reviews supplementary

fuck poetry : charlie bayliss red ceiling press www.theredceilingspress.co.uk a small book 10x14cm, 40 pages unnumbered perfect bound limited edition 120 copies £9.00

fuck poetry. Instruction or description?

If instruction, stop right there.

If description – of fucking – brace myself and open small black book, small but glossy and perfectly bound.

These are [in]disputably rants. Poetry nonetheless, a language/delivery all charlie's own. Lower case throughout. '...i am language, immediate & strange / a walk with a ghost / an underlit fountain with no wet...' if you are going to come for me you need to come harder

...parse your bread

& if you are an emerging poet

inquisitive about truth

holiness, or anything

take the black loaf: it is poisoned

take the white loaf: it is poisoned...

for the theatre critic in crisis

The anger had some poems feel like the taking of revenge. No idea for instance who the dedicatee Rachel might have been, but this is the whole of impossible white men – 'there're more beautiful things than beyoncé / but you, my dear, are not one of them.'

With many contemporary poets mentioned I chortled through the 7 pages dedicated to don paterson and describing responses to a workshop. I won't be the only writer manque who knows that near incoherent anger at the supposed celebrated telling the rest of us how to become that celebrated.

Fucking does get many a mention, rarely though in an enjoyable way. Taking it up the arse, cock-sucking, etc. Fuck therefore largely aggressive.

So many poems about and for other poets, much of the anger charlie bayliss's self-loathing, with one voice being near graffiti/troll responses to other of his assertions here. Overall an overriding sad anger following the death of charlie's sister May. But fuck poetry doing what poetry should, moving one both emotionally and intellectually, oft times amusingly so.

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Tears in the Fence #82 Autumn 2025 Editor David Caddy Durweston Mill, Mill Lane, Durweston, Blandford Forum, Dorset. DT11 0QD A5 192 pages perfect bound £30.00 for 3 issues

So very much in these 192 pages. Beginning with David Caddy's editorial extolling the inspiration to be got from pre-digital archives, going on to lament the losses of material already overwritten in digital archives.

Poems this issue open with a 2 page almost flow-of-consciousness alphabet road poem after Grace Potter by Jeremy Hilton. Followed by two war/anti-war poems by Guillaume Apollinaire translated by Ralph Hawkins. Next are two short and one long observational poem by Lydia Harris. These three/four poets readily representing the differences, the variety of work to be found – as usual – in TitF.

Of the poems that follow some are shaped, some word salads, self-commentary poems, prose poems/pieces; typography that lightens, turns grey... When I came upon a two horizontal page array by Fiona Russell Dodwell, had me reminded of something Derrick Woolf and I discussed and almost made real, mathematical concepts as poetry. Ah yes, those were the sociable days, the earnest enjoyment of ideas.

My own happy discoveries this issue were poems by Joanna Nissel, especially her mixed language Words I am considering since you left; John Mateer's The Charnel House. I benefited from a woodland venture with Peter Larkin and a re-reading of Aidan Semmens Provisional. I was also mightily impressed by all the Hatherns in Andrew Duncan's 7 page Legends of the High Wolds.

There is descriptive writing to envy from Biljana Scott. This is from her Back in the belly of the beast - '...Women peer back at her from afar. Women in their doorways. / Honeycombs. Whole lives. Their broods behind them. Their men // a pledge, sweet. Hearth-fires like stars everywhere. Smoke. / She coughs. A child whimpers. Time suckles a moment longer // then releases. Milky bubbles pop and disappear...' Same to be said for Jason Ioannou's John Cage, the Heron, and Me, its dualistic telling.

One negative: I do so wish Americans and their imitators would cease using 'mom.' A red flag to this anti-sentimentalist, sets what teeth I have left on edge.

I'm inevitably self-conscious when it comes to, but nonetheless feel I should, reviewing the reviews here, especially when they are reviewing poets that I haven't come across. Thankfully I am not alone in my not knowing: Robert Hampson tells of Andrew Duncan's counting of all the poets published circa 1990 onwards and the difficulty of deciding what of all their efforts can possibly be of lasting importance. Andrew Duncan himself features a lot this issue – as poet, under review and as reviewer in his informative take on New Poetry in German.

Guy Russell in his review of Dominic Hand's The Data Harvest also refers to this explosion of poetry which has led, partially, to its fading importance in the zeitgeist. I loved Peter Oswald's challenging opening to his review of Paul Stubbs' Beast: The Lost Chronicle – 'Suppose you walked in through the doors of a metaphor and found it was more real than the thing it was a metaphor of...'

To offset my concern over poets reviewed unknown to me I was so happy to find myself in agreement with Mandy Pannet's estimation of Lynne Wycherley's poetry. Keith Jebb also reassured me that I was not alone in my uncertainty in his 8 attempts to begin a review of W N Herbert's Unselected Poems.

An interesting piece by Steve Spence on the Plymouth Language Club. Almost nostalgic, except that of the many guest poets listed my name, a poet of the plethora, was omitted. I'm not really hurt. Just sad.

Please note Tears in the Fence annual poetry festival this year is in Stourpaine village hall and takes place over the weekend from Friday 19th to 21st September.

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Reviews of Coal City Review #46 and Poetry & All that Jazz 2025

Coal City Review #46 Editor Brian Daldorph, University of Kansas, English Department, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA B5 perfect bound 80 pages $10.00

Contents showed there to be several old friends this issue. I began turning the pages in happy anticipation. First poem to impact me – others seeming to have had a retrospective slant – was Kelley Sivits' It was a deep red, like wine, a dispassionate view of a gunshot victim while the author was thoroughly engaged in trying to save his life.

But on a personal level what was truly wonderful this issue was to first find myself enthralled by Joaquina Guidobonos's Verses For Your First Days which had several short stanzas looking forward to the birth of a child, on what it was to be called...

Now you sleep

Inside your mother's

belly: a conch

to which I put my ear

for listening

...only to find at the end of the 2 page poem that it was translated by my friend Laura Chalar who, when it was still going, translated so many poems for The Journal. Made me so happy, my editorial faith in her justified, renewed. With heart gladdened I moved on to her many other translations this issue. Only to have two of her own poems leave me in tears. Here is Pool, January -

Your death comes as a text.

“I'm sorry. I know how pure

your love for him was.”

My body warps the water's

bright skin. Immersed, I gauge

the trees' regal upsweep.

All your kisses rush to my mouth,

rending my tongue and

leaving me wordless

And Immersion -

There is a pool into which I'll let myself slide

when I need quiet, its pull benign,

a cool beckoning. The cobalt dusk will not

offer its thoughts on why you're gone

or why it still hurts like on that morning -

that's for me to seek to know, I know,

and when I do, I'll be Home. For now, it buoys

me up like an unclouded conscience, arguing

me off the water, which coaxes down,

down, down – go down so there, in the

bloating surge, you may still find him.

Of other poems Joanne Holdrife's Trick Question held me. And another pen friend, Dan Grote, turned in a classic sestina with his Executioner's Song. Format and lyric combining to perfection to capture the intensity of the experience. I also couldn't help but identify with the opening stanza of his Career Path -

I never set out

become a Poet – I found

plenty of other ways to

disappoint my parents and

alienate my friends.

I gave a rousing cheer to Gail White's The Witch's Defence: 'If every witch is ugly, old, and poor, / then I confess I'm guilty of all three...' And reading on, so much to read here, I was happily surprised again by another of Laura's translations – Sunday by Alejandro Crotto.

Also this issue were reviews of novels. Brian's take on James Benger's One Week had me add it to my must-read list. It never stops...

Poetry & All That Jazz 2025, editor Barry Smith, southdownspf@gmail.com 56 pages A5 perfect bound for price contact www.sdpf.org.uk

Easiest thing for me to say about this 2025 anthology is that it contains work of contemporary poets from Sussex outwards. Choosing what to extol turned out not to be so easy: I realised on reaching page 5 that I had enjoyed every single poem so far – by Maura Dooley, Stephen Boyne, and 2 by Frieda Hughes. If all were going to be so good this year what would I pick out? Daunted, I read on. Mandy Pannet, Kevin Saving, Stephanie Norgate...

Help! Was I to list the contents page by way of review?

Only to be confronted by Wendy Klein's The Word for Rose in German that won the Binsted prize 2025, followed by her The Density of Butterflies. All too much.

It was at this point that I gave up the review – or the listing of contributors if you wish – and simply read on. Such riches here.

Then I came to Chris Hardy's In this World and the Next and he caught me, that recognition of a thing I knew but that I had not until then seen it set in words, became instantly haunted by it. Michael Bartholomew-Biggs' Deep Listening also told me something new about myself. What more can anyone ask of poems?

Not often one can say of an anthology that every poem within is worth reading. Many based on music, paintings, theatre even... Of so many poems here what I particularly loved, no admired, was that they neither ignored nor made of today's horrors and anxieties a polemical cause, rather life's negatives simply received a day-to-day mention. Because that's how it is now – global warming, wars, corruption....

Every poem here justified its inclusion. But when I got to the end I paused a moment, then went back to reread Jessica Mookherjee's Returning. Seemed apt.

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Foreign Forays : Antony Johae Mica Press & Campanula Books, 47 Belle Vue Rd, Wivenhoe, Calchester, Essex, CO7 9LD micapress.uk ISBN 978-1-869848-39-2 36 pages B5 perfect bound £9.00

That I would have so much sympathy with these poems came as no surprise. In the old days, when The Journal was still functioning, I was always pleased to see in my inbox a submission from Antony. That was when he was still based in Lebanon, and I'd be looking forward to his alternative view of our world.

I don't think that I, like Antony, will ever lose that itch to go see new places; to take that first step onto the train, walk up the gangway... With its subtitle, 'Poems of Travel in Europe and the Med,' Antony uses his long poems to take us to several places new, carrying us along with that longing for an otherness, a difference, for that – as in From Bruges to Brubeck – sense of a place promised by a painter. Poem got me to remembering my first time travelling down through France and coming upon Van Gogh in the countryside.

Antony captures perfectly that huge privilege of being elsewhere while not belonging. A Day in Leuven tells not only how but all the before and after circumstances of the writing of this one haiku -

From a Train Window

Yellow-blue circus

tent, striped, motley crowd outside

set in Flanders field.

That simple description of a circus tent carries both a reference to World War One and to the poem of the same title by Frances Cornford. And this is how these poems, many already covering a page, become bigger in the reading: allusions, comparisons, incidentals teasing mind and memory outwards.

Each poem a story, and with him being more the observant traveller than the blinkered tourist, he sees the real weather for what it is, migrants passing by, the extraordinary of their everyday. He is witness to technology mixed with tradition, the pleasurable meeting of, and overlay, of different cultures.

In the Men's Room at the Fryderyk Chopin Museum, Warsaw, the content and clever rhyming had me chortling along. Amusement too in Lebanese Lapse finding that one, abroad, is not quite where one's mind is. Crossing roads having always been my problem, the direction in which to look before stepping off the pavement and the horns blare. The poems took me to more places than those in the poems, so thank you Antony.

I'll close, as he closes the collection, by quoting the whole of my favourite Antony Johae poem.

Arriving at Rafik Hariri International Airport, Beirut

The queue wasn't long for foreigners;

the other for Lebanese, guest workers

home for a few days from the Gulf,

stretched back a bit. I stood on the yellow line.

He stamped the man before me

and beckoned. “Bonjour,” I said and he smiled.

I handed him my passport, he flipped through the pages.

“You are coming from Kuwait?” and I nodded.

“What is your occupation?” “I teach at the University -

English . . . English Literature.”

