"Like starlings falling" by Dillon Jaxx (Nine arches press, 2026)

Poems from Magma, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, Stand, etc., and several competition prize-winning poems. I found the poems challenging and often rewarding.

Typography

The first person singular pronoun is (I think) always "i" rather than "I".

The poems' appearance varies more than the content - instead of punctuation symbols, p.30 uses "#", p.31 uses "/", p.36 uses ".", p.64 uses small hollow circles. Some poems use a few spaces instead of a punctuation symbol. "unweather" has no line/paragraph breaks, using "|" to separate phrases. I don't understand the point of such superficial variety.

"Y2k" is over 1.5 pages of full-aligned text without line/paragraph breaks, using commas and full-stops but not beginning sentences with upper case. Again, I don't see what's wrong sticking with invisible convention rather than using distracting, quirky alternatives.

Food

There are frequent references to the family and food. The eucharist is frequently referenced -

• In "distended family" (an allusion to "extended family" I presume), foodstuffs are used as adjectives - "an orange squash breeze", "watch with biscuit eyes" but also "lick the ends of batteries to check how much of life is left." The ending is "the congregation mumbling prayers// as though they are ingredients for a meal/ in a language they never plan to serve".
• In "edible family" there is "me eating my nails, my father eating his rage"
• "i eat surrounded by dead people. my brother's// beautiful, bruised cadaver at the head of the table" (p.66)
• "you/ filling that hole in the ground       me eating what remains" (p.51)
• "wet limbs slide over my gums/ as i wait for the body of christ to dissolve" (p.75)

Misc poems

• In "before we were bodies" some lines are repeated with minor variations "we were windows opening out ... i didn't know i had an obsession with locks ... before we were bodies we were doors left on the latch ... before we were bodies we were dutch doors ... before we were bodies we were half this half that .. we were bodies we were doors opening"
• In "w-inter" "on my mother's tongue the initial sound/ of winter is silent much like the first leaf falling not knowing if others will follow ... losing itself to the freezing grip not knowing if it will ever dress again get warming again/ just letting itself go"
• "the Fisher Price hospital" is a page of full-aligned text without line/paragraph breaks, using commas and full-stops but not beginning sentences with upper case. It could so easily have been Flash.
• In "press one for emergencies" "a paper aeroplane drifts in through the window/ and lands on my bed, it smells of strawberry/ sweets and freshly cracked days. i unfold it/ to find three words think yourself better"
• In ":to cease to be visible", the persona wonders why someone's absence wasn't noticed for "one hundred and fifty-seven days" (why not "157 days"?). They imagine being a detective, asking the mother, cashier and neighbour. At the end "i ... watch as i rub a window into the steam on my mirror and think about my own disappearance. wondering when anyone will notice my absence, and how long i've been gone. how much i've been missing"
• "geography of falling", in 10 numbered parts, looks at the use/etymology of "fall" "in Italian/ the word for pregnant gravidanza shares its roots with gravity." The final part is "if you feel yourself fall,/ put your hands out, if you feel/ someone else begin to fall/ hold your hands out"

Misc forms

• There are too many heavily redacted poems - 5 are mostly black.
• "boy" is a sort-of acrostic. The first 9 left-aligned lines begin with "b". The next 5 left-aligned lines begin with "o". The final 5 left-aligned lines begin with "y". The words in bold say "boy leaves the world with a question".
• "my beautiful bees" is a near mirror poem. It starts with "every time the doorbell screams or the phone stops breathing/ i see a dead message and vomit up my beautiful bees/ upstairs footsteps detonate in the electric lining of my brain/ water mixes into the wiring until i'm brace brace in the landing strip/ underneath my bleeding fingernails"
• "summer fruits" is a shape poem. Don't know why.
• There's a scattered sequence called "disappearing sonnet", the first having 14 lines, the second 13, etc. All begin with "my brother has a knife in his hands".
  Elsewhere in a blog she writes that "The form allows me to play with words, starting with the title disappearing son(net), with rhyme and ideas. The ever-present knife in the poem is the addiction, the knife edge addicts live on, the danger they expose themselves to every time they use, the pain they cause themselves and those that love them, the destruction but also the tool they hold with which only they can cut themselves free. ... I decided to split the sonnet into its stanzas and pepper it throughout the book, like breadcrumbs, or blood trails, like footsteps or the chorus of a song".
  Much of that sounds fair enough, but before it started disappearing was it ever a sonnet? Some of the pieces in the sequence struggle because of the constraint. It ends well - the 12th one is "my brother has a knife in his hand, threatens/ to cut the family photo album to shreds,/ brother cuts into himself instead". The 14th is "my brother has a knife in his hand, now all of us are bleeding".

