"Plot and counter-plot" by Helena Nelson (Shoestring Press, 2010)

Some sonnets - loose and tight ones appear on facing pages early on, establishing the stylistic flexibility. There are rhyming pieces that are like Stevie Smith or folk songs - "O" and "Oh" are used. There are short pieces like "Teller" (which has an "ab cd ad cb" rhyme scheme). There are psychological dialogues like "The Hill" where a man leaves a woman to climb a hill alone. It ends with "He doesn't ask about the view from the top./ She doesn't tell him she didn't reach the top.// She might think, 'This is the story of my life'/ but although this the story of her life// that is not what she thinks./ She thinks something else."

"Down with poetry!" by Helena Nelson (Happenstance, 2016)

It includes poems from Unsuitable Poems and The Unread Squirrel. The back cover suggests that poetry is "worthy of serious satire" and that "Some of [the poems] even rhyme". Acknowledgements include Ambit, PN Review, and The Rialto - a heavier list of magazines than many unlight poetry books can boast.

Marianne Moore famously wrote "I, too, dislike it". Ben Lerner has recently published The Hatred of Poetry where he "takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art". In an age where allegedly only poets read poems, and those poems are written by friends, and those friends teach poetry all day, I think skepticism is healthy - even necessary. Standing back to take in the bigger picture (to include the worlds of Flash, stand-up, etc) it's sometimes possible to see things that aren't so obvious to practitioners - the new rules and fashions, the old tricks in new disguises, and maybe the emperor's new clothes.

It does no harm for poets to laugh at themselves. Many of them (sorry, I mean "us") work on the fringes of pretence. And let's face it, some forms are asking for trouble -

Submission Guidelines Do not go gentle into that villanelle Allow yourself a period of remission. Rage, rage against a rhyming hell. Why they exist, no laureate can tell ... Try a sestina. Forget that villanelle! It's not too late, it's really not. Oh well.

Helena Nelson is a practitioner but she's also a publisher. She has to read thousands of poems a year, many from previously unpublished poets. She's also a shrewd reviewer/essayist for PN Review and The Dark Horse. She can see the wood and the trees. She's old enough to have seen waves of fads come and go. People intending to submit to her press are well advised to read this book. Once or twice I blushed as I read it, embarrassed that my tricks had been exposed.

My favourites are "Poetry Virgin", "Bellytalk", "Fillers" (not at all light) and "The Contemporary Poem Explains Itself", whose beginning and end are "I'm not allowed adjectives and adverbs./ Exclamation marks are out too, which is sad./ I can have any amount of verbs, I adore verbs./ My tone is casual, but that's just a front. ... You're supposed/ to go back to the beginning now/ and get to know me better".

"The Unread Squirrel" by Helena Nelson (Happenstance, 2009)

The acknowledgements include "Pap Issue 3" (i.e. my Poetry about Poetry magazine, with its logo that I created with Postscript). Also mentioned is Lighten-Up Online, another magazine I've been in (and P.N. Review, which I haven't). Light verse? Well, some of it I suppose, but it could just as easily be described as witty, formally playful, etc. I don't think one needs to labour over them, though you may well go back and read some again.

"Plodding" is far from mainstream. "Break in the Line" though it's about line-breaks is the most prosaic piece - a strong Flash contender. "The Red Squirrel" is witty (I thought the squirrel was going to be the author). "Submission Guidelines" offers good advice

Do not go gentle into that villanelle. Allow yourself a period of remission. Rage, rage against a rhyming hell.

"xaxa" is the most common rhyme scheme, but there are many other forms. There are rhyming couplets ("The Amazing Adventures of Alphabetsy" is a sort of Abcedarian in couplets). "Rain" (7 lines) and "Half Light" (14 lines) have the same end-rhyme throughout.

Other reviews

• Trevor (goodreads)

"Unsuitable Poems" by Helena Nelson (HappenStance, 2005)

When I send to magazines my habit is to send 3 poems: 2 proper poems and novelty party piece. The party piece is often the one selected - I guess editors want a bit of variety in their magazines, but also these poems might be free of the portentious baggage that can burden my more ernest efforts.

