"The Great Animator" by Roy Marshall (Shoestring Press, 2017)

There are poems from many good paper magazines - Ambit, Magma, New Walk, Stand, The Rialto, etc - and also from some of the best online ones - Antiphon, The Compass, The High Window, etc. He's becoming a reliable performer at a high level.

The first section has many beasts, especially birds (though a persona admits s/he's not a twitcher) and fish. In the first poem, "The Horses", road-side horses are the one constant over the years as the persona gains children and loses distant friends/relatives - "Blossom is blown to blizzard". "Wing" (about looking at a detached bird's wing) begins with "If I'd looked it up later", then has "If I could have looked beyond the raw, torn joint" then ends with "But what it lacked was all I saw ... as rooks mocked ...", whose message I'm missing - maybe that there's beauty to be found in dead parts if one researches and isn't distracted by noisy, teasing life. "Oyster" is a new take on the "ship at Ground Zero" story. "Pity the angels" is a worthwhile addition to a sub-genre I'd thought already full ("A drone can recognize co-ordinates/ but not the family of the bride"). "Morocco" mentions the Algeciras to Tangier ferry (I still have my ticket from over 30 years ago, and wrote about the Fez-Tangiers train). It's one of the poems that seems to string together notes from a holiday or phase. With a few of these poems I worried that material was being spread rather thinly - notebooks being trawled for material. "Zoetrope" in particular takes a chance, given that its central analogy (train + trees = zoetrope) is fairly common in the poetry world. It's well executed all the same.

The 2nd section of the book, "Traces", has 12 poems in hospital settings, the persona first being staff then a visiting patient - "doctors hold X-rays to the sky. The day turns cold and blue. Bones rise to the surface of film the colour of canal water." (p.25). There are poems about life-and-death issues ("A fresh sheet/ on an empty bed/ after the curtain went back"), dealing with patients' relatives, nightshifts, etc. I imagine that there are more poems where these came from. Hospitals are a common setting for poems. What's interesting about these is that they're not all one-sided.

The 3rd section is opened by "The Great Animator", which features the wind - "Ballerina in her dress/ of smoke, now naked, come to pirouette/ among Styrofoam cups and dead cigarettes ... Meet me again on that ledge where / arms outstretched I leaned and was held.". It and "Scent" are essentially list poems - good ones.

Were "Nymphea Thermarum Stolen ...", "The Glass Delusion" (one of my favourites), "Risotto" and "Ammonite" written without line-breaks I doubt that anyone would have thought that regular spatial interruptions would improve them - quite the opposite, I'd say. But market forces are powerful, even when money's not the issue.

I've used the same raw material as "Waterloo Teeth" uses, but haven't made a whole poem out of it (I wrote "Women once roamed medieval battlefields turning the dead over/ looking for a husband's face/ while others carried buckets collecting teeth.// Now you dance round your handbag under glitterballs"). In general, I think I'm more of a hit-and-run writer than he is. I used to write extended metaphors like "Accidental Music" (e.g. "No more crosswords" - "Our words engage quite cleverly sometimes across the dark square room"), but gave them up. "In the big house" is interesting in the way it slides from one image to another. "Woodlouse" ends with "a sight he'd denied and shut/ away, much as he did/ with something he can't talk about:/ but he was a child then. and doesn't dwell on it" which seems too easy a way to add drama to a poem. "The Red Forest" is neat, contrasting radiotherapy with Chernobyl - "trees grow slow and slant. We too/ advance slowly, trying to hold on/ to the idea of your going". I like "Thaw" - I'm guessing identities here, but I'd say the persona and son leave his wife and her ill mother alone. Waiting outside in the snow, the son plays at being a super-hero while the man sees through the window the woman trying to tempt her mother with ice-cream.

I noticed something at his Leicester reading (it's online). Consider these extracts -

• "Heron/ He's as unexpected/ as royalty"
• "It is worth considering longevity/ before bringing home the tortoise who might/ out-live you, tender and hairless in its ceramic hull./ Picture him"
• "the juvenile parrot in livid scarlet/ and green; imagine him faded as seafront paint"
• "Caller/ ... a sparrow, concussed in the furrow/ of terracotta tiles.// He'd hit the window"

How come all these creatures are male? The birds' plumage might be a giveaway to a twitcher. I suppose calling them "it" sounds too harsh, especially if there's some identification between persona and beast, but "it" is used in some other pieces, and the tortoise in this extract begins as an "it".

On p.17 should "know the taking life is for the living to decide" be "know that taking life is for the living to decide"?

Other reviews

• Kathleen Jones
• Matthew Stewart

"The Sun Bathers" by Roy Marshall (Shoestring, 2013)

About a quarter of the poems come from his earlier pamphlet, Gopagilla. Of the 10 not reprinted I miss "Egg". The Gioconda poem from the pamphlet is now part of a sequence.