"Family money" by Nina Bawden (Virago, 1992)

London. Fanny Pye has been a widow for 18 months. Her husband had been a diplomat. Her son Harry is married to Poppy. They have 3 children. Fanny is injured trying to stop street crime. Her daughter Isabel (4 years younger than Harry, married to Max with 3 children) visits her in hospital, as does Fanny's sister Delia, a Baroness with a daughter Rebecca (the youngest, shyest) and 2 other daughters.

The man injured during the street crime might die. Fanny's discharged back to her 5 floor house. The garden is on the canal where narrow boats have moored illegally for decades. Ivy (who used to babysit for her and has been a friend and paid-helper) visits. Her husband is disabled. Delia's daughter Rebecca (26) moves in as housekeeper. Fanny doesn't like being suddenly treated like an old, helpless woman. When with Harry watching a young couple she clumps him with her generation rather than theirs. She wants to sell up and buy Ivy a house without telling her. Fanny's kids don't object.

The crime victim dies. The police try to get her to recall the incident - now a murder case. The next door neighbour's house catches fire, damaging the top floors of Fanny's house (including the attic of souvenirs), thus delaying the already agreed sale. Fanny thinks that Isabel is having an affair (actually she's pregnant). Fanny used to have affairs, we now learn.

Ivy's husband has a stroke, then dies. She's planning to move in with her son's family (Fanny is shocked to discover that the house is twice the size of her own), thus spoiling Fanny's plan of getting her a house. She tells Fanny she should downsize. Fanny wonders about giving the house to Rebecca. Fanny meets Jake, a boat owner. She thinks he may have been involved with the crime.

Fanny meets Tom who she and Pippa knew 40 years before, a widower now. "It had been a pleasant meeting but now the first flush of surprised recognition was over they would become strangers with nothing to say to each other". But they start seeing each other. He sometimes stays in her spare room - he has troubled siblings. He proposes. She rejects, saying that he could be her tenant. Harry's suspicious until he meets Tom. At the end, Fanny's leaving to visit a friend in Pakistan. She's aware of her bouts of inexplicable anger, panic, etc.

Each crisis - Fanny's hospitalisation, the fire - triggers re-evaluations between family members. Fanny re-evaluates her past, her marriage. Conversations come under analysis - "'You usually call me Ma when you are displeased with me'"; "It was simply a coded way of expressing a mild reproach". I couldn't see that Felix's family were worth mentioning.

Other reviews

• bookertalk

"The Final Play" by David Baldacci

An audio book. A novella.

US college footballer Swift has broken a record set by Ruggles decades before. Ruggles disappeared down the players' tunnel and was never seen again. A wig and gown had been found down there. Swift's clever science friend North is curious and investigates. They find the dead body of Linda Daltray in her wig shop. They track down Vilacheck, a player who had been somewhere down the tunnel at the time. He owns a bar - how did he get the money for it? Molly, North's friend, arranges a meeting with Gloria, 75 y.o. widow of the college benefactor. She admits to having an affair with Ruggles. She says he didn't like football that much.

North tells the police where to dig to find the body. He accuses his father of involvement with Ruggles' death. His father's girlfriend of the time was Linda's mother - who subsequently bought a shop. She lured Ruggles down the tunnel. His father says that when he confronted Ruggles, Ruggles said he wanted to sneak away and give up football. His father shoots Swift (a flesh wound, but bad enough to limit his sport career) then kills himself.

