a flavour of the content. There are moments of observation, pieces with the tone of wisdom, and lots of rhetorical repetition. Eliot? Hart Crane?

Isn't the act of placing flowers on a tomb a gesture of bringing a little life back to the dead?

And I place flowers on my father's grave, a gesture, like any other, to bring life to the dead. And beside me two junkies eat a watermelon from a plastic bag, And a black and white tit hops beneath their feet.

 

And in turn each approximation, Becomes the outline of the boundaries of the next, And our plump history is sketched in non-linear distance, between the staple and the snare.

 

It is only in death that the final form of those we loved emerges. Though as we ourselves approach death, their shape intermingles with our own changing.

 

But what if I forget myself? or spend the days -- in truth -- with the mouth full of ash, observing a vertical/horizontal lattice of incremental anamorphoses between what might have been, to what was?

 

What constellation blasted drear light, a nova of turned down gas dials, into a litany of hot wind and frozen pipes?

 

I hid because there was a kid nearby I knew. We all called him retarded. I was bullied too, but hating him was a guilty treat. I was happy to feel like everyone else.

 

I hid because fate is a way out, and salty epiphanies are beautiful, like rotten flowers in a fat glass, and wet Edinburgh streets.

 

Thus truth is nothing but the crushed pleats of the stories we tell ourselves to state, with surety, that we are pregnant with a real salt of the earth kenning of ourselves.

 

Today the hourglass is wet with time. Today the minute hand is the spoor of the ineffectual cause. Today I bond parched qualia with the grinding of bone-cut wheels.

Dublin and the Loose Footwork of Deity

And her eyes: Hanseatic trading ships marooned in the stony places of differing economy, persuaded to look, unshewing to themselves.

 

How is the ordering of things and the centreing eye a calculus of freedom in abashed abundance?

 

For in 2015, I love you, and I splice interstices of intersecting sedimentary instants in refracted chronological collapse -

Her Cross Carried, Burnt

The flowers they are fallen, The fruit it is rotten, But your grave is as pretty as ever.

 

KNOW THEN, THIS IS HOW ALL LIFE BEGINS From vital song to verse, from chorus to hearse, From the nodding head of coming dread, to linearity and vice.

 

We are all, in part, pulsars,  etching secondary moments,  in which we have something been,  with furious, tempestuous light,  into the fabric skin of space,  into those nested Russian dolls of one and other's fantasy.        So then it is that while you undress me,        you undress just another version of yourself.

 

Other reviews

• Lawrence Illsley (a triptych of long poems taking us through grief’s chaotic journey to acceptance. ... the strongest of the three poems is perhaps the second, ‘Dublin and the Loose Footwork of Deity’. Here we are firmly located in Dublin, and this appears to free Breen as a poet.)
• Emma Lee (a journey through adulthood, loss of parents and developing as a individual. Its narrator meanders through gathering observations and thoughts. At times he could be seeing Dublin through the lens of Eliot’s “The Wasteland”, at others, Joyce’s Dublin is recognisable. It’s ambitious, designed to have cerebral appeal and determinedly unfashionable.)
• (It is hard not to be impressed with Breen’s utter rejection of contemporary poetic trends and the skill with which he maintains what might be described as a High Romantic diction ... While the diction may be romantic the overall tone of Breen’s project is modernist ... I came away exhausted. Yes, exhilarated with the language, but also worn down by what reads like a 95-page Joycean epiphany. But if Breen’s reach ultimately exceeds his grasp within these pages, it is because his aims are so lofty)

"The North (No 60 2018)" by Ann and Peter Sansom (eds)

£10 gets you over 150 big pages (two-column). 110 poems by 60 poets (D A Prince, Ilse Pedler, Carole Bromley, Jonathan Edwards, Kathryn Simmonds, etc), reviews and articles. It's a good read.