He looked at me and then at my picture,

again at me and said:

“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”

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Boxing in the Bone Orchard : Bruce McRae Published in Canada by Frontenac House frontenachouse.com ISBN 9781989486926 B5? 88 pages $22.95

My kind of poetry this, descriptive and oblique. Not obtuse. Given the plethora of imagery would be easy to say some poems are surreal: they are not. Bruce McRae's is a clever use of juxtaposition, of aligning unrelated images, overlaying them within the mind and this synergy creating there something other. Most are fundamentally poems of contemplation, where one looks away from the page in order to absorb what one has just read, even to reconsider a single phrase – 'a city pestered with people.' Which was not by any measure the only phrase which sent me off a-pondering.

The danger with this technique is that in a few poems one not only sees the joins, the intent; with some edging dangerously/undoingly towards whimsy. The successful though can be really funny – 'Art for Art's Sake,' along with the playful 'The Hole' and 'Twin State.' A couple poems on scarecrows will stick with me long after this – I have to say beautifully produced – book finds its place on the shelf.

While some poems were strangely threatening, 'Talent Show Auditions' for one; several other poems here qualify as small masterpieces – 'The Spider Says,' 'The Volume of Man,' 'Each Fear Contains a Wish,' 'In And Of,' 'Forgotten Promise,' 'As Ever' and 'Evictee.' Here is the whole of 'Eternal Flame' -

The night the house of love burnt

down. The night the eminent shrink

informed us: Sometimes, a cigar is

just a cigar, but his erection more than

obvious, the bluestockings in hushed

awe, some of them quietly reaching for

tissues. “What do women want?”

the world renowned psychoanalyst asks

as he fumbles for his matches on the dais,

an elderly matron at first crossing and then

uncrossing her legs. A poem in which alarm

bells are going off all over town, firemen

throwing their trousers on, fire engines

entering the first of the long dark tunnels.

Bruce McRae allows poems to claim their own length, from a few short lines to several pages of speculative delight as in 'The Hole,' to a splatter of long line imagery in 'Stuff.' I gave a cheer at his five stanza 'Fabrication.' Exactly how a writer's life is. I also applauded the clever way he deals with our world's absurdities in 'Longtime Customer.'

My one criticism is that this atheist found some poems closed to him by mentions of God. Likewise those poems that relied on the use of religious terminology and biblical concepts stayed closed. In compensation I did delight in poems about the writing of poems, at language being uncooperative with language at the same time leading us beyond the poem. 'Writer's Block' being one such. In truth my only real disappointment with 'Boxing in the Bone Orchard' was turning over the last page.

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Rising Dust, a collection of short stories by Arthur Broomfield The Limerick Writers' Centre www.limerickwriterscentre.com ISBN 978-1-7384997-8-6 90 pages

Written in the first person most stories here have an easy conversational style, tell of rural life in Ireland. Although I don't know first-hand of rural life in Ireland I did grow up among farmers and, as related here, their preoccupations and concerns ring true. Their being in Ireland I did anticipate of-their-time references to religion and its rituals, a church-going conformity.

I enjoyed some stories more than others. Could identify with a few. Excellent atmosphere in the calfing shed story, knew that from feeling my way into the dark farmyard first thing to load up the milk van. And, as told in 'The Night the Music Died,' I too have had experience of trying to stay safe in the middle of riots, especially the bit about trying not to follow or dodge orders that were frankly ridiculous, along with the shame that comes from powerlessness. Was also good on combinations of smells, silage and cowshit, and – a lawyer's office – of paper and polish.

Not so good, unfortunately, was the proof editing.

His being a lover of long descriptive sentences often left me wondering at times quite what was being described. The first short story, like the train journey it described, was a bit stop-start; the narrative out of sequence too. I had to go back to see if I'd missed a mention. I hadn't. Closing speech marks were on occasion omitted, meaning that I had to re-read to make sense of what was being said, again interrupting narrative flow. Where there should have been spaces after a full stop, there weren't. So many easily corrected errors that should have been spotted before going to print.

I'd love to have taken my editor's red pen to so much here, especially to some of the dialogue. Take this, 'He often said to me it's life's the mystery, we're sure of death but we don't know what lies ahead of us in life.' How much more verbally authentic that would have sounded if, omitting the 'to me,' a full stop had been put after 'mystery' with the next sentence – 'We're sure of death; what we don't know is what life has lying ahead of us.'

My apologies if this reading seems weighted towards the negative. Amateurism in publishing though, especially regards self-publishing, is carrying before it a reputation for poor editing, and is doing the rest of us no favours.

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From the Nab : David Callin Culture Vannin, Ballavargher Cottages, Patrick Road, St John's Isle of man, IM4 3BN ISBN 978-1-0369-0153-0 A5 96 pages perfect bound £10.00

Having published David Callin's work in The Journal it was probably a given that I'd find much to praise in this collection. What came as a surprise was both to find so much new to me and how very impressed I became with this gathering together of a lifetime's work.

The Nab is the Isle of Man farm where David grew up, the poems of his life thence onwards. Opening, as of course it should, with Prehistory -

We lingered in prehistory

because we liked it.

It suited us to let the days

slip by unchronicled,

while in our woods, uncatalogued,

wonders could walk unchallenged.

And then the Word arrived

with its clerks and secretaries,

all scribbling furiously,

demanding credos, oaths and testimonials,

finding us out in our oak-wreathed haunts

and taking everything down.

That set the standard I have come to expect from David and reinvigorated my lately lapsed pleasure in poetry. No class concessions here: I loved the way the poems slipped from the erudite into the vernacular, from legend and on to Man's medieval history. Poems of generations past, such as his Aspects of my mother had me laughing out loud, others like Mikado raised a fond smile. So many poems, page after page, that tempted me to quote them in full: I gave in to Cabbal Pherick -

Snow on Cabbal Pherick,

which is the chapel of Patrick,

where still, perhaps, the first priest sleeps;

snow on the uneven steps

that drop down to Spooyt Vane;

snow in the glen,

like peace in the valley -

temporary.

There are broken lines too that perfectly capture a notion, '...sanctified / by centuries / of use...' As my coeval he captures farm sounds that my faraway Devon childhood knew: 'Work was going on. We could hear it. / Growling tractors, the creak and thud and clank / of a farming day, the ambling tumult of cows...' A child's farm. While his Antidisestablishmentarianism could as well describe my early life, and I might add his Hillwalking into my CV.

Nor is David afraid of rhyme. Here are the two stanzas of Ushtey vea -

For whisky we say ushtey vea -

not quite what the others say,

but very like. Our tongue and theirs are kin

enough to drink and get acquainted in,

not minding Ps and Qs

and other such ados.

A little local language ours,

with little local names for flowers

and birds and seasons, hills and willow trees,

Looan's a small imperfect swarm on bees.

This slipping between both is how he captures both the strangeness and familiarity of life on Man. Some poems are blessed too with accompanying paintings by Vicky Webb. I was going to call them illustrations, but that wouldn't do them justice; it's more that the paintings complement the poems.

Poems of place and of loss, told with feeling and humour, many I left murmuring 'Lovely.' He comes across as a confident poet, brazen enough to challenge Shakespeare. So many moods he gets just right. A whole series of poems from his Country Roads onwards that explore what might appear a dissonance but is rather an acceptance of the global strangeness of our days. Some of the poems are such beautiful works of art that they demand to be shared. I'll end here with the first two stanzas of Out of the past -

This is the doubtful hour. Shapes start

to flow into each other. Shades

creep out from under trees, where they've

avoided the dogmatic sun

all day, to gather with their friends.

This is the time of day when things

are seen to be believed. The light,

more diffident, obliquer, drops

its flat insistence on who's who

and joins us in the masquerade...

(Should you want to purchase a copy of From the Nab online I'd suggest you contact David via email - dcallin2bvc@gmail.com - or via FaceBook.)

Orbis 211 : editor Carole Baldock 17 Greenhow Avenue, West Kirby, Wirral, Cheshire, CH48 5EL www.orbisjournal.com A5 96 pages perfect bound single copy £6.00

One knows the format, its familiarity reassuring, but never the content. And always, with Orbis, there will be something to surprise, to amaze, to learn. Here on page 2 I learnt, courtesy of Pat Farrington, of the poet-writing trials and tribulations – in poetry form – of the 17th century Anne Bradstreet. Plus ça change la même chose.

Didn't stop there, on page 42 Linda King told me of Xenophanes and Empedocles.

Elsewhere a diverse selection with much to consider – a translation of Ma Yonybo's poems by Helen Plath; S.C.Flyn's identification with a bat in his Rescue. In both of S.C.Flyn's poems there is so much more than what is being said. Much to admire too in the lyricism of Blaithin Allain's The Sea Bride. I was also taken with Michael Milburn's take on Kipling's If, and Jean Prior's use of Kintsugi.

Those are the poets outstanding for me in this issue. This issue 'Lines' has the estimate of poems from the previous issue, many reinforcing my own assessment, and had me curious quite why others should have chosen differently.

Of the reviews Pam Thomson's response to Roz Goddard's Small Moon Curve drew me in. As did Philip Dunkerley – again! - with his review of Jane Hirshfield. D.A.Prince too on Chris Rice's In Transit. All three reviewers telling me enough to get me wanting to know more of the authors.

This issue ending as usual with 9 pages of competition listings. Orbis always a good read. Always a bargain.

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James Russell: The Brown Bread Sonnets KFS 51 Pipit Avenue, Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside, WA12 9RG ISBN 978-1-916590-10-6 B5 48 pages perfect bound £7.00

On seeing prose squashed into 14 lines my first response was 'Great minds think alike.' Except that I called my own effort Mock Sonnets and they don't really bear comparison. Each of my Mock Sonnets is self-contained, whereas James' 72 sonnets combine to tell the tale of his principal character, Clovis. James' sonnets also differ from mine in that, even within the first, he examines the form and the language being used to describe that examination. As anticipated I am in the hands of a Master of Wry.

Confident, and anticipating more, I read on.

What is so impressive is just how confidently James commentates on the language and expressions in common usage without digressing that far from the narrative of Clovis, who apparently began life effortlessly, breathing 'light in and out.'

A worthy successor to the likes of Brideshead Revisited and Withnal & I, these 72 sonnets take us from Clovis' effortlessly glittering lifestyle to the more interesting mundanity of old age and ill-health. Much to bring delight in these sonnets, descriptions so apt, tart almost, one has to chuckle. With lines to cherish '...the mind-numbing particularity / that prose affords...' Guilty. Asking myself later, am I too a 'theory-drunk pen-pusher farting in the nest.'?

At that point, already full of self-abusing glee I was only on page 9 and eagerly looking forward to more acerbic asides: 'Those Yankee novels ruined by higher education...' for instance.

Talking of prose the tale goes not into the drug-drink dissolution, supposedly tragic that one has come to expect of the over-confident and the beautiful. No, Clovis gets overtaken by the ordinary. And for the 'cool' there can be nothing worse. We are assailed by the banal comparisons wrought by age: 'A thought that pops out like a hernia.'

Throughout the tale the writing is self-aware rather than self-conscious. Although occasionally James does become exasperated by the expectations that have been built into both narrative and language, while at other times he cleverly subverts both, keeping this reader on his mental toes.

Only to bring me up sharp with an observation so closely allied to my own experience. The opening of Sonnet 22 for instance, 'Each time I slip into tee-tum tee-tum and rhyme / I feel further from the truth, at least the following / Kind of truth. It seemed as if (too much as-iffing?) / He was his body's ally willy nilly...'

For Clovis, from golden child to - led by the sexual nose – the self-deluded physically decrepit victim of a con-artist – no fool like an old fool – every one of these 72 Brown Bread Sonnets is a winner. Which, even having said that, I don't feel that I have done anywhere near justice to these sonnets. Believe me they are writerly fun, caustic fun, but fun.

