"Greekling" by Kostya Tsolakis (Nine Arches Press, 2023)

One way or another I've trouble appreciating many of these poems. It's a "Poetry Book Society Recommendation"

• I don't get the line-breaks of "Tribute of Children". For example, "clinging to her waist like wax-drip on the candlestick" is spread across 3 lines.
• "1991" is 3 fairly rectangular stanzas, yet it reads like prose.
• "freedom or death" uses gaps instead of punctuation - fair enough, but why 9 lines per stanza? Why such short lines?
• "chatroom '99" includes "lol i mean what u rly in2 ;)/ breathless adolescence/ gives way to/ fostering alterity" which I think I get, but I didn't think it means much.
• "First Time" and "Nocturne for the American Boy I Pulled at Popstarz" are the sort of poems that I (a heterosexual) wouldn't have bothered writing.
• I like "marble bf", though I'd prefer the lines at least twice as long.
• "Kostya as a Failed State, 2011-13" grew on me.
• I don't understand the layout of "Anastylosis"
• "Patrick" is a mirror poem (title = last line, etc)
• "Vine" stays mostly on theme - "Gift from my forefather./ ... do your roots absorb/ every voice cast/ in this yard? ... Each leaf you bear,/ a word from an ancestor./ I pick them ... I cling/ to our name - I,/ your very last leaf/ closest to the blank sun" - but oh dear, those tell-tale short lines again.

"The Usborne Creative Writer's Handbook" by Katie Daynes and Megan Cullis (Usborne, 2017)

For Young Adults? The style might make you think so. The content is useful for any budding writer and includes tip on writing blogs. At the end there are non-graphical sections explaining punctuation and listing common grammatical mistakes. I'm less convinced by the thesaurus-style lists of words on various topics at the end.

"A bird in the hand" by Ann Cleeves

An audio book.

Tom French, a twitcher (bird watcher), is found dead (head bashed in by a cylindrical object) on the Norfolk coast by young Adam (another twitcher). Adam's father (a magistrate whose young wife left him when Adam was little) doesn't want fragile Adam involved with investigations, so he asks George Palmer-Jones (a twitcher, but also a retired person with connections) to investigate. His wife Molly helps too. He gets the police report and starts questioning other twitchers. He discovers that Tom used to be friends with Sally, who has a child, Barnaby. She once tried to kill herself. He was also friendly with his female probation officer - Tom was found guilty of possessing grass 2 years before, though he denied it after.

Several people are introduced, each with a reason (though rarely sufficient for murder) and several with alibis (not always 100%). Sometime we have their point-of-view. Adam has a portable bicycle. Sally is getting threatening mail. Cranshaw (a teacher who looks after his old mother) sent a hate letter to parents of kids who Tom tour-guided. Dennis, a strong chef working at the same White Lodge hotel as Tom, might be smoking cannabis. Terry, also working at the hotel, is mentally defective. He saw Tom with a binoculared person on the day of his murder. Rob had failed to get the international tour-guiding job that Tom had been offered just before his death. Adam has a secret. He starts being friends with Tina. Ella runs the Windmill cafe. Vera, newly divorced, chases birds and young men.

Ella held a party to celebrate a TV show about the place. George saves Adam from the well in the windmill ruins (he was probably meeting someone there).

George realises that the threatening letters to Sally were written by Cranshaw. He goes to the Scilly Isles because 3 of the main characters had been there at the same time.

Sally has been lying. In the Scilly Isles she was at a party with Tom. But Pete was in love with her, and she with him. George thinks that Pete is the father. Pete was arrested for a drug offence but Tom gallantly took the blame because he knew Sally loved Pete. Pete won't leave his wife.

Cranshaw's near madness is revealed - he's bitter about not having married and was irritated when Tom belittled his reputation. But Adam was the killer - hearing voices. Why, wondered George, had his father wanted George to conduct the enquiry?

I like it, especially the description of the twitching community - the holidays abroad; the long journeys across the country if a sighting's reported; the abandoned houses where they stay; ringers vs twitchers; the dedicated twitchers vs the tick-and-run types. Some villages cater for twitchers even though they find them strange. In the cafe there's a blackboard savaged from the closed school on which info for twichers is written.

Other reviews

• Sue Magee
• goodreads

"An Italian girl in Brooklyn" by Santa Montefiore

An audio book.

New York, 1979. Evelina (62) prepares a thanksgiving meal. She left Italy 30+ years before. Franklin, her husband (76) is there. So are Dan (lazy and flighty), Aldo (hard-working, with a long-term partner) and Eva-Marie, their children. Friend Toppino and widow aunt Madalena are there.