• John Lancaster has 7 poems. I don't know why.
• Kathryn Simmonds writes the odd good poem, but also many ordinary ones. She has 3 poems here, one of them good.
• Carole Bromley has 4 poems, but only "High Dependency" is any good.
• I'd like to be able to write like Nigel Pantling or Martha Sprackland about a poem. Here's Sprackland - "Something is lost. Perhaps it's only the sea, whose light 'broke in silver shards', as do so many visions which can only be revisited in the memory. Or perhaps it's memory itself that has been lost: the car moving along the road 'as loud as the airplane' whose trail, visible and solid enough at the beginning of the poem to sign its name on the sky in affirmation, fades through the poem to 'not so much as a snail's trail'. What causes something to lose its name, its signature, its ability to speak?". I don't think this is a faithful interpretation of the poem (I think she's cherry-picked and ignored the parts that didn't fit) but all the same.
• My favourite first stanza is from Emma Simon's "I Confess My Sins To The Electronic Scales" - "It speaks a language of loss I understand:/ the scantiness of half teaspoons of salt,/ a promise of absolution in a row of zeros". It's probably my favourite poem too.
• Linda Saunder's "The Railway-modeller's Farewell" is good.
• Judge David Constantine writes "It was heartening to note that almost all the poets in contention did ... address the common central facts of human existence: love, death, grief and the will to happiness. It reinforces one's faith in the whole endeavour of poetry"
• The poems exhibit a whole range of techniques except that there's little formal poetry (which may well be more to with the submissions than the editors' tastes). The subject matter's much more limited - the poems are nearly all human interest pieces.
• I liked "I wish I had more mothers" by Ann Gray
• I liked all but the final line of Emma Jeremy's "A hairbrush walks onto a train"
• "[Eric] Langley deftly uses page space to give a sense of the curator's confused location as a private public body interacting with the implications of new technology" (Andrew Jeffrey). I don't believe it.
• "Titles tend to summarise, to simplify or to indicate. [Thomas A] Clark's poems are humbler" (Philip Rush).

"At or below sea level" by Elisabeth Sennitt Clough (Paper swans press, 2019)

The title alludes to The Fens. Maybe also to mood. There are poems from Stand, The Rialto, Magma, and some competition anthologies.

Two of my allergies are to higgledy-piggledy indents and contractual poetry. This book has a fair amount of each. The first poem, "Juno's Augury" is laid out as prose with some passages in bold. The bold text can be read alone as a poem - the passages end with "woke", "night", "moonlight", "bones", "stain", "flakes", "breaks", "pane", "smudge", "watermark", "lawn", "budge", "skylark", "dawn" - an abbacddcefgefg pattern. There's a storm with thousand-mile an-hour winds, a father, and many birds. A little research uncovered Aesop's Juno and the Peacock, and a Juno/Moneta soothsayer. And the planet Jupiter has violent winds. OK, so what's to be made of this passage - "Her voice is low, measured as she speaks: soaring birds have hollow bones. The marrow in my hips settle like evidence. They rotated him to remove the needle: they took what they wanted and left a stain on the paper sheet."? I don't know. The poem's tantalising though ultimately frustrating. "Creed" and "Gravid" use the same poem-in-a-poem form.

"Hum" riffs off the title - "Human ... Humbert ... humouresque ... humerous ... humdinger", etc. "The butterfly and the stone" has fluid symbolism - she=butterfly and he=stone? At first, yes - "she rests on the large grey boulder of him ... he wakes to something brushing the back of his neck ... the boulder is not capable of thought" - then "she" becomes "I" - "while he sleeps my wings open to night ... his mouth twitches as if in prayer when he closes me with his tongue ... I have a jar he says to preserve each piece of you"

I didn't like "Anonymous" - even if it's worth printing, it should be printed as prose. I didn't get "The Homemaker". I can see it's in 4/5/3 syllabics, but why the 1-tab/0-tabs/2-tabs line indent pattern? So each line has 5 "units"? I've problems with the content too. "Footnotes to a marriage" uses a cute idea and has some nice lines. I like "The Actress". But "Volta" has "last night's chip papers/ flap emptiness at our shoes/ grease our wayward steps", and an indent pattern of 1/2/0 0/2/1 1/2/0 0/2/1 1/0/2. I don't get "Jagged Lullaby". "Soham" presumably alludes to the 2002 murders. It's in 2 columns. Maybe it's supposed to be read either column-wise or row-wise, but the syntax is loose enough to make that a technically easy thing to do, and the content doesn't do much - is it about regeneration? I like "The Missing Moth Cabinet ...".

The book has many lines that sound good in isolation - "You no longer keep your threads taut/ in your dull patchwork of fields" ("Fen"); "Here futures are set in creosote" ("Fen Elegy"); "How the yellow bathwater made islands of me" ("Footnotes to a marriage"), etc. In the end however there were too many poems that I found difficult, and too many features that I look upon as warning signs - it's too advanced for me.

