"Baffling gravity" by Andrew Sant (Shoestring, 2018)

Little touches. Light wit. Lots that I think I don't understand. I was going to highlight "Gravitational Pull" to illustrate my views, then found that Paul McLoughlin had written about it (see below). I don't see how it's "marvellous poetry all the same" and I'm puzzled by "peaked". Poems like "Mosquito in amber" make me feel I've missed something. I don't understand what's in his mind when in a poem set in an airport waiting room he notes that there are "guys, lofty, in baseball caps (though/ no baseball soars around here)". "Machismo" starts with "Love hit/ Billy, the kid, hard// though it barely/ slowed his appetite/ for wild oats.// That is, his guts/ felt like porridge.// Let's spoon, she moaned/ domestically, in bed".

"The Suicide Note" is over 3 pages long. My concentration drifted. I preferred "The great ocean road" (3 pages, though it could have been a lot less) which compares a 5 day trail of ants across a kitchen floor to an aerial view of a road across open country, then describes a scent-seeking drive to the sea. "Woman in Izmir" is a page long - again, the aesthetic hits my blind spot. In "Year's end" the narrator notes the neighbours' old calendar in the bin, and the new one on the kitchen wall. 12 endangered species replace 12 landscapes. "How effortlessly one calendar replaces another!"

Formats seem pretty arbitrary to me, devaluing the line-break - it's the current fashion.

Other reviews

• Paul McLoughlin (“Gravitational Pull”, is an instructive guide to Sant’s way with poems. Its first line (‘Gravity always proves itself’) is followed by obvious examples and an acknowledgement that possible hypothetical quantums of gravitational energy may be present that are ‘blind / to Einstein’s theory, defiant’. When we then read ‘Balls of unequal mass // it’s reported Galileo dropped / from the Tower of Pisa, a high // Renaissance demonstration, peaked / in a dead-heat’, we might not be being told anything we didn’t already know, but it’s marvellous poetry all the same. Can we let ‘peaked / in a dead-heat’ go by without a nod of acknowledgement? The same might be said for ‘when gravity makes sediment impressive’ and for any number of other examples throughout the collection. The point here is that, just as a recovered cliché restores life to what was dead, so too do lists and thematically-linked poems in the hands of a poet like Sant remind us of what can be done with them, especially in an age when they have become, to their detriment, creative-workshop fodder.)