I liked the first poem "Melting" more on a second reading - how various water-related details sketched the beginning of a friendship. I wasn't impressed by "Norfolk Winter '72", "The Woman Who Cries", "Dreaming of the Professor Who Gave Me the Sack" or "How on Earth Would We Have Managed" (about ghosts?). I liked "Killer Whale", perhaps because I read it as Flash. I can't see that "Hollywood Hotel" is worth writing. Even if it is, why all the line-breaks? So I think I'm missing something.
Other reviews
- Sean O'Brien (laconic, undeceived ... She works in a vein that many readers will recognise, at times recalling Hugo Williams in her patient orchestration of apparently “ordinary” language which she makes memorable by sentence construction and a good ear. ... Not all the poems here are so successful. “Dreaming of the Professor Who Gave Me the Sack” is almost there, but ends with a repetition that should have been ironed out. Yet Beckett’s unselfconscious alertness is appealing.)
- uncomfortable contemporary truths are again skilfully rendered in ‘How on Earth Would We Have Managed’, which has the quality of a found piece that utilises the authenticating elements of its voices to evoke the chilling thisness of the refugee crisis. It doesn’t always land on the spot, however: the latter poem doesn’t need its second half and the near industry standard dislocation that ends ‘Killer Whale’ feels a trifle clunky - Martin Malone (Interpreter's House)