Then it's 1934 in Northern Italy. Evelina's father is an avant-garde writer. Her mother's an art-dealer of sorts. Evelina sees her mother having an affair They live in a run-down villa. She lives a sheltered life, home-taught. Her older sister Bernadetta is pretty. She agrees to an arranged marriage. Her husband hits her. Meanwhile Evelina has fallen love with Ezra, a dressmaker's son. A jewish girl had been set up for him. He and Evalina make love. But he's a jew. We learn about the various race laws. Ezra and his family die. Evelina's little brother Bruno suddenly dies. Evelina leaves to start life again with Aunt Madelena in New York.

She turns down a long-term boyfriend her age. She meets classics lecturer Franklin and they marry. They sail over to Italy. The Italians like Franklin (his Latin helps). Evelina still can't forget Ezra. Bernadetta is happily remarried.

What sort of contact has there been between Evelina and her family? Minimal, it seems.

Greenwich Village, 1959. She sees Ezra and immediately sleeps with him (she's married with kids, but her husband's busy). Ezra had returned to the village after the war only to be told by his jewish ex that Evaline was married in New York (she wasn't). Ezra had moved to New York 5 years before, repairing violins. But he didn't try to track her down?. She considers divorce. She discusses a friend's divorce with Franklin. She mentions Ezra to Franklin, who suggests that he become a family friend. Their kids look upon him as their father's friend as much as their mother's. There are many kinds of love, they all agree. When Franklin's dying, he tells his wife that he wants her to be with Ezra. She writes down her life so that her children can read it and understand.

"Don't ask me what I mean" by Clare Brown and Don Paterson (eds) (Picador, 2003)

Subtitled "Poets in their own words", it's the edited highlights of prose that poets wrote for the Poetry Book Society when it selected a book of theirs. As the editors point out, postmoderns and performance poets' books weren't chosen.

• Charles Causley wrote that "The effect of a poem (but not necessarily its 'meaning', whatever that implies) should be instantaneous. At the same time, the poem should conceal certain properties that may only reveal themselves very gradually". I think poets and readers differ widely about the relative importance of these two properties of poems.
• "Performing an act of literary criticism on your own work is a little like do-it-yourself dentistry: a sloppy affair at best, not to mention the pain involved for writer and reader alike" (Billy Collins)
• Michael Donaghy is entertaining.
• "How might we be educated by anticipatory grief? And how, finally, do we love a world that's always disappearing? ... Grief, it seems to me, is an education in both beauty and sorrow" (Mark Doty), p.60
• "In retrospect I feel that during the year I worked hardest on Elegies it was only within each poem as I wrote it that my life had any meaning" (Douglas Dunn), p.70
• "the Muse deserted [Wordsworth] and in his late work the marvellous original poems become boring ones ... Also Wordsworth had no sense of humour. Humour is valuable. It makes a poet realise that he's not as important as he thinks he is" (Gavin Ewart), p.78
• W. S. Graham‘s effort isn’t very reader-friendly.
• Grigson writes “I regret a certain snobbery in these sentences.” Indeed.
• Thom Gunn deals with the assignment seriously
• "there has been considerable expectation that poets from Northern Ireland should 'say' something about 'the situation' but in the end they will only be worth listening to if they are saying something about and to themselves" (Seamus Heaney), p.102
• "the concept of poetry ... as self expression has always repelled me", (p.105); "Conventional metres and conventional rhyme schemes ... can nowadays only be used for light and occasional verse" (p.106) (John Heath-Stubbs)
• ”I accept, though with some reluctance, that my poetry is generally regarded as difficult” … I am baffled and saddened when readers, friendly as much as unfriendly, approach my poems as cryptograms to be decoded” (Geoffrey Hill), p.116
• ”I think that legitimate difficulty (difficulty of course can be faked) is essentially democratic” (Geoffrey Hill), p.116)
• "a poet goes so deeply inside himself to write a poem that he ceases to be himself at all" (P.J. Kavanagh), p.137
• "ability to face outwards, using personal predicament as a spur and not an end in itself, is almost totally lacking. The indifference of the educated public to poetry is justified ... the future of English poetry is bound tight to the future of the working class. Laments over the decay of religion, the loss of this or that sex partner, the glories of Italian summer holidays &c., are meaningless and destructive",(Christopher Logue), p.149
• "in a sense most poems are love poems; that because a poet is someone for whom no experience is complete until he has written about it, most poems are elegies as well" (Michael Longley (p.152)
• "To me, the thriller at its best is close in spirit to poetry, which, however it expresses itself ... must always be a contemplation or unravelling of mystery" (Blake Morrison), p.187
• "England has a tradition that emphasises the role of tone in poetry and rightly so" (Craig Raine), p.222
• "The sestina strikes me as the poetic equivalent of an instrument for removing Beluga caviar from horses' hooves - bizarrely impressive, but finally useless" (Craig Raine), p.223
• "The penalty of being a lyric poet is the law of diminishing returns, the temptation to repeat oneself unconsciously or even consciously", (R.S. Thomas) p.285
• "Is God dead? The very mention of his name and of prayer in a poem now arouses the derision of jobbing reviewers. Generally speaking, comtemporary English poetry is cheap and shallow as a result", (R.S. Thomas) p.286
• "I believe with past writers on the subject that metaphor is the supreme sign of poetic ability. Without this gift a lyric seems to me to be generally speaking dull. That is why I find so much of contemporary poetry dull", (R.S. Thomas) p.286
• "I can foresee a time when poetry as we have known it will, like the Marxist state, wither away, and only poets be left", (Peter Whigam) p.301
• "In keeping with fashion rather than strict honesty, I put the poems to do with unhappiness and searching at the end of the book, but the wheel has gone round often since then and most people read slim volumes backwards", (Hugo Williams) p.309
• "one cannot help remembering how few poets have improved much after forty if indeed they didn't get a lot worse", (Hugo Williams) p.312
• "Listening to English writers talking about surrealism is about as fruitful as listening to Frenchmen discussing a cricket match", (John Hartley Williams) p.317
• "Pity for the poets who have no subject save themselves", (Christopher Logue) p.328

