"Tormentil" by Ian Humphreys (Nine Arches Press, 2023)

The collection won the RSL's "Literature Matters" award while in progress. Poems come from Bad Lilies, Poetry Birmingham, Poetry London, Poetry review, Rialto, The Dark Horse, etc.

The book (and title poem) begins usefully with "I can't face the big stuff/ so I comb the moors/ for a tiny yellow flower"

• There's interesting imagery on p.14 - e.g. an earthworm is a "silent concertina"
• "Lady Luck" has centred lines. All the lines have a big gap somewhere, except for one line which has two gaps. Some of the gaps are replacements for punctuation. Some aren't. It ends with "On the sea-front      heads turned like waltzers/ the admired your blue-black hair       they gave you extra chips/ Sometimes      they touched you for luck"
• I've read "Gay Bar" by Jeremy Atherton Lin so "Pansies" looks a bit light. I like "rubber pup at the Queer Rights in Chechnya rally" more.
• I like "Walltown", how it wanders while staying on-theme. It starts by considering dry-stone walls - their disrepair, the lack of skilled repairers. The narrator found 4 dead foxes in a walled off field. The biggest wall that the narrator knows of is 30ft high, big enough to hold a river back. But what do the walls in ancient woodland hold back? In his pub they found a bricked-up mummified cat, there to ward off evil spirits. The narrator saw a horse kick down a section of wall. It sniffed the fallen stones, looked into the next field, then decided to stay put.
• There are some tidy plots. In "Petrified", the narrator, about to phone the hospital, sees an insect close to oozing sap. Will it become immortal? The narrator's indecision immobilises him/her. S/he dead-heads roses in the morning's bright stickiness, sweat beading his/her brow.
• "There's a walrus on my windscreen" is based on a cute idea but it's rather too long.
• "When trees burn" After Philip Larkin rhymes!
• I think I've seen "Punch and Judy on the West Yorkshire Moors" before. I still like it.
• I often run out of patience with poems like "Paucity". This time I rather liked it.
• I like "Discarded wardrobe on Deansgate" though it sounds to me like a piece of Flash by (say) Meg Pokrass
• "tormentil +" is tidy. The symmetric petals are compared to compass points, then the poem ends with "why do I feel lost/ when a thousand compasses/ guide the way?"
• "Falling galaxies" starts well - "It's raining stars over the high moor,/ the black sky flecked with slow cinders// coughed from the lungs of a great fire" - and the ending is ok - "and few a few seconds/ my words whiten the cold night air/ like chalk on a blackboard. Like a question."

p.35 and p.38 aren't promising. Nor are p.45, p.48, p.52, p.54, p.65. Overall there are more poems of interest than I usually see in a book.

Other reviews

• Steve Whitaker (the psychological obliteration of ‘Remote’ is mitigated in propitiatory, and profoundly affecting, fashion, as the architecture of long-term memory is circumscribed by the locators of the present – television repeats and Tupperware boxes for favourite cakes. ... above all else, and beyond the much-needed recalibration of attitudes towards homosexuality and prejudice through the medium of acerbically employed wit, lies the mechanism of escape. )