Interviews

• Paul Stephenson (I’ve heard that living at or below sea level can have an effect on a person’s physical/mental state. I don’t know how true that statement is, but it interests me .... I have travelled a lot, since my late teens with my own work and later with my husband’s job ... As a child, I didn’t want to be female because I’d been conditioned into thinking girls and women were weak/lesser beings by my stepfather (who beat and humiliated my mother). )
• Chris Edgoose (She took it further and replied that the Fens are an ‘abused’ landscape, almost literally beaten into submission over hundreds of years of drainage ... But Liz has spent years away from the local dialect, living in Cambridge, the Netherlands and the US, and so she does not feel linked to the local language in a way that has allowed its use to feel natural in her poems so far.)

"Fenland Poetry Journal (issue 2)", Elisabeth Sennitt Clough (ed)

Poetry (some of it more than a page long) and bios. There are nearly 50 pages of poems by several poets I've heard of. Jeremy Page has 6. In an age of cut-backs and web-based magazines it'll be interesting to see how this fares. It has an East Anglia flavour, which might help, and an editor who's in the ascendancy as a poet.

"Meet me at the harbour" by Michael A. Brown (Eyewear, 2019)

I like paragraph 2 on p.14. I like the idea of "Property playground" but not its execution. I like the title on p.36 - "Sometimes all I need is the air that I breathe and a report to tell me how dangerous it is". I like "In memory of my red RNLI hat". A few of the more raw poems begin well enough - e.g. "Mercury poisons me" - "I feel wrapped in metal/ my kidneys are pissing toxic tales// I've forgotten your name again/ my skin becomes pink and peels"; They open wounds/ tearing off emotions like plasters" (p.35)

I didn't like p.13, 19, 22, 42, 44, 48, 56. Where I expect a punch-line too often there's banality. An insight which merits a section on p.27 is "Lighthouses/ remind me/ that despite darkness/ there is always light.". p.31 ends with "The sun goes down on City Lights where ideas open up like books, minds, and hearts". List poems are a problem. "Border" is a list ended by "From space there are no borders" Really? "Wildlife of Fraggle Rock" is another list - "Noisy mallard ... A cute rabbit ... A solitary heron ... A Christmas-card Robin". "Charlestown Harbour, Cornwall" begins with "Carefree boys swim,/ bob like buoys" and ends with "I harbour this feeling.".

If you're going to write about poems and IKEA it had better be good because several people (me included) have done it before. "Finding a poem in IKEA" might have preceded them all.

The punctuation and line-breaks of "Cormorant" puzzles me even more than that of the other poems. He tries rhyme in "By the book", which begins with

She does things by the book while giving me an evil look no reason for hands to be shook

"I think that's the trick with Cambridge/ hang around long enough and suddenly you stick" (from "Cambridge Problem"). Damn, my secret's revealed.

"Rattle (issue 57)"

Over 100 pages, 10 of them bios and 18 of them an interview with Ken Meisel. The magazine has 7,000+ subscribers, which is impressive.

Several of the pieces have starts or endings that would work well for stories -

• Start: You stick the chicken's head through a hole in a bucket. There's no guillotine or ax, just a little sharp knife to cut their throats, and you say, "Goodbye little chicken" and slit, slit, slit. It takes a couple of minutes for them to bleed (Edward Derby)
• Start: I inherited from my mother the knobbly joints and square ends of my fingers. From my father, I got the habit of biting my nails, their shortness. The frayed missing skin had never bothered me but now I have a son and he has begun to bite too. (Ananda Lima)
• Ending: His case was distinct from mine, the doctors reassured me, I could be cured again and again (Andrew Miller)
• Ending: I startle a flock of birds, that will never again be still (William Evans)
• Near-ending: She kept my books and a few LPs because I was going to come back (Ed Ruzicka)

"Pardoning the turkey" is prose, despite its couplets. "Pancake Dilemma" is à la Lydia Davis. "Who am I?" by Kelly Fordon has rhetorical repetition, but that's far from justifying its classification as poetry. Kelsey Hagarman's "The Visit" looks like something written as the result of a Flash prompt - except for the line-breaks. Dillon McCrea's "Self-portrait as an inkblot" uses a device that's used in other pieces too - it begins with a surprise, then tells a story whose ending repeats the image at the start, which now makes sense.

"Weed whacker" by Nancy Whacker is amongst the pieces I like.