4 years later, having got a PhD at MIT, North returns. Swift and Molly marry.

No.

Other reviews

• Kartik Narayanan (I have so many issues with it concerning the characters, the plot, the setting — basically everything. ... inserting words like quantum, time shift etc do not elevate the book ... The main character cannot be awesome suddenly just by imagining he is a photon undergoing quantum tunnelling. ... the only saving grace is that it is short.)

"The expanded earth" by Mikey Please

An audio book

On July 2nd - "The Descent" - people shrank to 10% of their height. Many people didn't survive the shrinking (pacemakers, artificial hips, cochlea implants, etc, didn't shrink). Millions of years ago, therapods suffered the same shrinkage. Elizabeth Godwin runs a research project in the New Forest about plankton being a superbeing - their dead and living bodies forming a binary code. She wants to conect with it, with God. A young researcher Lazlet wants to work with her. He creates a connectome so people can connect with a pool of plankton. Religious fanatics take over the project, taking Lazlet away.

There are various little, independent stories - "Elsewhere". All astronauts but one die. She returns to earch with a memorystick containing data about July 2nd. On an island, battling parties stop arguing because there's so much more land now. Some people see the collective plankton as a God correcting the faults of mankind.

Giles wakes, shrunken. He wants to find his daughters - Eva, who has a weak heart, and Sadie. Seeking a phone charger he finds a tent village of survivors. They build a car needing 6 to drive it. Cats and dogs are frightening. Alwyn is killed with a scalpel by a woman in red (actually it's paprika, to keep animals away). Children have set up their own tribes and try to kill the adults using fireworks, etc.

Matilda (a paramed) and Bob (Police) attend a traffic accident where people's clothes are left, and there's a shrunken body. They visit a nearly building. Shrunken Godwin is there. She thinks her experiment might have caused people to shrink in the range of a km or 2, and is worried that Lazlet will cause an event that will affect the world. She thinks that in a coma aren't affected so she advices people to take barbituates. Matilda and Bob try to inject as many people as possible as the predicted event gets close.

Giles returns to the building where he worked. The women who killed Alwyn is there. She says that Richard isn't a priest. He's fanatical about the end of the world and is killing people. Giles finds his fully grown daughters and Matilda, who's an ex-lover?

Oh, it's the first part of a trilogy. It has elements of SF and fantasy that don't always mesh - wouldn't small people have such high-pitched voices and such different ears that communication with normal sized people would be difficult. I like several of the ideas.

Other reviews

• echoesinanemptyroom
• potsandplots (The Expanded Earth contains two central stories. One is set before “the descent” (where humanity shrank), and the other is in essence a quest, where a disparate group of adults is shepherding a gaggle of children to safety. ... This quest aspect of the story is strangely reminiscent of Watership Down. ... The other thread offers an explanation of how the descent occurred. Hubris and science gone wrong. An eccentric scientist, their research derided, stumbles upon something incredible. This work is appropriated by people who don’t understand its significance, triggering a cataclysm. These events centre around Matilda, a paramedic, as she tries to cope with, understand and contain the initial shrinking outbreak. ... While these are the two main threads, there is a third strand that is arguably even better. A potpourri of stories from around the world, giving wider context to the tale and showing us glimpses of what is happening away from the main story )
• goodreads (3.83 rating; 1,015 ratings)

"Midwife on the Orient Express" by Fiona McArthur

An audio book.

Prologue - a 12 year old Lucas sees his mother drown in the sea in Australia.

Now he's a world-famous infertility doctor. It's 23rd December. He's with his 80 y.o. grandmother Winsome in Venice, waiting to catch the London train. She's done the trip several times. Now a widow, she's hoping to meet Max again.

Australian Kelsie by chance is waiting there too. She left Lucas at the altar 15 years before, when she was 18, because she suddenly had career ambitions. It was his grandmother's example that had made her dream of doing this journey one day. She's manager of a Maternity Unit.