Tears in the Fence #81 editor David Caddy, Durweston Mill, Mill Lane, Durweston, Blandford Forum, Dorset Dt11 0QD A5 196 pages perfect bound £12.00

This as usual weighty issue opens with a David Caddy editorial on '...poetry on the edge of intelligibility,' and cautioning against '...wild signalling carrying the risk of uncertain or spurious meaning.' One way, he posits, of navigating the 'edge of intelligibility' and conveying the sense beyond might be by word-play and/or repetition.

For the two page editorial alone this issue worth getting.

Mandy Pannett's Cardae At The Edge is almost a working example of the editorial.

A whisper

held

in a silent

space

so faint it's almost

inaudible in its sibilance.

Outrush

of breath, the tip of air

it sways, slips, is lost.

Answer it

that whisper, even

if your fingertips clutch at white

disintegrating chalk, even if

it's late and the black sun sinks.

Elsewhere within are poems both topical and perennial. The topical include ongoing wars, which had me wondering how many of us biblios automatically, thanks to Huxley, put Eyeless in front of Gaza? Of these war-mentioned poems, that by Holly Winter-Hughes was probably the most telling.

Of the other poems, I enjoyed Lesley Burt's skewed appraisal of lives today. Lucy Ingrams' wordscapes. So too Julian Dobson's The Colour of Quiet. I pondered long on Kasia Flisiuk's pair Likewise Charles Hadfield's pair. Hannah Linden's Hiroshima was fun. And Catherine Fletcher produced a beast of a poem in Ursa Poetica.

Jess Bauldry's short story The Shadow drew me in. As did Helen Steel's poems.

The poetry is fittingly rounded off this issue with an article, Fence Festival Address, by Gerald Killingworth who endeavours to decide just What is poetry? Followed by 20 pages of reviews.

Now reviewing reviews might seem like extended navel gazing. That said I found David Pollard's review of Alina Stefanescu's Dor both sympathetic and educational. Likewise Frances Presley's review of Hazel Smith's Ecliptical; and Guy Russell's review of Guillame Apollinaire's Seated Woman was equally informative.

Barbar Bridger's review of Czernovitz-Charmoritz by Anna Kaminska told as much of the modus operandi of the two translators, Anna Blasiak and Bohdan Piasecki, as it did of the poetry which I found particularly enlightening. Finally Joanna Nissel's review of Ilse Pedler's Auscultation did what all good writing should do and invited me in. Which is not to say of the many other reviews that they weren't well written, rather that they were of the books and didn't immediately engage. As with everything else this issue though there is much to return to, to reconsider.

The Usual Apologies: Sadie Maskery Red Ogre Review, Los Angeles, USA. https://ogre.red ISBN 9798311146852 49 pages

When editing The Journal I had a rule that, the Journal being in print, only hard copies would get reviewed. Now that rising costs have meant that The Journal is no more I am having to look again at that policy. This is an on-screen review of the PDF of The Usual Apologies. The apologies I assume for the poems' contents.

Overheard in Stockbridge

I killed my pet snail

gluing jewels to it –

I pushed too hard.

Went out with the lads,

you know, to console myself.

Too much fun, staggered home

bleating at the door, 3 a.m.

Felt a bit of a hiding from my dad,

but I shat out the johnny, praise be –

he never knew, or there might

of been words over and above.

Fair play though, it was his night.

I should have stayed out till lunch –

less mess all round.

As with her previous collection here too she has used eavesdroppings, capturing again those rhythms of speech. These examples giving the gist.

Shed

Decades of handheld iron,

wood, their warmth on a hot day

sliding over dust or rain-slick clay,

lined against the wall

to dream of worms

slid across an edge,

but spared to squirm and tease

the robins perched above.

All are comfortable in their place

except the scythe. It leans

in an unaccustomed place,

spotless, tossed behind mould

and dust-dragged cobwebs –

sliced by the scent of bleach

where green juice should stain.

Scrubbed of stories. It gleams,

offends the shabby shadows,

keens a lullaby that makes flies

dream of maggots in red beds.

When I reviewed Sadie's Overheard Love Songs I said that they could as easily have been titled A Young Maiden's Adventures in Singledom. Same holds true here, especially with her easy use of the vernacular.

Alien

I dated a foley artist

from Felchingham.

Passionate, but brief.

He said the sounds of our love

would win an award,

so I let him press record,

imagining sighs like doves

to the hallowed place

between our thighs.

He played back

a sci-fi horror squelch.

In space, no one hears

you queef.

The last laughter-making line a trait of hers. While, irony of irony, could this next could go some way to my own feelings having to now review her collection via the screen. Feel my frustration.

Virtual

A million mouths spit claptrap

through the screen. I am outwith,

you can’t hear me for noise.

Remember the rustle of paper?

Maybe I should write a letter

with an ink pen scratching love

and blots across cream paper.

There are women in the machine

sold for fuckoning, sitting

as limp as dolls, blank-eyed,

but for the click of a shutter.

Did they write letters?

Sign their names with swirls

and hopeful hearts?

Were they real, once,

before the algorithm forgot?

Listen. They had names.

I would write them to prove it,

if you could see it – but my fists

beat the glass and you’re gone.

The collection also contains b&w photo collages, some overprinted with poems. Taken all together with these varied vignettes they capture seamy other-side-of-the-counter lives and attitudes. No price given on the screen and no real idea as to the quality of the actual production or the cover.

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Stone Age Howl : Martin Ferguson www.hybriddreich.co.uk ISBN 9781739546397 A5 32 pages card cover stapled £6.00

On the inside of the grey cover, and before an equally stiff black endpaper, a quote from me: 'One page to the next, every poem in Stone Age Howl requires a mental adjustment. Ferguson's is a one world sensibility, his poems inhabiting a place, a time, a person, but briefly.' Just above that Peter Van Belle wrote of Martin, '...In his poem Swimming Pool he … shows that, just as the artist seeks universality, there's a universality seeking us.'

Allow me to expand.

Martin has lived in many countries and upon several continents. He is presently based in France. These many places, this global sensibility, informs each and every one of his poems.

Peter took Swimming Pool to exemplify Martin's universality. To begin with I felt that Martin's Crossley Street was as good an example. For the simple reason that my eldest grandson, still in primary school, is in 2025 almost re-enacting this poem.

Bailey on rhythm acoustic,

Larby on drums, Locky on tambourine,

and Harby on piano-

a 1979 progressive education,

let loose to experiment, blissful

space in the primary school music room.

We were, The Dustbins, ephemeral

a diluting rain of advancing days-

Dark leviathan institutions

gathered over four horizons.

Several poems here are about or 'after' local talents/celebrities. Blake, Miroslav Holub, Camus, Geoff Stevens, to name but a few known to me. Even while involved in a race, '...lungs scorch, limbs smoulder...' Movement 'is 'after Jean Pierre Duprey.'

In Tanagra In Black Martin almost describes his own poetry: 'Shadow, the territory of your apparition / from where all form emerges // you make a pact with light, / suspend time in the essential moment...'

So sympathetic a poet is Martin that he has the knack of describing one's own psychological state. Mine here. (See https://thesamsmithcom.wordpress.com/blog/ )

Fin de Partie

With nothing left for us to say

but echo chamber and its call

of neo-liberal open ways

with nothing left for us to say

words are reflected back one way

rebounding off the stone sea wall

with nothing left for us to say

but echo chamber and its call.

Not to keep on disagreeing with Peter but another example of Martin's universality has to be his December where he vividly compares his Tanzanian teaching life with a winter visit to his parental home in Yorkshire, capturing that dislocation every intercontinental traveller experiences, a dislocation that one never satisfactorily recovers from, never wholly reconciling oneself to one's own everywhere otherness.

But to read December you will have to buy a copy.

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The Invisible: Alessio Zanelli Greenwhich Exchange, www.greenex.co.uk ISBN 978-1-910996-71-3 B5 110 pages perfect bound £8.99

Many of Alessio's poems have been included in The Journal over the years. What attracted me to them was, his writing in English as a non-native speaker, the – only slightly – alternative use of syntax which served to undermine expectation, that had me look again at what was being said. Alessio makes no attempt to please us native English-speakers, nor does he try to become as us, rather he enjoys taking liberties with the language, then handing his efforts to us to see what we make of them, allowing us to scratch other meanings from our own language.

He opens here with a poem, Transition Hendecapoem, in 11 parts each of 11 lines. With my every rereading it appeared to become a fanciful biography, possibly. A self-education? I became so absorbed it took me a while to move on. And which had me ask again, just what it is that I find so attractive about Alessio's poems? One moment I think that it's their ubiquity, their international embrace, the everyday observations, likenesses, from/of so many places. Our ordinary similarities, our small differences? Or is it those observations that only Alessio Zanelli is capable of making? Take just these last 5 lines from Dear Old Beloved Padan Fog

...while sipping a Czech pilsner, sunk in a cushioned armchair,

an American poet's book open in my lap, in a silent conservatory.

Tired from a long hike, squinting at an unusually clear Yorkshire sky,

waiting for the heather to blossom over the moors up the hills.

A slightly staid, perfunctory sneer pictured on my face.

The mind on an errand a thousand miles away via the smartphone.

Or could it be summed up in this one title, Nowhereverywhere? Or as in his View he could almost – substitute buzzard or kite for eagle – be writing about a valley here in Wales.

Over the mountains, the horizon along the crests.

Not a sound all around. Conifers in the shade of twilight,

then snowfields, tongues and cirques of glaciers, walls of rock.

The joint line of sky and earth like a boundary between selves.

Below, the call of home, at the bottom of the valley,

a walk through the dark of night in the light of the soul.

But not before a glimpse at the flight in circles of the eagle,

under a moon slice, an embroidery against the heavens.

More than enough for today, quite a portion of everything

on view above out there as well as deep down inside.

That having been said Alessio doesn't, in his Hikers and Heroes, hold out much of an end for us fellow walkers.

Several poems are about running – part of his obsessive nature? Poetry being but another of his benign obsessions? Poems too that take in our ongoing destruction of the planet, our powerlessness as individuals. 'Yet here I belong, nowhere else. Nothing can chase / me away – not what is lost, not what is left.' Absence.

Philoosophysics

At the end of the universe man's mind begins.

At the end of man's mind the universe begins.

Thence, there is no telling them apart -

the two often intermix, overlap, replace one another,

to the point where they can plainly be perceived as one.

They swirl around and take my head by storm

each time black coffee's pouring in the mug,

keep seething inside while a splash of milk is added,

pop in and peep out sip after sip until the final one.

When all the drink is gone - and I reemerge from it -

they're still afloat in the thin film of liquid on the bottom,

contending for space with the few grains of sugar left.

A realist about poets and poetry, this is what he says of a reading-child's beginning to a writer's life: 'Tale after tale, book after book, devoured by insane desire, adrift in timeless daydreams...' The Castaway. Alessio's The Swan I believe should be tattooed on the inside forearm of every aspirant poet.

Towards the end of the collection there's a whole sequence of considerations of time passing, what it might be/is to get old, to witness death. Poems not prosaic, but near pedestrian. And yet in among them the sheer poetry of Pareidola and I was enchanted all over again.

La Belle Dame of the Mersey : Philip Burton erbacce-press.com ISBN 978-1-912455-49-2 A5 102 pages perfect bound £10.99

This collection couldn't be more different to Zanelli's The Invisible. You need no more than Philip Burton's title to tell you all that you need to know about the poems within. Strong on the colloquial, the opening poem was a step away from doggerel (light verse would be the polite description), words chosen to rhyme for rhyme's sake.

Reading on the poems would seem to be attempts to entertain, and that each would appear to have had an audience in mind. The early ones topical if not overtly political, a heart definitely worn on its sleeve. Place and brand names feature. Here is Ravenstall Raid May 1999

The checkout girl fainted away

seeing the sawn-off faces

between yoghurt and fromage frais.