This chapbook of 28 poems includes pieces from Forward collections, "The Dark Horse", etc. There's a prose poem, a very narrow poem, and several rhyming pieces. There are nods to Stevie Smith and Emily Dickinson, and pieces like "Blind Date" bring Wendy Cope to mind.

I found "Slith" and "Mature Student" a little too light. Pieces like "Thumbscrew" are neat.

"Starlight on Water" by Helena Nelson (Rialto, 2003)

Many of these poems are preoccupied not so much with identity but with the borderlines between people and how these can be punctured (by love, encroachment, etc). The I/you relationship dominates even when one party is inanimate. Of these poems I liked "Traveller", "The Invisible Man", "The Shades", and "Completing the Outfit" and many of the Philpott pieces (which are still growing on me).

Forms abound - the sonnets in particular work well. There's also much visual regularity - in at least 80% of the poems all the stanzas have the same number of lines even if there's no rhyme. The rhyming is regular in about a third of the pieces and mostly tight (the couplets in "Inside his house she built her house of words" are perhaps linked more by assonance and consonance than rhyme). Plath/Lawrence-style irregular end-rhyme is used effectively.

Sometimes I had doubts about the endings - too many poems use repeated words to signal closure (which reminds me of the fading repetition of old 45s), and sometimes the ordering of the poems alerts the readers to traits - "Dread" suddenly becomes popular, as does the use of "all" in the final line.

Throughout there's attention to detail and effect, with enough formal and thematic variety to keep everyone happy (one poem even uses bulletmarks!). It deserves to sell well. A sign of the times is that the WWW magazine Snakeskin gets onto the acknowledgements page.

"Mr and Mrs Philpott on Holiday at Aucherawe" by Helena Nelson (Kettillonia, 2001)

It's uncommon to see an even-handed portrayal of a stable couple in poetry. Too often we get an autobiography (one-sided in terms of viewpoint if not blame) charting a break-up. Fictional couples are rarer still, a missed opportunity because the mixed shades of privacy, the revealing habits (how they clean the bathroom), the simple, only partially shared pleasures all offer potentially interesting subject matter.

In this booklet of poems (some free verse, some metred, some rhymed) middle-age is beginning to fade away for the Philpotts and subtle preparations are being made for death. They row sometimes, but all couples do. The title poem (which appeared in The Rialto and The Forward book of poetry 2001) introduces us symbolically to some of the themes. It begins with Philpott, (naked except for his glasses) examining a distant squall from his conservatory, and ends with Mrs Philpott finding consolation in whoever's next to her as she wakes from her dreamworld. The references to underwear, voices and marmalade are picked up in later poems, which adopt various viewpoints as we discover how the couple like to spend their time and how they react to Xmas, socks, and money. We meet the ghosts of partners past - the dead and the abandoned. There's a fuzzying of personal boundaries: her hair is something he sees much more than she does; her sleeping body is never part of her world, only his; introspective monologues are taken over by The Other.

No major crises happen during the timespan of the work - personality is revealed by the response to everyday events, and given depth by the parallax of two individuals' reactions. Lyricism arises naturally from the settings - freed from the characters' dreams rather than pasted from the poet's notebook. There are muted examples, as at the end of Curtains

Cradling his anxious meadow of skin facing the wide, uncurtained window

or Preserves

the flood of light in a forest glade sweet-bitter sunset. Marmalade.

or Cake

It will rise, like heaven, and then be gone.

and intense bursts, most clearly demonstrated in the last, 4 line poem Love.

There's a sense of artistic unity, though there are few direct references between the poems. Rather they provide mutual support, rounding the characters by bringing more of their facets into view. Birds, voices and pinkness weave through the poems both in imagery and observation, binding the work together.

By the end of the pamphlet we feel we've had at least a novella's worth of insight into the couple. So many poetry books are too long nowadays - it's refreshing to see a through-composed collection, the carefully sequenced poems having a cumulative effect. Maybe there's hope yet for the pamphlet form.