"Everyone turns" by Bob Cooper (Pindrop Press, 2017)

Poems from Interpreter's House, Other Poetry, The Rialto, Under the Radar, etc

Typically they're in medias res pieces dropping you into an anecdote or dialog. Once you've worked out what's going on, you go back to the title and it all makes sense.

I liked "All we know is what we see" and "The Lunchtimes of novel ideas". I liked the initial idea of many other poems, but felt that they weren't sufficiently developed. Other poems disappointed, for a variety of reasons -

• A lot happens, but it doesn't add up to enough - e.g. "Sitting with everything too wide for her wrists - gold-braid bangles,/ multi-dialed imitation Rolex with over-loose gold-plated strap - / beside her tattooed partner whose laugh Kalashnikovs the lights,/ she lowers her head, flinches as she bites already chewed nails" (p.26).
• Some of the most prosy ones (p.25, p.29) have the most fussy indentation.
• Some (p.31, p.32, p.36, most of the ones on p.40-51, p.62 etc) are too slight - they start too slowly and stop too early.
• The poems set in Prague did little for me - a phrase/observation is developed into something more than a draft, but no further. I preferred the poems that involves actors/actresses, though there are too many of them. In "Big Archie and the visually impaired" Schwarzenegger help a woman cross the road then talks into his Blackberry, "in conversation with someone none of us can see". That ends the poem.

A switch in style is "A Fear of Flying" which is all analogy - a flight where a passenger distracts themselves at take-off is "no different, perhaps, to your final one:/ a succession of details before a vastness/ you know is beyond your control"

The book has 13 blank pages at the end.

"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)

"The luckiest guy alive" by John Cooper Clarke (Picador, 2018)

I've long had a soft spot for him. I couldn't find much to like in this book though. The odd line faintly amused me - e.g. "Startled eyebrows pencilled in. Taking compliments on the chin" (p.37). My favourite poems were "Crossing the floor" and "Trouble @ t'Mall".

Other reviews

• bookmunch (In this age in which people pussy foot around saying anything that might offend anyone in case it, you know, destroys their careers, we need JCC more than ever.)

"helium" by Rudy Francisco (button poetry, 2017)

He's a Spoken Word poet. There are some good lines, some of which are presented as short poems -

• "I have solar-powered confidence/ and a battery-operated smile./ My hobbies include: editing my life story,// hiding behind metaphors,/ and trying to convince my shadow/ that I'm someone worth following." (p.15)
• "I held you the way a boat holds water. I should have have left when I felt us sinking" (p.29)
• "depression ... getting out of bed has become a magic tick. ... I treat my face like a pumpkin. I pretend that it's Halloween. I carve it into something acceptable" (p.31)
• "Why did you leave? Because you wouldn't let me love both of us at the same time" (p.34)
• "When you choose to be a poet, you become a place that people walk through and then leave when they are ready" (p.39)
• "There was a moment in my life when I couldn't tell the difference between a window and a mirror. I could look into both and see everything but myself" (p.47)
• "Being black is one of the most extreme sports in America. We don't need to invent new ways of risking our lives because the old ones have been working for decades" (p.59)
• "Forgiveness is the well that all of my water comes from. I pour it over my past, apologize to my reflection. He accepts." (p.83)
• "it doesn't matter if the glass is half full or half empty. There's water in the cup. Drink it and stop complaining." (p.93)

Other reviews

• Angela Tolsma
• thequirkybooknerd

"The long haul" by Alan Buckley (HappenStance, 2016)

Poems from Ambit, The Dark Horse, Oxford Poetry, The Rialto, etc.

"Flame", "Sherbet Lemons" and "Being a beautiful woman" all start well, keep going and end even better. I won't quote from them because it might spoil your future reading of these pieces. "Loch Ness" has a good plot but is too long, or doesn't have enough of a twist.

4 poems in, and I've already read enough to justify the pamphlet. After that though, there's nothing quite as good. "His Failure" uses assonance between pairs of lines.

Other reviews

• Marion Tracy, Carl Tomlinson, Charlotte Gann (There are ghosts, and hauntings: gaps where people have been lost or never born. But time and again I’m struck by the choice of frame)
• Matthew Stewart (This is an unusual pamphlet by an unusual poet, one who quietly grafts and grafts away, before presenting us with sure-footed piece after sure-footed piece.)
• Alison Brackenbury (Buckley’s work is assured, often unshowy: ‘I bring you no fireworks.’ But I remember this claim with admiring disbelief at the end of his astounding poem, ‘Sherbert Lemons’.)