Worse than robbery, next day

Folk with, What did you see, hey?

I know a lass who went grey

overnight. Any blood-stains?

Any bits of brains

in the cucumbers, eh?

This chocolate – would you say

you might find your way

knock some price off. It's shot at.

For all the tell-it-as-it-is I felt that I was being given only the surface, only what could be seen, heard, and that made into a poem-anecdote. A conventional view even when offered along with a conventional 'alternative' viewpoint.

I'm trying to avoid sounding patronising; because these are poems that Philip Burton obviously enjoyed writing and probably enjoyed delivering up to an audience – I can imagine each poem being wrapped in an explanatory anecdote – and I expect that on the day the audience enjoyed the poems with him. But one after another on the page...? I almost gave up when I got to Maps. Here's the first stanza.

Unfolding a map is a joy to me -

a minimum shake and the sheet cascades.

To avoid the reverse origami

I leave charts around, not quite displayed...

Giving up however would have meant my missing out on Getting There where he finally allowed the reader their part in the poem. I was pleased too not to have missed the final poems in tribute to his father.

Overall however this was not a collection that catered to my 'taste' in poetry. Which is not to say that others might well lap it up.

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Dreich's 100th and final issue comes in 5 separate chapbooks, A, B, C, D & E. Editor Jack Caradoc, www.hybriddreich.co.uk A5 stapled 54 pages £6.00

Under review here is chapbook A, which contains the warning 'May contain language.' Black endpapers give this issue a touch of class, which this collection of excellent poems so deserves.

Hard to single out just one for mention, and as usual with online reviews because of website software messing with formats, I've chosen one with no stanzas or insets. Here is the whole of Lyn Moir's Thick and Thin.

Now you appear, then reappear,

each time in marginally different form.

I cannot capture you, you are too swift,

now here, now there, invisible, a wraith

confusing dream and memory.

Reality is not as simple as it seems -

how many shadows does it take

to build the substance of a silhouette?

There was a couple of other poems I was really taken by – Katy Mahon's word lovely Dimensions and Hadley-James Hoyles' long poem Balm, quite brilliant. But there was even more to love - Rowena Somerville's Modern Launtry for instance; and Roger Hare's Treating Mould on a Garage Wall, Janette Ayachi's The Snake Garden in Munich, Nazaret Ranea's Coronation and Katy Ewing's Effigy.

So sad to see Dreich come to an end, disappearing along with so many other small presses around the world, slipping under the rising costs of print and postage. Sadly not as before one small paper press getting replaced elsewhere by another the supply remaining constant. And what with journalists being in snipers' rifle sights, or with poets and bloggers and protesters getting imprisoned, it is getting to feel that the written word is globally under attack as never before. On the other hand the good news is that there are still Dreich chapbooks B, C, D and E available for purchase - www.hybriddreich.co.uk

I met Nia Davies at the Swansea Book Fair where she gave me this old copy of Poetry Wales – Spring 2018 volume 53 Number 3. This is the first copy of Poetry Wales that I've seen, never had a poem accepted there nor the wherewithal to subscribe. The size I think is B5 – 170mm x 250mm – and this issue comes in at a hefty 96 pages. Back issues it says here – bearing in mind this was 2018 – are £9.99.

I am particularly grateful to Nia though because this issue contains Poetry in Expanded Translation, and it is that international aspect of poetry, its other and borderlessness, that has so excited me over the years. In Zoë Skoulding's defining of Expanded Translation I was incidentally gratified to find her also lamenting that Wales, of all the British nations, is the only one to not have its own Poetry Library.

Putting that continuing gripe aside what followed were further attempts telling of the difficulties of accurate[?] translation, and how different translated versions of the same poem can be equally authentic. Such difficulties were perfectly captured here by Nia herself and Jeff Hilson – 'In geometry, translation involves the moving of an object from one location to another without changing the object in any other way. Imagine moving a word, perfectly shaped in its original language, to another language, cleanly, without any corruption. Impossible. Imagine trying to make a translation that balanced like an algebraic formula. Imagine a browseless transplant.' They then jointly proceed, along with Vahni Capildea and Alys Conran, to further examine and give examples of how certain concepts cannot be translated. Interpreted possibly, but not in like fashion. Years ago, in the first issues of The Journal of Contemporary Anglo-Scandinavian Poetry my principal translator Anne Born called her own translations from the Danish and Swedish 'co-creations.' A concept I've stuck with.

When, in this issue of Poetry Wales, I arrived at how concrete poetry might be translated, how one might seek to capture the original in another language, so involved did these near academic analyses become that I gave up trying to precis them here and have set them aside for a more leisurely, closer reading later. Should you however be fortunate enough to live near to one of Britain's several Poetry Libraries – none in Wales – get yourself along to one to study this copy of Poetry Wales, Spring 2018 courtesy of editor Nia Davies.

A plug now for Alan Corkish's how to write and understand poetry which I heartily recommend. Such good fun, for both us old 'uns and rank beginners, for one a reminder why we ever started and for newbies encouragement. Available I should imagine from Alan himself at www.erbacce-press.co.uk or here editor@erbacce-press.co.uk Looks like he is charging £10.00 a copy. Treat yourself or a friend.

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Let Battle Commence : Wendy Klein dempseyandwindle.com ISBN 978-1-913329-14-3 38 pages A5 perfect bound £8.00

Wendy Klein and I did a book swap. Let Battle Commence was not as anticipated: this is a very big little book, its literary weight worthy of the angst that went into its making, the title as readily descriptive of the Shall-I? Should-I? girding of loins prior to Wendy addressing her family's past.

War poems have long become a genre all their own. Anti-war poems especially. Rudyard Kipling even, while beloved of the warmongering right, still excoriated post-war British governments with his Tommy-this and Tommy-that. A neglect of ex-service personnel that continues to this day. Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade, although seeming to glorify heroism, served more to demonstrate war's waste and futility. Indeed it is hard to find a writer who does glorify war. Even that old macho Hemingway compiled one of the best anthologies of war writing, of what it is like to be actually under fire, even featuring Stendhal on the Napoleonic wars.

Wendy has followed in that appalled-by-war literary tradition with her poems based on her great grandfather's letters home from within the US civil war. Generally the collection is one long reconciliation, her long ago grandparent having been fighting for the Confederates, and thus supporting slavery, and her being of this 21st century's cosmopolitan culture.

Hers is a clear-eyed view of the past, and as importantly of the imperfect present. She manages to convey a familial empathy for her ancient relatives, while being both appalled by her great grandfather's cause and his wartime predicaments. The opening poem for instance is in the spirit of the aforementioned Kipling poem, but hers as an old-fashioned newspaper vendor shouting out the headlines, which serve to detail the killing innovations made during that civil war.

I find myself reluctant to quote any single poem here as each contributes to the whole and any one would be an imperfect example. The collection could also be called one long lament wherein she bemoans the ancestry of modern day weapons too. Recounted with no illusions she tries to forgive her forebears, their being of a time and place, but yet... We are none of us now perfect, and what will the future make of us? Us with our ongoing wars?

I don't think I've come across a poetry collection like this before, one that goes to such depths to avoid easy judgements. As conflicted as Walt Whitman's accounts of nursing in that war, Wendy Klein's inner turmoil is what makes this book so big, that gives it such a density, the wanting to be proud, admitting to the shame, embracing her ancestors' humanity, her reluctance to judge while knowing that she ought to and yet... and yet.

Orbis #209, editor Carole Baldock, www.orbisjournal.com A5 96 pages perfect bound subscription £20.00 p.a.

Can tell by that issue number how far behind I am with my reviewing, with my reading in general. Too much else elsewhere happening. But finally... Finally to be greeted by Carole's editorial matching my mood: just how do we come out from under the news these days? Carole offered no solutions, but it was marginally good to feel that one is by no means alone.

And plenty this issue to remind me, to make me feel good. Opening with AC Clarke's exposition on and translation of a Paul Éluard poem. And it pleased me to find more poems going beyond the personal and treating with the tragedies befalling so many in our so many current war zones.

Along with all of Orbis's other regular features, Lines on Lines, review section, competitions listing, the Readers' Award has to be so reassuring, even validating, for submitting poets in that, although a democratic winner will emerge, there is also the chance that their offering might get one favourable mention.

Should this brief review make it to Carole on time here are my four for the next issue's Readers' Award – Anne Klein Newcomer's Double Bind; Bill Greenwell's Nocturne; Marc Tritsmans' Approach; and Donna Pucciani's Forever Red. A worthy fifth would be the haunting imagery of Pauline Hall's Inside the Putin Doll.

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Two American publications.

Osiris 98 editor Andrea Moorhead www.osirispoetry.com B5 60 pages perfect bound 12$ 12€

One hesitates to say 'as usual' about any issue of Osiris. But this issue, #98, usual quality production with its heavy cream paper and international editorial board, contains the usual rich mix of original languages – French, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish and English. Truly cosmopolitan Osiris never has been a small poetry corner, contains as many poetic forms as different cultures.

Surprises too; I didn't expect Rupert M Loydell's descriptive Broken River. This goes beyond his usual linguistic preoccupations. And so much more to revel in here – the easy symbolism of Salvador Espru's La Villa de la Gerra. And in just 10 lines Richard Houff manages to tell of every old writer's state of being, if not life entire.

Broken Pencils

The last remaining leaf

on a threadbare tree,

overlooks scrawled stories

from an unclaimed

park bench.

And here I stand,

implicated in my own dream,

reinventing myself outside

the shelves of forgotten authors,

and that one passage

I never seem to find.

Generous of the editors to give all 5 parts of Hanne Bramness The Snow Museum, original and translation. And talking of editors, Andrea's own prose poem Understanding What One Reads had me captivated while almost defying understanding. Am gratified to report too that #98 has some of Robert Moorhead's b&w juxtaposition/visions, sliced about and skewed, which have been as usual both pleasing and intriguing.

Such a relief to find that, against all the publishing odds, international Osiris persists. Please support with a subscription.

Trajectory #26 editor Chris Helvey PO Box 655, Frankfort, KY 40602-0655, USA www.trajectoryjournal.com B5 166 pages perfect bound (2 issues $28.00)

The editors invite works that have 'trajectory,' howsoever one wishes to interpret that. My initial response to the chummy editorial led me to expect a writer's group – if dispersed – and 'supportive' publication. All forms here from poetry to short stories, novel extracts and articles to reviews.

I did wonder, the first forty odd pages, if all the writing was to be about writers and writing. Was relieved therefore to get to John Grey's poems taking an objective stance. So too Cathy Porter's poems that moved beyond the first person singular. Likewise I got drawn into Denise Thompson-Slaughter's third person Jackpot.

I couldn't help but remark – again! - on how casually so many US writers refer to God as if he actually exists. And I don't know what writing workshops recommend these days, beyond 'write about what you know,' what I do know is that the use of 'I' is the biggest barrier to my engaging with any literary work, be that poem or short story. Exception here being James K. Zimmerman's Elegy For The Leaves which drew me gently in. And being of a similar age I readily identified with George J. Searles' poems, even to my having also experienced vanishing mesons.

With something bordering on relief I arrived at the short story of the only writer here that I already know, Brian Daldorph. (I came by this copy of Trajectory courtesy of his daughter, Brenna.) As expected the writing is exceptional, character and plot nuanced. Unlike some of the other sub-Bukowski work here there is no implicit self-aggrandisement. If anything the reverse, detailing discomfort in social gatherings, a quiet stubbornness against macho conformity while endeavouring to be polite. All of this taking place over year upon year of America's Labor [sic] Day, with the ongoing mystery of one's supposed, and taciturn, nearest and dearest, the mismatch of expectations of one another perfectly rendered.