Someone said to me that this poet "only has one style, but he uses it well". People make the same comment about Arsenal. At least 22 of these poems have been published in anthologies and magazines, but the real test is whether the poems survive being read en masse in a book. I think they do. He doesn't always write the same way; there are variations of content-source and style that feel like natural, promising developments. That said, many of his poems are based on life-events written in a lucid style. This has risks, especially if poems don't quite work -

• People nowadays seem to feel they've not fully experienced something unless they take a photograph. I worry that poets do a similar thing - writing up big events from duty rather than necessity. This isn't an issue that should worry readers generally, but with from-the-heart poems, such impressions matter more. This book avoids those problems.
• When content or language fall short, it may lead to schmaltz or prosiness. No schmaltz in this book, but there are moments when I worry that the language flags.
• Using one's own memory hoard may lead to running out of material. Doesn't seem a problem yet.
• If the reader's jolted out of the poem, the spell's broken. In "Floodplains" for example, there's "How quickly landscapes are erased,/ wind-throbbed fences become mute veins". I can understand how the submerged fences become quiet, but how do they become veins? By the time I've worked it out, the poem's left me behind.
• When the poems depend on delivering an emotional payload, the rest of the poem might appear as mere set-up. "Floodplains" for example could have been line 5 + the final stanza, retaining the landscape thread. What are the pros and cons of "Student" being line 1 + stanza 2? Once doubt is sown in the reader's mind by one poem, other poems become vulnerable.

That he avoids these pitfalls as often as he does is due to his control of tone and pacing. When poems do fail, it's not through pretension or over-ambition, it's more the result of a shallow slide into so-whatness. Another point in his favour is that he doesn't use flashy layouts, or make them more flashy the plainer the language (though I think "Relic" and "Season Rings" come close to this). Most of the time I ignore the stanza- and line-breaks. Indeed, "The Arrivals" looks rather like my attempts at short Flash - tightly written with coupled imagery. I can imagine "Southbank" beginning a story that soon jerks into flashback before ending back in the present.

It's mostly accessible poetry, poetry that even non-poetry readers might not object to. Some people may need to web-search for "Ray Davies" (p.33) but it's largely allusion-free too. Only one poem has notes. One poems that had notes in the pamphlet has lost them here. At a reading of his that I attended, he pointed out that the style of "Da Vinci Packs for Pavia" is meant to emulate the way da Vinci's drawings are sometimes a mish-mash of text and image - useful to know.

"Arm Wrestling with Nonno" (note: Nonno is Italian for "grandad") could have been one of the pitfall-ridden poems - the easy pathos of the once-heroic grandfather becoming so weak; the clichéd idea of adults letting children win. What I think saves it is the economy. In 4 short stanzas there are many period/location details, and the initial boasting of the mother about her father's strength is transformed at the end to the persona's (almost boastful) pride in being the grandfather's apparent favourite. The "It was my face that brought light to his pale eyes" mirrors the end of "Cimetero" 3 pages later - "next year, behind polished glass, the face I'd know". Poems like "Dying Arts" work because they move fast through a sequence of images, from "As the last window cleaner born during the age of whistling" to "the gaze of children who sat silent and still their eyes reflecting England through the window of a train".

I like the poems that I liked in the pamphlet ("Dandytime", "Inheritance", "Records on the Bones") plus "Dying Arts", "Student", "Night Shift", and "Lives of Poets". "Career Advice" is fun. "National Service" (also in the pamphlet) and "Chestnut Mares" are too slight. p.43 surprized me by using end-rhyme, and it's a list, a structure he doesn't use much (p.7, p.18 and p.59 excepted). The non-realism of "The Catch" surprized me too.

A couple of observations -

• There's a sudden clump of poems that end with a time-switch or telling realisation - "But I know the source; it was you of course, it was the two of us, smoking" (p.47); "and I'm back in the woods, winter dusk" (p.49); "I remember the police car ..." (p.50); "It's what I remember whenever north wind meets wet skin" (p.54); "After all this time I recognise boredom, unchanged" (p.56).
• Space travel features surprizingly often. I'm old enough to recall the first moon landing, but he's not. The moon's brought down to earth in "The possible fates of Wren's globe". In "Flight Path" a plane's silhouette against the moon is imagined as shadow; a projection of hope.

Is "famer" on p.10 meant to be "farmer"? Is "it's" on p.21 supposed to be "its"?

Other reviews

• Neil Fulwood
• Rosemary Badcoe (Antiphon)
• Rebecca Bird (Hinterland)
• Maria Taylor

"Gopagilla" by Roy Marshall (Crystal Clear Creators, 2012)

A pamphlet with poems from The Rialto, etc. In these poems all stanzas except the last (which can be shorter) have the same number of lines (in this case usually 2 or 3). The exceptions (but not by much) are "Egg" and "Telepathy". The format lends itself well to texts that have prose-like characteristics, where line-breaks aren't critical. "Dandytime", "Egg", and "Inheritance" could easily have been emotion-laden anecdotes at the heart of short stories. I like them. They, and "Ghost Walk", are the sort of poems that are easy to read yet hard to write. Some of the poems in the last third of the book are in a less lucid style - "No Signals Available" begins "The sky is unmanned; no dash or scrape of vapour/ in the high plateau of ghost ash, while grass on the hill/ is flattened to gloss".

In "Rose" a baby is "a small doppelganger", "a mirror of his mother", his lips "a perfect miniature" of hers - one comparison too many for me. "Hawk's Eyes" has "find the sine wave of a weasel/ through the geometry of plots". Gregory Leadbetter's written "I saw a weasel streak its sine-wave over the grass". I like the idea of "Records on the Bones" though I think the poem doesn't add quite enough to the source material.

Other reviews

• Matthew Stewart
• David Cooke (Ink, Sweat & Tears)
• Emma Lee
• Alan Baker
• Ross Kightly, Fiona Sinclair and James Roderick Burns (Sphinx)