They're both attractive and single. They meet. Lucas is still grumpy. Winsome sees an opportunity to do some matchmaking. She sees that Max, now a widower, is on the train.

A passenger, Anna, gives birth. Kelsie and Lucas are impressed by each other's handling of the breach birth, and sleep together. After, Kelsie thinks that Lucas (still) doesn't respect her abilities enough, and he doesn't want to be led up the garden path again. He's helicoptered from Calais to a patient in London who thinks she's about to give birth. Kelsie and Winsome talk. Kelsie decides that Lucas doesn't have a controlling personality.

Epilogue - Max and Winsome are married. Kelsie is giving birth.

No. Decisions and tension built round very little.

Other reviews

• goodreads (3.74 rating; 334 ratings)

"Tomorrow's woman" by Greta Bellamacina (Andrew McMeel publishing, 2020)

Her work has appeared in the Guardian, The Times, Vogue, London Magazine.

There's a 6+ page forward by Robert Montgomery. He writes

• "Greta writes in a kind of reinvented English where inanimate objects are filled with life"
• "As a poet, you should struggle and push against the walls of the language you write in; and Bellamacina does this to new levels, and perhaps more brilliantly than any poet of her generation, creating new phrasings in English, which make at first only musical sense"
• "poetry in English, to be new, needs to forget the English language as much as possible, the heavy weight of all its structured precedents, and especially the terrible dulling administrative English we are forced to use every day. Twenty years ago I began to look for a poet who could do that - when I found Greta, I finally found that poet"

The section headings sound promising - "Tomorrow's woman", "Pregnancy", "Love", "Loss, grief, and thunder". So, here are some extracts: all sentences -

• she has loved all the women she has heard/ in a throat hood/ behind an eye inhaling rain. (p.3)
• Hands like stolen trees/ stuck up in the fog,/ a library card to Jerusalem/ only human in waves// a courtyard of scarlet fire/ closed so far down into itself. (p.4)
• Our child hasn't learnt his knees/ or the broken dreams of the Internet.// There is only our unprescripted love,/ not even a word yet/ but for you it's Modernism. (p.7)
• The sea birds come to show their support/ spiring pendulums, dead and still alive -/ small airports of gathered whale processions/ and invisible life// living namesake threats. (p.10)
• Hair of a horse/ over a faded clock,// modern hair like rainfall/ hunched blackbird dampness// sun beast isles/ burning in its nest. (p.19)
• The bed remains ancient in its ritual of worship/ a personal attack against strangers/ made up of all its own Trojan wars/ hung in literature, undebated. (p.22)
• The Internet is full of eagles, they cry out from all the/ isolated fullness, pushing like bread// they remind you of a storybook. (p.30)
• Viagra water flickering through morning tea/ tribes of water burning the air,/ and white heat that is a renamed cover version of water. (p.34)
• Before there was anything/ there were the stars touching time with hope,// before there was anything/ love was still blind in the darkness,// all of wonder above you,/ where you put it, up high. (p.48)
• Shaking the locking organed funfairs// the daytime observes its place to the sun,/ bewitched by the size of the hills (p.57)
• We have become old dreams/ lying on hourglass traps/ boarded up like embarrassed commitments (p.76)
• We assure ourselves 7:59, O'children/ lifting up our children,/ embarrassed angels. (p.77)
• There is no allotment for this blue rehearsal// we have replaced our faces like old caretakers,/ overwinged by the thought of secret exits// bluer than the untangle of a ballroom. (p.86)
• The night continues to note down the morning dawn// it breaks slowly, gentle like a smile/ ragged with hand-peddles from a mountain seascape. (p.89)

"Phosphorescent" is my favourite.

"It was you" by Jo Platt

An audio book.

The blurb mentioned a Book Group and a woman opening herself up to new possibilities, so I started reading, but I got 25% through without feeling that it was going anywhere. So DNF.

Other reviews

• goodreads (3.78 rating - 2,074 ratings)