This was followed by an interesting article on charity work done for the migrants who make it across the Mexican/US border; similar to the charity work undertaken over here for those migrants who make it across the English Channel.

All in all, one way or another all work here fell under the 'trajectory' heading, with a final piece on sexual uncertainty, acceptance of the experience being its trajectory, in a prison setting – 'a human warehouse on the outskirts of society.'

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I wanted to review these three books while the conversations I had with their authors at the recent Swansea Book Fair were still reasonably fresh.

All fours: Nia Davies Bloodaxe Books, www.bloodaxebooks.com ISBN 978-1-78037-364-5 A5 78 pages perfect bound £9.95

Nia Davies was until a year or so back the editor of Poetry Wales. Hard to credit that this 2017 collection was her first full collection.

First impressions are that these are allusive, off-centre poems, require the reader's participation. Her second poem, Mossy Coat, is a poem of oblique defiance – I think? – is her refusal to be categorised.

Reading on... Every word, every phrase here, titles included, require consideration, even the repetitions. I tell reviewer me to choose my words as carefully as she has. Not that these are look-at-me clever poems, far from it. They sing. Nia Davies attacks language, and delivers her pleasure in bringing that destruction/reconstruction to the page, fulfilling the dictum that poetry be the reinvention of language.

What I most love about this collection is its sheer artistry, the poems being allowed to create themselves, their own logic/continuance, their own shapes. So many lines that I wanted to share, but would have meant less out of context. Or more. But other.

As an already lover of German compound words, and of compound growth like lichen, I revelled in the final section, Çekoslovakyahlaştiramadiklarimizdanmisiniz or LONG WORDS. Here is her

about to become the leader of a contemptible palaeontology conservatory komencopaleontologiokonservatoriaĉestriĝontajn (Esperanto)

they rob you sideways at the bus stop

after the classic car convention,

yours was always a contemptible rise to fame

and they always had their edifice of cotton,

fossils – like the fossil inside their bodies – and

there are palaeontologists who don't reveal themselves in conversation

who spat upon you

you, pretender to this invented order,

all their tradings off

(is the eel's heart needle-shaped?)

they put their fists in rock cavities

hunch over the mineral dishes

snap each other's jaws shut

with metronome clicks

have wasted years of mineral wealth,

about to become a revolution

about to dress sensibly for warfare

(if we were in North Korea, we'd have been executed by now)

I chose this poem to quote in full not because it is representative of the whole but because its format would not get messed about by website software. I remain concerned here though that you might assume, from what I have so far said, that these poems would keep the reader at an intellectual distance. Far from it. The long poem the most emotionally disturbing (or upsetting) thing Pinakanakapagpapabagabag-damamin (Tagalog) left me for one distinctly uneasy.

Eighteen Haikus : Mike Everley www.everley.link ISBN 9798373424547 A5 28 pages perfect bound £4.00

When Mike showed me this booklet at the Swansea Book Fair what jumped out at me were the full colour illustrations accompanying each of the haiku. These had been generated, Mike told me, by feeding each of the haiku into an AI image generator. With, I have to say, remarkable effect.

I got quite excited about the images, wanted to show them to everyone. Until that is I showed them to my artist daughter. “No artist credited,” she said. “And yet each of these images is based on someone's art, someone else's photograph. Wonder if they got paid.”

Which left me a tad crestfallen. Slightly guilty too, as I have only recently signed up to the Society of Author's campaign, with other of my publishers too, to demand that permission be acquired before any of my own work be AI scraped, and if scraped followed by payment.

My guilt wanted me to admit/argue that here we enter the realm of plagiarism, and I could have asked in the putative debate where ekphrasis might sit, deconstruction too, even accepted usage? But as she also works as a copy editor, her work copyrighted, I thought silence a better option than a scowl.

All that said the full colour images accompanying each of the haiku do remain remarkable. 'Last light' for instance – Last light. Borne by waves, / grey crested and slow curling. / Lost to day and sight. – has an almost indigo, could be waves, weird could be bird shapes, with splashes of orange. Probably, and simply because the image is not of human origin, it intrigues.

As does the Wild Dog Rising haiku – Against the dark sky / the wild dog is now rising, / to bark at the moon. – The image here has a storm-clouded sky with a large could-be silhouette of a dog, the foreground a cracked yellow.

No image here though is as unsettling as that accompanying the cold wind haiku – It is a cold wind. / Shouting along dusty streets, / sucking bone marrow. – Here the image has foreground and to the side the front of a traditional Japanese building, a dark figure in female dress standing outside. In the pale distance are tower blocks, and coming centrally down the dusty street are what looks like a sawn open body part, could be a pink torso.

All the haiku here satisfy haiku's qualification, the particular meeting the universal; and this booklet is, despite the plural of haiku being haiku, and despite my daughter's disgruntlement over the use of AI, one very attractive publication.

Fragments / poems written in 2024 : Mike Evereley www.everley.link ISBN 9798323756230 A5 54pages perfect bound £5.00

Poems here of the past imposing on the present, those we can't forget, are angry to remember. Hard lives recounted, unnecessary deaths in a ragbag of poetry forms, some obviously written for performance, some perilously close to doggerel, and some of acute observation. Haiku too. They seem to be Mike's strength.

Ginger Tea

A clump of ginger

sitting in the small green pot

it fills my senses.

Likewise

Mallards

Mallards skid addle

Emeralds in the wet sun

Beyond moment's past.

I feel honour bound to say though that this collection would have greatly benefited from an editor's oversight and a cruel red pen; or maybe a year longer's reflection. However, my being of a similar age, I can readily sympathise with Mike's haste to publish, to get the work out there, because at our age we never know what year is going to be our last. Let's hope that Mike is going to be around and experimenting with forms and images for a lot longer yet.

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Overheard Love Songs: Sadie Maskery Alien Buddha Press, available on Amazon ISBN 9798336837018 A5 84 pages perfect bound £8.38

A beautifully produced collection: a black cover with a glowing image in reds of a bus stop perfectly placed. Opening it the contents came initially as a bit of a shock, the vernacular especially. Yet beautiful in itself, so well chosen and almost too true. Here's St Andrews the second poem in.

He's a manlet, arrogant,

a short king. Too much brains.

I love being a hater,

he knows full well

I wouldn't give him

the steam aff ma piss

if he was freezing.

But he telled me

'Gravity is loneliness,

the faint call,

come to me come to me

as the universe flies apart.

Come to me.'

I was puking up ma ring last night.

Oh it was a belter.

Not all is in Scots dialect. Sadie's is a cosmopolitan reach in the characters adopted. I didn't doubt a word here. Classical allusions undercutting the vibe, someone twerking for a 'like', overheard literary chat... I spluttered into my coffee so many times I had to give up drinking it.

Acrylics £20

Had me minge lasered

smooth as a buttered parsnip

then used that mint

napalm in the shower.

Tingles? My poor old foof.

I fell off the ceiling.

Overheard Love Songs could easily have been retitled A Young Maiden's Trials and Adventures in Singledom. As it is it rekindled my joy in poetry. Take a gander at the lusciousness in just these 5 lines from Trade.

Who plucked your wings, Twinkerbell?

So exquisite a sensitivity to the light.

You drop too glibly into other tongues,

flirt unceasingly, dissipated dilly boy,

sly drinker, winker, SM kinker, hellsprung

well hung fighter of the holy cockfight...

Elsewhere are single lines to give pause, to self-accuse. That's the degree of honesty here. Another indrawn breath. But by no means wearing. Not knowing what to expect next, pages and poems remained fresh to the end. Characters here I have known, and a few I don't want to know. But all so credible. I loved Clarence.

Making Dolmades in Essex: Judith Wozniak Vole Imprint dempseyandwindle.com ISBN 978-1-917101-05-9 A5 64 pages perfect bound £9.99

With Essex in the title I hadn't expected the first poem to be local to here in South Wales. Memory poems these.

But first a confession. When checking the number of pages for the publication details above I made the mistake of glancing through the end page acknowledgements. No magazines of previously published were cited, only placements in competitions. Now I am by no means being alone in not having the wherewithal to meet the entry payment for poetry competitions, and along with those others I have come to doubt the worth of competitions if it is only the well-off who can enter them. Also the actual choice of who wins. The winner will have to be acceptable to all those who have entered: don't want to upset the paying customers. And it is that acceptability that ends up bringing nothing new to the poetry scene.

I am bringing that prejudice to this collection. If all these poems were found to be acceptable to competition judges are they going to be telling me anything new in a new way?

An undercurrent of sadness does stop these memory poems becoming wholly nostalgic. But brand names litter this Essex growing up, and holidays with extended family in Wales told me nothing new.

I did have to look up 'Dolmades', which are of Turkish or Greek origin, a rice mixture wrapped in vine leaves. As a child Judith helped to make them with her next door neighbours

The second problem in my reviewing this is my just having exulted over the explicit Maskery, and comparison to the implicit Wozniak couldn't be greater. 'Tell you when you're older,' her mother says after a visit to seeing camp Liberace and wondering what all the laughter had been about.

Several poems about dressing up, as girl and older.

Stage Whisper

Mum gives me a last-minute lick and spittle polish.

I'm wearing my new frock made by Auntie Clover,

from across the road, in school colours, daffodil yellow

with boxed pleats ironed in crisp lines, a starched

white Peter pan collar, itchy green angora bolero,

lacey socks with elastic that cuts wheals in my shins.

I've rehearsed and rehearsed, with Mum playing piano,

for my recorder solo. I see Mum and Auntie Clover

settle in the front row. The lights dim, a sudden hush,

it's my turn. In the wings my teacher whispers

just think how proud your father would have been.

I'm sure he's out there somewhere listening.

I can't see him beyond the dazzle of spotlights.

I can see why several of the poems earned commendations in the competitions; and despite all that I have said, the poems are eminently readable. But taken together one starts to spot a then-and-now theme, recurring similarities. No playfulness with language inviting me in, little to excite.

Poetry & All That Jazz editor Barry Smith www.sdpf.org.uk A5 56 pages perfect bound To buy a copy or submit poems to next year’s issue (from March 2025) please contact Barry Smith at southdownspf@gmail.com

This 2024 anthology, produced by the South Downs Poetry Festival and the Festival of Chichester, has contributors from far beyond its Sussex constituency; and is as with their previous anthologies packed with delights. One poem I certainly didn't expect was Timothy Adès' translation of Gold by Joachim Ringelnatz (1883-1934), still sadly germane. And there was more excellent work from Melanie Penycate, Rosie Jackson; and then I came to Denise Bennett's lockdown letter to Edward Thomas. A perfect bringing together of different times.

I loved the rallying cry of Robert Hamberger's Queens, found Robin Houghton's when satellites align oddly haunting, and enjoyed Nancy Mattson's hunt for 'petrichor' in Name That Scent. I became fascinated by Simon Jenner's pair, Listening to Naway Kechog. Loved Jessica Mookerjee's Menopausal and Geoffrey Winch's Transcending Self-Portraiture. And finally couldn't resist reproducing Rodney Wood's minor masterpiece.

At Sea, a Brew with a View

A cup of coffee spills its tale,

while water beads on the window

carve paths and race to the sill.

The sea outside flexes its muscles,

splutters, coughs and almost gags.

It lives under clouds and stretches

into the distance and disappears

at the horizon 11.9 miles away.

My time her unfolds in this cup of coffee

where every drop speaks of oceans.

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Immigrant Journey: Jim Conwell Vole imprint dempseyandwindle.com ISBN 978-1-917101-07-3 A5 66 pages perfect bound £10.99

An opening piece, Poise, had this reader laughing, setting me up to enjoy what followed. Because Jim Conwell uses humour to make serious points, and does so effectively. Got me to reassessing certain parts of my own life.