"Rainstorm with goldfish" by Martin Edwards (HappenStance, 2012)

Poems from The Interpreter's House, The North, The Rialto, etc.

"Morning Song", the first poem, begin with the stanza "There was a frog/ memorized/ under ice". Each line-break precedes a surprise. The 2nd stanza is "and a bird-skull/ there/ on the palm of my hand:". Fewer surprises there. Then in the next stanza, 3 surprising comparisons in a row - "little perched ghost,/ go-between,/ empty tent". Such comparisons need to stretch the reader without baffling them. I suspect different readers will have different breaking points. I like "memorized". I don't get "go-between" though I like"little perched ghost".

A few poems (e.g. "Birthmarks") were short, straightforward, and not too interesting. Most poems had some enviable imagery. "The possibility of snow" begins with "The pages of the snow-fall/ are opening, they flicker/ and the little/ derelict school/ shivers", and "Grief" has "All the palaces of your voice were empty;/ all the labyrinths of your fingerprints".

Other reviews

• Hilary Menos, Nikolai Duffy and Matt Merritt (Edwards' subject matter is various, but he treats it all with the same sure, deft touch (Menos); There’s a restraint and precision about Martin Edwards’ work that’s apparent from the first poem here (Merritt))

"Fleche" by Mary Jean Chan (Faber and Faber, 2019)

Poems from Poetry Review, Poetry London, PN Review, London Magazine, Rialto, Magma, etc. The book also won the Costa Book Award for Poetry in 2019. I had trouble liking it. "Practice" was the first poem that I thought ok. The "Riposte" section contains my favourite pieces - "At the Castro", "They Would Have All That". Less so "Names (1)", "Safe Space (II), "11". Later I liked "an eternal &".

At first some of the paraphrasable matter (e.g. in "Vigilance") interested me, but too many poems go on about the same subjects (mother dealing with lesbian daughter; a women wanting to be accepted though she's mistaken for a man and likes woman; multilingualism; assimilation), arbitrary variation being introduced by way of typography - slashes instead of line-breaks; wide-margined double-aligned; stepped lines.

Analogies aren't striking - "as when a great wind / pushes a small boat out to sea / before it is ready" ("Vigilance"); my arms are weak as hand-pulled noodles"" ("song"); "all the sounds a body makes when it becomes its own instrument, rehearsing the songs it has learnt across the centuries" ("One Breath")

"Wish" uses extended analogy - "my lover often says look up!/ as she admires a canopy of green ... my languages are like roots/ gnarled in soil, one and indivisible/ except the world divides me endlessly ... lately I've been trying to write/ a poem that might birth a tree/ a genuine acceptance of the self/ continues to elude me"

The title poem and The window (Shortlisted for the Forward prize for best single poem) are online.

Other reviews

• Alice Wickenden
• Zakia Carpenter-Hall

"Spirit Brides" by Togara Muzanenhamo (Carcanet, 2006)

In "Captain of the Lighthouse" the narrator and his brother are on an anthill, playing make-believe. "We man our lighthouse - cattle as ships. We throw warning lights whenever/ they come too close to our jagged shore. The anthill, the orris-earth/ lighthouse, from where we hurl stones like light in all directions.". At the end the narrator writes that he misses his brother now. It's a rather wordy poem. I like the plot. I liked "Half Untold" except for the format. "Man in the Bowler Hat" was ok. "The Conductor" contrasts a conductor with baton to a head-master with cane. Poems on pages 18-20 seem rather slight.

"Six Francs Seventy-five" is a sestina. "The Dawn Chorus" is a sonnet. The book ends with "Gamiguru", a 10 page piece mostly laid out as prose. He inserts passages of purple prose (with mixed results - I don't think irony's being used), and passages of adjective-rich prose. Here are some phrases that caught my eye

• Turning in the distance are the white tri-sails of a wind farm Strange and quiet - those tall metal ghosts writhing in unison, Their bladed arms glinting like broad scalpels slicing the slow shine Where the last folds of daylight ache before the gathering storm