"The House of Ashes" by Stuart Neville

An audio book

A couple (Damian an architect; Sarah an ex social worker who recently tried suicide - her close-3rd person PoV) have moved into a Northern Ireland house that had been burnt down and restored. She has trouble washing away brown/red stains on the stone floor. A old woman, Mary who had lived there is now in a care home. She was born in the house's cellar to a woman who was held captive there. Mary's first-person PoV tells us more. Ester's PoV (she was brought to the house later) adds detail to life in the house. Ester's mother then father died, and the married rev who took her in abused her (and his own daughter), his wife knowing.

Damian (who grew up locally) knew about the house's past (60 years before) but hadn't told his wife. She goes to the local grocers to know more. Mary was the only survivor when 4 others died in the house. People think the house is haunted.

Damian is protective (controlling?) and is short tempered. His father was (falsely?) imprisoned for owning explosives. The shopkeeper suspects he had something to do with the fire. The electrician, Tony, tells her that Damian's father is nasty, and Damian no better. Damian, like the men in the house 60 years earlier, is kind just after he's been nasty. Sarah's friends had told her early in the relationship that he was controlling her.

She visits Mary. She says that she didn't set light to her house - she'd heard someone break in. She says what happened on the night she escaped for the first time - how a policeman had visited, how Ester had made a run for it. The men had disagreed about what to do.

Sarah runs away. Tony helps her. Damian and his father catch them. His father violently assaults Tony. Damian takes Sarah back to the house, apologises, locks her in.

We learn how Mary escaped. She murdered. She's haunted by children (her dead brothers and sisters). Sarah sees them too. She digs up some skeletons under the house. Sarah attacks Damian in self-defence. She calls the police.

Damiam seems so unpleasant that I thought he must be involved in a twist. Maybe, I thought, he kills his father to save his wife? But no.

There's a tendency (here, and in similar novels that I've recently read) to use nouns where a verb is more normal - "a scream came out of her mouth" rather than "she screamed".

"The river" by Jane Clarke (Bloodaxe, 2015)

Poems from Rialto, North, Acumen, Ambit, Stinging Fly, etc.

The first poem, "Honey", is a disappointing start, and poems like "The Blue Bible" seem slight to me. I like the plot of "The Suitcase" and several other poems. The plot of poems like "Cows at Dugort" doesn't impress though, and it's only the plots that interest me. "River at Dawn" begins with "The Shannon moves through morning mist/ under the arches of Banagher Bridge, steady and slow as a draught horse in harness", which is gentle. Then "A row boat skims the surface with a whisper ... line in, catch, pull back, release". Then a heron rises. I can see how this captures the moment. But the moment's been caught before.

Other reviews

• Tracy Youngblom (To say that Jane Clarke’s debut collection, The River, is accessible is not to criticize it, but to honor it with its due. ... The collection’s narrative moves roughly in chronological order, from poems that describe a childhood spent watching her parents’ farm and care for animals, through the desire for “leaving, making lives / of our own,” to the establishment of an adult life which turns out to be, after all, not so separate from the past.)