Throughout these lives of ours we all move, move both physically and socially, especially in class-ridden Britain. Consequently those of us like Jim who don't know our place we spend our lives wondering at those who do, or think they do.

I was tempted to write that Jim writes 'unashamedly working class poetry.' Except, Jim Conwell being realistically working class, he has no false pride in being working class, knows his own. Odd to think that I have laboured with shovel and pick alongside men like Jim, and with language too, trying to make pen and ink sense of it all, our being awkward and not settling for being peculiar, a character.

Working

The men I grew up with risked boredom

if they were not working.

Digging trenches took the energy

that had no other outlet.

And I worked with men,

dead-enders like me, mostly,

who longed for the holiday break

but when it came, ended up longing

to get back to work.

What has been done to those people?

And who is responsible for such damage?

Why is it that we do not even ask

those questions?

That last one is rhetorical.

I know the answer.

It suits us.

And who gives a fuck about them anyway?

And here the obverse, about his mother.

Portrait

Pinched defiance.

Is that what it was?

Have I got you there?

Not unlively and not mean

but squeezed.

Except around the eyes

where someone with spirit still looked out.

A woman of early ambition.

Prepared to be ruthless.

Bolassed by four children

and a steady husband.

Inexplicably left behind

by the film-star glamour

when the Yanks left

and took their promises with them.

Abandoned in an ordinary life,

cleaning the mess of others

and making his tea

with endurance.

I so identified with these poems, their preoccupations, the lifetime required to make sense of a single childhood. Us at our late age still trying to figure out just where we came from, came to be, wondering about the people who created us, who sowed guilt and shame into the fabric of our being, weapons of control stored in us that we then had to battle against using on our own offspring. The absurdities of life also, as with this collection, had us finding plenty to laugh at. Which has probably not endeared us to the sober and sombre.

When describing characters Jim is so very good at capturing pronunciations and local cadences; and I so enjoyed the poems that I doubted his wisdom in including the 7 page family history at the end, although it does go some way to explaining – needlessly I think – the attitude behind the poems' sentiments. Could be just me, but after the pleasure I took in the poems the prose left me flat. The poems though still make the book worth getting hold of.

Tears in the Fence editor David Caddy Durweston Mill, Mill Lane, Durweston, Blandford Forum, Dorset, DT11 0QD, UK. A5 188 pages single copy UK £12.00 (p&p incl.) £30.00 for 3 issues / £50.00 for 6 issues UK only.

TitF is worth getting for the sheer variety of poetry, to wonder at the how of of it all. Although there was one consistency this issue that quite soon made itself apparent, the use of the first person singular, the largest word, the biggest stumbling block to engaging with any poem, I. Was almost a relief to come to Rosie Garland's second person singular, although in it she is still presumably talking about herself. Huw-Gwynne-Jones with his second person singular in Pavanne not so.

Norman Jope's Bitumen had an altogether pleasing absence of the personal. Imagistic and speculative Bitumen was an absorbing read. Likewise Andrew Henon's etymological playfulness. Caroline Maldonado's concerns with language too. I loved Jane Wheeler's Blebo Craig's and would have reproduced it here were it not for the site software messing up the formatting.

With so much excellent work to choose from I came to realise, anew, that my taste runs to the descriptive, as with Lynne Wycherley's Octavo with Unexpected Fauna. And altogether different again, Cathra Kelliher's University of Texas, April 24 2024.And this by Eliza O'Toole ticked every box for me:-

Participal and perfective; the grammar of the valley prefixed (the fastening of things, or it was more than that)

That rain is ringing the pond, the lilac in full

purple, that gale shrill, horizontal the hail sheet-

beating the corrugating, and ruthfulling

hamorian the flowering cherries, wild whip-

lashed. In the field a tide of barley deening was

rolling and high resurging. That the knowing of

the growing was in the ground, that the addling

of the roots was in the shoots rising, and that the

inclementing of the wide green late spring winds

were resounding an ocean, that the valley cleaved

and silence followed and the ghost ponds arisen

were swallow heaved, and the crows unflapping

were flowing over, and rooks were rough ruckling

in the oaks, that should be enough.

Not quite enough. Being TitF there are of course page after page, 67 of them, of fulsome, close read reviews.

(Scroll down for previous reviews)

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Movement of People : Clive Donovan Vole imprint, dempseyandwindle.com ISBN 978-1-917101-06-6 A5 84 pages perfect bound £10.99

I thought that I knew Clive Donovan's work from his contributions to The Journal. I recall some of them being quite subtle. Not so here. This collection is dedicated to 'all the oppressed.' And to that end Clive gives us examples and tells us of the mechanics and psychology of oppression – in poem after poem, page after page.

This subject matter of itself makes a single read-through hard going. Had I not been reviewing I would probably have put the book to one side and have dipped in when I felt the need to confront reality. And what with the ongoing genocide in Gaza there's been a lot of reality around of late. Did I want yet more? Reviewer duty nonetheless called and I read on.

Difficult to supply evidence

when it's gone, been killed,

destroyed, raped into silence,

but we all know it's there,

ignored..... The True History

This collection though is as much a call to arms against oppression as a lament for past wrongs.

Cobbles

Mauled by the suck of sea,

their edges sheared away,

ordered as weary subjects

of a tyrant's grim regime,

worn altogether smooth by obedience.

Compliant in ranks arranged on shores,

higher up than smaller brethren,

so they may view their pebbled future,

raucous in the shove and pull of waves,

reduced at last to sludge of sand.

But these lively cobbles have been saved,

bagged by hand, hauled and sold,

to be set in streets and yards and squares,

compressed by horses, iron wheels, clogs

and all the trampling commerce of men.

And in times of oppressive might past remedy,

mutinous subjects loosen and lever

those perfectly shaped fortuitous stones,

to fit just so, in furious fingers and slings, to throw

as they surge to the rock pile palaces of kings!

Other poems step into prisons, concentration camps, stumble through atrocities, meet everyday horrors and ambushes, riots and crusades. Like wars all waiting for us again. Always, lest we forget; and Clive Donovan is determined that we won't forget. While knowing that his is an uphill task.

Don't Want

I just don't want to think about

those murdered babies,

she says, in a huff,

nor blackened trees nor blown-up tanks,

the turtles strangled, whales, the rest.

I don't want to give such things energy.

And when I hear those words,

others blossom to fruit in my head;

like buried – sand – ostrich.

The poems here cynic me expects will get described as 'powerful' when all they are is true. The same fundamental and unappetising truths previous other pacifist poets, such as WH Auden, acknowledged. One very timely collection this.

(Scroll down for previous reviews)

Orbis #208, editor Carole Baldock www.orbisjournal.com A5 96 pages perfect bound single issue £6.00 annual Sub £20.00

This editorial has the Carole Baldock I know and love in full castigating flow – generally against laziness in submissions and competition entries. Don't these careless poets want their work to be accepted, to win? What with her criticisms being many of my own old editorial gripes my sympathies were assured, doubly assured when this issue's past master turned out to be my hero and all-round pacifist inspiration Wystan Hugh Auden.

There follows the usual Orbis mix of contents, adverts for competitions (as well as the 4 bonus pages of competition listings), poems of course, 7 pages of reviews, and readers' responses to last issue's poems, prizes given. One of mine was given a joint third most liked. Thank you!

This having to choose one's favoured four poems for next issue's readers' awards makes one yet more attentive to the poems. Here's my four – Experiments in Time by Patrick Druggan took me where I hadn't expected. Nauset by Royal Rhodes had me going back to see how she (he?) had so successfully married the internal with the external. I was similarly drawn back to Julie-Ann Rowell's Illness by Night. And of the competition poems I was most taken by Michael W. Thomas's Killay.

So much excellent descriptive writing this issue. For instance loved '...a shape of light falling...' from Phil Kirby's Rooms By The Sea, 1951. That poem began a whole curated mini series that encompassed sea all the way to rainfall and lakes.

With so few print magazines surviving these days (I have so far failed to find a way of resurrecting The Journal) I can only imagine the work that must go into keeping Orbis alive. A subscription to Orbis would therefore be a help to both your writer self and poetry life.

(Scroll down for previous reviews)

Spirals: a multilingual poetry & art anthology: Editors Hari Marini & Barbara Bridger, PartSuspended Artist Collective www.tearsinthefence.com ISBN 9781900020138 A5 136 pages perfect bound (no price given)

Knowing that I had Spirals waiting to be reviewed I perchance came upon this note to myself. 'Spiral art – a visual representation of a poem, then a poem based on that painting, followed by a painting based on that poem... and so on.'

That is not quite what is happening in Spirals. This is how Mary Paterson describes it on the back cover: '...our lives did not make a neat circle like a snake that swallows its tail. Our lives made a spiral: a disappearance of circles. An endless movement that does not meet its own ends.'

A long term collaborative project, dance incorporated into the mix, complicated by the Covid lockdown, it very soon became apparent that here the nebulous is being sought, that just-there-ness, corner of the eye, memory's edge, tip of the tongue... A self-examination of language, art looking at itself; I went backwards and forwards looking for connections, inspirations between this piece, this language, one poem and a dance reference. Barbara Bridger waiting '...for time to continue / for tick to become tock....'

Thirst

From the furthest exile

comes the land of snakes,

they reap the harvest with a dance

of language, death and thirst.

(Noèlia Díaz-Vicedo: trans. Noèlia Díaz-Vicedo and Clive Boutle)

Figurative almost cartoon/collage-like paintings by Georgia Kalogeropou are reproduced in shades of grey. So many poems I'd like to use as examples here. Hari Marini's paths 2 & 11 for instance. One of the drawbacks of reviewing online however is that formats are not accurately reproduced, so I have to be selective. Here is Hari's path 8.

and when she can't breathe

from the rhythm in people's steps

sucking in their little moments

she escapes to the repetirive sound of the waves

that remind of the big moments now forgotten

she stretches her fingers flicking the dust away

from anything that goes unnoticed

(Trans. Theo Kominis)

Of all here I was less taken by the long exhortatory poems than the shorter that allowed me to participate.

Ex-situ

They laugh and dance the crab and the scorpion

and begin the dance of jasmine,

a drink of the tail of the snake uncovers

an ancient secret: living with me or without me,

and will recall the old songs of poets and grandmothers:

disappointed feet make me their hostage.

(Noèlia Díaz-Vicedo: trans. Noèlia Díaz-Vicedo and Clive Boutle)

Here in the book is where the colour photographs begin, and I encountered a problem. I do not have an iPhone, couldn't scan in the Q codes that would take me to view the videos. Decades of typing having also taken their RSI toll I reluctantly decided against typing in the long website addresses, consequently I missed out on the dancers' contributions. Though I think I got the gist.

The anthology changes again on pae 68, from there features more prose. This Collaboative Writing on SPIRALS during the Covid-19 lockdown is where members of the PartSuspended collective reflect on the process of writing collectively. Where already in the anthology efforts had been consciously made to connect out of one's existential loneness, being confined during the lockdown emphasised that need.

Again here my appreciation of SPIRALS became limited by my not having an iPhone, although the colour plates helped; and did I, where understanding doesn't necessarily need to know everything, have to have that iPhone access? Dreams and photos analysed, picked up on, moved on from... The poignant need to share, something more plucking at mind's edge... (In a spiral the ellipsis is a prerequisite.)

Then came, under more colour photos, explorations of spirals – from spiral galaxies; and from the French, Greek and Latin for 'spiral.' Then more from synonyms for spiral. Such riches, so many provocations. There is even an instruction on how to spiral. Art as process and product, joyful stuff.