  How do the turbines writhe?
• the night staggers through the empty streets, the cold wind whistling out of tune (p.28)
• Drivers eating meat-pies, listening to radio shows hosting phone-ins at three in the morning, or playing games to pass the time - counting the centre white lines or cat's eyes, trying to figure out how many pass within ten seconds or so, how many pass in a mile (p.30)
• the German car rolling into the garage as safe as warm honey twirling into a jam jar (p.32)
• These thoughts in the late hour, face after face falling into the dark; each dead portrait lost to hopeless memories framed beneath quiet glass. And tonight they come with stones, whole mobs with sticks and fire - chanting, readying to break every window of the years (p.33)
• The old projector's fan hums through each guillotine changeover, and specks of dust float casually in front of the hot white light of the lens (p.37)
• The nights unfold on flash-lit crests of waves beneath a full moon,/ The wind rushes at frosted windows like the wraith of a blood bull (p.53)
• At meetings they called him Cenotaph because his eyes held the fire of their long lost dead and the spirit of those still fighting (p.59 - the ending)

"Greenfields" by Richard Price (Carcanet, 2007)

Poems from PN Review, etc. 104 pages. For my tastes, it should have been much shorter. Minor memories are insufficiently enlivened by imagery, even when the imagery in itself is good, and there's much dilution. Prose sections are disguised by the use of wordplay, unexpected (puzzling) words, and line-breaks. Poems like "Facts about trout" could have been dropped. Others could have done with editing. Here are some samples -

• "Bungalows crating up the field" (p.8). Good.
• "The shock is the light/ sucked from the Tree/ (I think of me - as just teeth)" (p.9). I don't get this.
• "The stream runkles its sheet over the pebbles" (p.11). Good enough.
• "The inside was elastic/ twined tight/ like a statistic/ for nylon/ gripping the dwindling globe" (p.14). About a golf-ball, but so what? And in what sense like a statistic?
• "Inside, like church, when mum says garden/ she means an English one." (p.50). This is set in Scotland during a heat-wave, so the mother's perhaps confused. The phrasing suggests that "like church" refers to what follows it, in which case I'm confused too.
• "Skew across the road/ a tonne that's jumped the wingmirror,/car scrap in the sprung hawthorn." (p.26). What does "jumped the wingmirror" mean? Why "sprung"? Why the line-breaks?
• "Inside [the wedding rings], ions like mines five-jack up// in a wave's midrise,// froth themselves in charge -/ all so tense they just shine " (p.87). This looks like a merge of ideas - mines afloat on the sea, and gold's atomic-level behaviour - "charge" being a common term. Doesn't work for me.
• "and here's you, sleeping,/ irritable, sifting the air/ as if a hair/ at the back of your tongue/ knew something" (p.89). Maybe there are idioms I'm unaware of. A hair knowing something? At the back of a tongue??

His titles don't help -

• "With is" begins with "To ravel with you in ripening light./ To worry and adore the stacking cups of your spine" - cute enough first lines. The title is a contraction of "Being with you is ..." I guess.
• "Saying the swim" begins with "I am in the two of us at the breast stroke, ... and the pool is not now the municipool". Well, it's not prose.

The "Quilted Leather" section did nothing for me. The "Tube Shelter Perspective" section begins with a quote by Djuma Barnes - "An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties". The background's a trip on the underground, which helps to explain the day-dreaming. I liked fragments of it. Here are three sections, each given a page -

• "Stop, and in a tunnel of radio/ a probe is among moons" (p.57). I don't get it.
• "At the next station/ no detraining, too.// A bomb, or something civil?/ Fishermen in oilskins wave us through/ and we are a submarine:/ the nets have no snags" (p.63). Why invent "detraining" unless it's to allude to "training"? What nets?
• "On the tannoy I can hear/ the muezzin singing/ to Whitechapel's underground gallery.// Crosses have been crissed.// Upstairs the District Line's delays/ percolate in a golden minaret" (p.68). I like the idea, but "Crosses have been crissed" isn't needed to repeat the idea of mingling. Indeed, I think the sentence has minus points - the wordplay is distracting, as is the reference to Christian crosses.

Still in the underground section, p.70 is an aside about names and things. "Balham Station" to "banal" to "Balaam" to "bedlam". Then for some reason oilrigs' names arise - "Piper" and "Thistle" - which lead to "platform". On p.77 he sleeps on the train so he can end the section with "Even at the stops I don't start". Boom boom.

"Open the paper window is a hit'n'miss list poem - "Scaletrix. A red car. A green car -/ they're from my father to my father./ We were just intermediaries", "a tangerine,/ miraculous, the orange for learners", "Black bags of exhausted wrapping./ She definitely said batteries included."

A footnote on p.60 says that "[The Footnote's] rise, like that of free verse, can be traced to the marginalisation of poetry".