"Faber New Poets 16" by Rachel Curzon (Faber and Faber, 2016)

She's a Bridport runner up, with poems in Rialto, Poetry London, Magma, etc. I had trouble finding extended sections that I liked amongst these 17 pages of poetry. I liked parts of "Hydra" (which is in parts) e.g. - When I stepped down onto the platform/ I pretended to look for someone I knew and I painted a picture with my fingers./ I told them it was my mother.// They took it from me before the paint was dry./ Draw a nice houses, now, they told me.

Parts of other poems appealed too - Recently the sun tried to set/ but long branches held it back,/ tutting a little. It's summer./ Days are meant to finish late (p.16). I didn't like "Postcard", "Ultrasound" or "Worst Winters. "Exhibit" is mostly ok - I would like to show you my halo ... about my head, so attentive like a migraine ... I wore one in a band about my throat ... Soon my wrists earned little halos of their own. Perhaps "Question" is my favourite - another monologue with discontinuities in the voice of a mentally troubled person.

The pamphlet ends with "The Catch" (a baby - plaything? dead? someone else's? - is retrieved from the river - I put her to my dripping breast and find she fits) and "Happy Ending" (a hungry baby in a tree by a playground isn't attended to by the narrator. After hours someone else comes along).

Other reviews

• Jenny Gorrod (These images and many others in the collection add up to an intensely heightened sense of alienation and opposition to an ordinary accepted reality.)
• Sean O'Brien (the selection of Curzon’s work is a little erratic)
• Rachel Curzon’s poems (no. 16) are most effective where most elliptical and epigrammatic. Tending towards the confessional mode, Curzon’s first pamphlet is more striking when it is less particular. Her simplistic diction is understated, and this is crucial to the comedy of the attack on middle-class aspiration in ‘Ultrasound’. However, this becomes more dangerous once the poems move to consider questions of motherhood, personhood, and ownership (‘The Catch’) - Laura McCormick Kilbride, Cambridge Quarterly
• a remarkable demonstration of how someone like Plath can be a poetically useful, rather than merely totemic, influence on the way to finding one’s own voice. … . In [‘Ultrasound’], Curzon brilliantly uses the cross-purposes of inner/outer dialogue in a form of extremis –  the downright odd situation of a hospital scan – to yield another exploration of existential angst and control offset by powerlessness. - Martin Malone (Interpreter's House)