The wonderful thing about this book is that it is not, that it cannot be, complete. I for instance can feel my want to make, my imagination teetering on the edge of something yet to come. Which is not to say that the work here is not accomplished, all those involved are deserving of applause.

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The Lost Art of Ironing: Kelly Davis The Hedgehog Poetry Press, 5 Coppack House, Churchill Avenue, Clevedon, BS21 6QW www.hedgehogpress.co.uk ISBN 978-1-916830-30-1 $13.99 (this on Amazon was the only price I could find. Email from Kelly tells me it's £10.99)

Oddly as the one male in a family of women it fell to me to do the weekly ironing – school clothes, blouses, skirts, dresses. My grown daughters even now rarely iron. I therefore somewhat tentatively approached this collection, fearing that it might lump ironing in as a woman's lot. Consequently the first poem I leapt to was The Lost Art of Ironing, and was relieved to find ironing used as the key to a relationship. Nicely done too.

But to the whole collection – of largely thought-through poems. An ode to her hands, speculative on Emily Dickinson, a wry smile for Mona Lisa... Several of the poems are to, or are inspired by, other poets. She explores them, and the past, with a cold eye and a warm heart. Not all though are of bygone days and characters. The present is here.

As with the ironing poem Kelly Davis has the narrator's knack of drawing one into a poem, and has one travelling with her towards its resolution. Leaving one content, reflective, even if a concrete resolution fails to materialise – as in I Sat Opposite Autumn on the Tube and the oh-so-right ending of Meeting in Deep Time.

As a one-time resident of Maryport I loved, can vouch for the veracity of her Senhouse Street, Maryport. Of all here though the poem that sticks with me is her Editing Memoirs -

Sometimes I feel like Florence Nightingale

wandering the battlefield at night,

hearing dying men calling for their mothers,

wishing I could reattach their severed limbs,

return the blood to their veins.

Looking back, perhaps it was a mistake to say

I specialised in memoirs. I never thought

so many wounded lives would fling themselves

into my in-box, beg me to heal them,

arrange them neatly on the page.

Kelly finishes off the collection with 5 of her versions/responses to Shakespeare's sonnets, all 5 as adroitly written as the remainder of the collection. As Brian Patten says, hard to believe that this is a first collection.

(Have to say, having been to Kelly's website – www.clarepark.com - in search of the book price, her photos aren't half-bad either Although, same email from Kelly, she tells me that that's Clare Park's website and she it was who took Kelly's author photo.)

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On the road to Cadianda: Janet Hatherley VOLE books, dempseyandwindle.com ISBN 978-1-917101-04-2 A5 70 pages perfect bound £9.99

Collection opens with a powerful poem telling of two felled pines and which captures perfectly our emotional compact with trees. So strong is the poem I was encouraged to read on; to find that trees are not her only emotional connection, is what Janet Hatherley does, telling of her fascination with wild tortoises for instance.

The tightly descriptive poems tell of her life and repeat visits to Türkiye, and of incidents with butterflies, moths, birds, gecko, goats, sheep... She captures both the modernity and the agelessness of the place, where empires and tyrants have come and gone, and markets and people go on. Here we are again, she seems to saying, and with a nudge says, 'Look at this.' Some boys on bikes, a pilfered tomb, man on a horse, more butterflies, bird, moth... So much of the slow heat conveyed brought to mind my own time in the Trodos with Turkish Cypriot friends.

Although not about Cyprus this of hers perfectly captured my own time on that pre-partitioned island.

Kayaköy

Night falls

the imman plays chess

with the priest

the moon

leans into its curve

Greeks leave

their keys

with Turkish neighbours

long friends

last tears and kisses

walls and fireplaces

open to the sky

blue patches of paint

the air stirs

somewhere there's a key

When I reviewed Janet's pamphlet in The Journal I said that the only disappointment I had was coming to the end of it. Her On the road to Cadianda has more than compensated. Although I did find one aspect disappointing. The few less successful poems here, those that lacked authenticity, were those where she attempted to follow a rhyming scheme or a particular form. They stand in contrast to all the tightly descriptive free verse which every time drew me in and which I found enchanting thoughout. Because there is a stubborn love at work here, not only of love for humanity, but for all life. Evident especially in her long Hurrem Sonnet Sequence where she imaginatively tells of Hurrem, consort to Suleiman the Magnificent, and of Hurrem's many efforts to make people's lives better. Latterly germane too, '...What is war's purpose, / so many drown in its ruin...' She is unafraid to mix the ordinary with the exotic, or to find the exotic ordinary. When accidentally stuck in a garage's grotty lavatory she draws solace from Rumi: 'You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.'

This is not a tourist's view of Türkiye, but it is the Türkiye that I so wish tourists were seeing.

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Orbis #207 Editor Carole Baldock, 17 Greenhow Avenue, West Kirby, Wirral, Cheshire, CH48 5EL A5 96 pages perfect bound subscriptions £20.00 p.a.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love having poems accepted by Carole Baldock. I know that she will take me to task, will seek to make my offerings the best they can be. What I probably shouldn't be saying now is that, in the back and forth of proofs this time, both of us were bothered by my use of the word 'brown.' Says nothing much, said Carole. But neither of us could come up with a satisfactory alternative, not which didn't invalidate the authentic experience. However no sooner had this issue gone to print than, when out walking, a more fitting alternative came to me, 'butchered.' Too late.

Despite that small disappointment, knowing how much Carole works on my poems had me ready to appreciate all the other contributions this issue.

I've said it before and I'll say it again; but Orbis is as much a social club for poets as a magazine per se. Blocks of poems are separated by issue standards. Past Master this issue was one of the Imagistes, Amy Lowell, with her delightful forerunner of prose poetry.

Another thing Carole likes to do is spot and gather poems into a theme. So the natural world continued to inspire the poems that followed on from Amy Lowell's, some of them free verse, some formal, their authors from around the world. The tightness of Niels Hammer's two poems particularly impressed.

Then we come to what makes Orbis a club, the Lines on Lines section. Here are letters and comments from readers on aspects of the last issue. Most are complimentary, where not the editor responds. These are followed by Readers' Awards, where they choose their favourite 3 poems from the previous issue and say why they are so favoured. All good feedback, the poets top of one list not getting a mention in another. Here is where poets abandon hubris.

Another regular section is Featured Writer. This issue it was Tanya Nightingale, whose work I haven't come across before. Proved a very welcome introduction to her confident and sophisticated oeuvre.

If I had to pick a Number One poem/poet this issue it would have to be Gareth Roberts' John Ever Afraid. Almost its every line intrigued. I was also knocked sideways by the Stephen Copus translation of Töredék by Miklós Radnóti. The original written 1944 sadly pertinent today: 'I lived on this earth in an age when men / had stooped so low that they killed for pleasure...' That setting my mood, my Number Three would have to be Marcia Gamsu's grim Defence.

The seven pages of reviews are on a par with those in Tears in the Fence. David Harmer's review of Marjorie Lofti's The Wrong Person to Ask was the one that drew me in. As did Andrew Taylor's reviews of Luke Samuel Yates' Dynamo.

This issue was rounded off with 10 pages of competition listings – for those who can afford the entry fees – and a couple of adverts.

I don't know for how much longer Carole can keep doing this, but for the foreseeable if you can only afford one poetry magazine Orbis is probably your best bet.

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2024 reviews of the collections below should have been included in future issues of The Journal had increasing costs not caused its production to be temporarily suspended.

Reeling and Writhing : Barry Smith (No immediate relation, but who knows? We are of an age and there was a war on...) Vole Books, dempseyandwindle.com ISBN 9781913329914 A5 102 pages perfect bound £12.50

Title taken from Alice in Wonderland's conversations with the Mock Turtle I thought I knew what to expect in terms of delivery. Opening section though showed me otherwise, its contents as various as its styles. Several poems of recollection, with a few figuring by-the-by physical ailments – ulcers, AIDS and so on – and they cover times not so long past – the lockdown, terrorist attacks – and times long ago. Whatever the period to the forefront Barry has the knack of placing each descriptive piece within an historical context, be that in a day's wander around his Sussex neighbourhood, or in a visit to a particular churchyard, where the Romans or even the bronze age can figure. His Figures in a Sussex Landscape about Lord Alfred Tennyson captures beautifully, after the storm's partial destruction of their Warninglid holiday home, the prosaic among the poetic and vice versa.

Some times past are captured in a line – 'the sensuous chastisement of the birch' for instance. (Had The Journal still been solvent my chancing on that line would have had me passing Writhing and Reeling to Melissa Todd for her expert review.)

A few poems I found over-descriptive: less would have been more effective. I much preferred his wry views of recent outrages and political developments, the tightly-related anecdotes and the polemic. He knows how to hit home does Barry. As in Theresa's Tears.

The second section – there are three – is based on, inspired by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Could as easily have been titled, Barry's Inventions in Wonderland so close are they, both in the telling and in spirit, to the original. Here is the first stanza of

Changing Places

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party

When you're sat at a place

When you're stuck in a rut

You look all around you -

And see what others have got!

The grass is much greener

The sky is much bluer

The chair is much softer

The fruit is much fresher

Everything you see is -

Better and betterer!

The rhyming in this Lewis Carroll inspired section continued on into the next Songs from the Country of the Blind section, which was for secular me, probably due to their bible/prayer book references, the least telling. Even so, with Barry's willingness to have a go at any format/layout/subject, he does possess the capacity to surprise. Pins and Needles had me read that through and through.

All in all Reeling and Writhing is a mixed bag. Being positive I'd say that it has something to suit all tastes. Well, most tastes. Daily Mail readers would not like this at all. Which is by way of my wholehearted recommendation. I'll leave the last word to Barry. These lines from his Requiem -

I have played my last tune,

See my notes are dissolute

You cannot dance to them now -

They are lost in the laughter of time...

Passages, a chapbook : David Heidenstam Grey Dolphin Press www.greydolphinpress.com ISBN 978-0-9955934-8-0 A5 38 pages perfect bound £3.99

Another mixed blessing. Sensual descriptive writing; untethered and, as this small collection's title suggests, always about to move on. I was at times however irritated by the inclusion of post-it type inspiration/backward aphorisms – 'the water swims the fish / the earth draws the root / the paper pulls the word / the life pumps the heart.' Forgiven when meeting the next purely descriptive piece -

Shallows

Sitting beside her, you hear the tide of her breathing.

You, insomniac, quietly breathing,

hear the ebb and flow of her breath.

Out there in the bay some men are digging cockles

working in pairs across the rippled mud....

And then he goes and contains the elusive in Another Apocalypse -

Home is numerous and previous.

You tattoo knife cuts on your wrist.

Days nudge you forward. Or maybe back.

God tells you death is worth the visit.

The small winds circling in the street,

the ripe horizon tempting on.

Up from the plain, skies growing shorter.

Stilled wolves watching.

Birds not caring.

Hills grey, green, black

coloured by transience

like us, like all of us.

Light reading; some of the poems needing to be sung, others required a stage.

Tears in the Fence #79 Spring 2024 Editor David Caddy, Durweston Mill, Mill Lane, Durweston, Blandford Forum, Dorset, DT11 0QD www.tearsinthefence.com A5 192 pages single issue £12.00 3 issues £30.00 UK only/

Primed by an editorial on [mis]translation and [mis]interpretation this reviewer went treading carefully into the poetry. The first poet asked me to look at the language, the second told me stories. The usual juxtapositions that I've come to associate with TitF; which is an observation not a detraction, there is so much here to ponder on and to enjoy.

Many of the poems this issue would merit outstanding if included elsewhere, making it so difficult for me to single out any for praise. But having more space here I can tell you that I was very much taken with Cindy Botha's phrases, both of Philip Gross's poems, Jane Ayres' [r]evolution (an affinity: I've used the selfsame title), Gerald Killingworth's pair, Sarah Frost's exquisite imagery, Huw Gwynn-Jones flights of whimsy, and Gary MacKenzie's two fish. To top it off Tracy Turley successfully married superstition and contemporary psychology.

And that's just a reflection of my taste, and what sparked my interest. There was so much I passed over, passed by, that could so easily have enthused another reader.

Come the reviews and articles I decided quite soon into the reading of it that David Caddy on Poetic Space has to be required reading for all versifying aspirants. Had me, as one who finds both online and screen reproduction unreliable, wondering what will happen when poetry moves beyond printed publication, beyond the page. The page, if I may emphasise, unhappy at having had to suspend The Journal, is where poetry visually and mental/orally happens. Rarely in performance, far more often on the page.

Good review by Barbara Bridger of Christopher Whyte's translation of Maria Tsvetae's Head on a Gleaming Plate. She managed to convey the complexity of the poet and her life. All the reviews are informative, a couple trying to overcome their own political leanings in order to be fair to the poet and book under consideration. For instance Guy Russell's sympathetic – he worked at it – review of Kjell Espmark's A Cloud of Witnesses, translated by Robin Fulton-MacPherson.

In TitF the reviewers themselves aren't named until one reaches the end of the review. I therefore found it pleasing that the writing that did as it is supposed to do – invite one in and keep one's attention – turned out to be two reviews by the same person, Jenny He. In one she championed The Lost Book of Barkynge by Ruth Higgins. Her other was of La Mysterique by Jennifer Lee Tsai. I learnt much from both her reviews.

This issue also included a conversation with Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani and Branko Čege. Branko Čege spent most of the conversation resisting the interviewer's assumptions. What I took from this was that Croatian poetry is pretty much on a sidelined and struggling par with most Western poetry.

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Fear of Falling Backwards: Ian Mullins Cajun Mutt Press https://cajunmuttpress.wordpress.com/ ISBN 9789-8-89217-714-6 A5 68 pages perfect bound $8.57

I do like how many authors and publishers these days view their books as art forms in themselves. Fear of Falling Backwards lived up to its title and had me laughing as the book, once opened, had the inside poems all upside down and backwards. I was thus primed to be pleased by what the poems had to say and how they might be said.

For all the amused introduction these are by no means happy poems. Sensitive to the point of flayed skinless they unsympathetically scrutinise failures of the self, and detail coping strategies that help the self barely cope. This is the Mullins' territory I have come to expect, clinically raw and self-harmingly honest.

Citizen Of Nowhere

Voices dissolve me like

a soluble tablet, but light

burns through my skin,

rendering me a shadow

of the roles I'm required

to play. The loyal employee

you would have me fabricate,

and the wild boy I would be

if only you'd stop screaming

too loudly or whispering

too quietly, pushing light

into my eyes like a face

through a windscreen

when I crash head-on

through the crowd.

A catalogue of the misadventures of his imperfect self in an imperfect world, we are the beneficiaries of Ian's saving need to write his pain down and cut it into comprehensible shapes. And in this 21st Century he is by no means alone.

On The Job

Perhaps the morning's a cold bath

after a long night's march.

And maybe the pink light beside the bed

glimmers like the fingerprint

of a new-born, reaching down

to touch his toe:

but I can only mosaic these marvels

into words. In the here and now

of the witness they are only

childbirth movies reeling in reverse.

All I have to offer

is your despair of needing me.

And I for one thank Ian for mosaic-ing 'these marvels into words.'

Ark: Estill Pollock Broadstone Books, 418 Ann Street, Frankfort, KY 40601-1929, USA BroadstoneBooks.com ISBN 978-1-956782-43-1 A5 84 pages $26.00 (But also available through Blackwell's, Oxford, UK)

From the prolific Estill Pollock this is told in 3 parts, Weather, Waves and Sanctuary. The personal is here, but here more as a lens on this disintegrating world. All is detailed, the day's weather first, then the technological climate, digital downloads and hedge funds, juxtaposition of the traditional alongside and mixed in with news headlines.

Estill is master of the telling image. This for instance, and taken at random – 'A sweat-stain river – sediments banded / AstroTurf green, shrill-yellow tetrazine, spills / into the choke of gravel above the village...' Note that 'choke'. Perfect.

Nor does he confine his telling to one place, one time, one planet. Prolific Estill may be, but he has a lot to say. And he says it so well. 'The world is frail, each breath the last / Until we wake in older light, in the counterfeit of days our / lasting memory fire – the fall from grace...' Spirit Animals.

In the Waves section he moves from a poem a page to 4 line stanzas, those stanzas 5 to a page of the 10 pages in a concise, and cynical, description of old London.

A dirty, lawless

Time, windows stuffed with rags, poles

Jammed in casement cracks

Hung with dank clothes, a sluggish

Drain, children with stick-horses...

…

Coal smoke, yellow fog

Sinuous through a sickly

City, the wealthy

Fled to their estates, the poor

Begging pennies for their graves...

The second long poem in Waves, same format – and there only two poems this section – seem to tell of the 20th century, how the rising sea levels began.

In the Sanctuary section we go back to mostly a poem page; with this sanctuary being less of an Eden and more of an I-told-you-so, here is what we did. Sanctuary also includes a 7 page history of American slavery. This though, The Time, I think typifies the many strands of this large collection.

The time is past for all that, last words

Hanging like thieves at Tyburn, Sam Pepys leaning

From a window, noting the weather

And the crowd

Time is past knowing, a code

Of subsequent revelation, the diaries

Of the dead simply days bleeding out to moments

We all rehearse, shy before mirrors

In quiet rooms

All that is known of time, tripwire

Escapements or quantum eagles in the sun, redeems

Each ticking atom with the winding

Of the key

Breath rallies, then eases - ruse of memory

And a queasy incoherence, the way priests make signs

To kickstart ghosts

Time to get yourselves along to Blackwell's, Oxford.

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Bacchus Against The Wall: Roy Duffield Anxiety Press, Amazon. ISBN 9798397473811 A5 84 pages perfect bound £10.21

This is one thoughtfully arranged collection. Won me over straight away with his attempt to – not unkindly – depict the inarticulate. That being, after all, where we all begin. And which lets us know that this is an author confident in his abilities, someone who has made both a study of speech and how to convert it into print so that it rings true. Craft or art, or both? In Construction Work he lets us into his [possible] inspiration, 'kerouac before, cummings beforer.'

An effective user of white space it was difficult to find an example of his work that mightn't be reformatted by online software. But here is his esca(r)pe(ment)-

Stopped by every escarpment.

Beaten by every thicket.

Moved on by every storm.

Forced to change course by every river.

but still,

never still

As spokesperson for the homeless and rootless, for us outsiders and unbelongers, he includes some powerful stuff here. His becoming criminal, the view from below, is simply brilliant.

Both humour and despair are at work throughout; and I can't say I disagreed with a word, with even a part-word, or any dot or any precisely placed dash. The long title poem, Bacchus Against The Wall – or – the orgy you know damn well's coming I read as his Barcelona version of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, an over-libated romp.

Book of Crow: Anna Barker Indigo Dreams Publishing, 24 Forest Houses. Cookworthy Moor, Halwill, Beaworthy, Devon, EX21 5UU ISBN 978-1-912876-79-2 www.indigodreamspublishing.com A5 62 pages perfect bound £10.00

Cover by Ronnie Goodyer so good had me concerned the contents wouldn't live up to it. Because I do love corvids. Thankfully this collection didn't disappoint. Corvid-inspired works rarely do - Ted Hughes' own Crow, Mark Cocker on rooks, Rossini's overture to The Thieving Magpie, Edgar Allen Poe's Raven. Corvids engross us all: the Welsh for jay is screech-in-the-woods.

Crow here as metaphor, crow as emotion, crow anthropomorphised, crow as projection, crow as self, crow as symbol, crow as crow; all are here, some figuring in and around her mother's suicide, death by hanging, crow as a reconciliation device, the child herself having discovered the mother dangling. With each poem titleless I assume them to be one long poem made up of individual poems.

To begin with there was a balance, mother memory poem on one page, crow poem facing. That aspect dwindled into one long coming-to-terms. Except when not.

Last night I dreamt I grew wings

of blackish blue. I shone, almost,

so alive, so bone light

I flew.

When at last I perched,

I spoke nonsense words

only I could understand:

clacks and clicks,

sharp sounds

that fell from my beak

like ink.

Then, stretching my wings,

I saw a time

so sublime it seemed invented:

gloves stitched to string,

Monopoly Tuesdays,

Maggie, the cat,

spooled in a basket.

And except when the two come together -

We slide together

my flesh, your feather.

Your jet eye, the haw you draw across in sleep.

The patient keel of your sternum -

the steel of your rib.

Your beak to stitch the vane, the silken ley,

the tap of talons on glass,

the hollow bone that lends my shape.

Your pulse of blood – smell of hot metal -

stash in the kettle.

The word you hold in your throat like an egg.

The poems growing disjointed and into a contemporaneous at-everything anger. Regrets, wishes, unequal relationships, trying to cope, failing... I'll leave the last word to Anna.

I don't drink because I have a problem,

I drink because the world is

a problem – I drink to fit

And that's how it is nowadays. Another wonderful collection from another self-declared failure. 'Corvidae ad infinitum.'

Blue: Robert Burton The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 51 Pipit Avenue, Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside, WA12 9RG ISBN 978-1-916590-00-7 B5 36 pages perfect bound £7.00

Poetry as puzzle; and that's me being descriptive, not dismissive. A poetry that relies on the reader's willingness to engage. Here an exploration of what, so familiar are the sensations described/conveyed, is old age. Here the self-doubt of the senses, nodded-off dreams mixed in with the part-remembered, the aloneness all around.

The mirror tells me

that I have no reflection now

vampire or ghost

Like a Stone

Poems detail the stages whereby the author supposedly metamorphoses into older old age, life a memory at a remove.

Sleep and the

sons of sleep

deceptive of all things

Blue Again

Poetry to lose one's thoughts in.

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Bloom and Guts: Scott McKenzie with illustrations by Chunhui Li Amazon ISBN 9798398209617 120 pages B5 no price given

The opening illo, softly coloured, raised my expectations. Immediately dashed by finding the first poems centre-spaced. There being no acknowledgement of any poems being previously published in magazines or elsewhere I was forced to presume this to be an unedited self-published collection. With every poem carrying the year they were written they came across as a beginner's or a young person's poems, naïve and one-dimensional. Here's his Love -

Love is so many things

but to me it's a vine.

It grows across a lifetime,

overcomes obstacles,

and especially when

we're shaking at the edge,

Sometimes it's all we need

to live.

Written 2018

Telling not showing; and the comma after 'edge' is not my typo, his.

People who haven't read a copy of the Journal often send me poems of this calibre; poems personal, written for one other person but not expanded enough to include the uncommitted reader. And so many editorial no-nos I came across – single words in capitals, double exclamation marks... I wasn't encouraged to read on. A reviewer's duty though... Only to find a variety of fonts being used and that had no bearing whatsoever on the contents.

From the angst I suspect that the author might have suffered some sort of breakdown. The one poem that did draw me in, 5 Minutes, and his rare use of third person singular, told of another person's breakdown. Remainder of the poems though swung between first person singular and a finger-in-the-face second person You. What I did find strange, given the inclusion of some fine illustrations, was the lack of thought given to the overall appearance of the text. All the different fonts had it look a mess.

All the Birds: Mark Totterdell Littoral Press, 15 Harwood Place, Lavenham, Sudbury, Suffolk, CO10 9SG. littoralpressuk.jimdofree.com ISBN 9781912412495 76 pages A5 £10.00

Such a relief to come to poems that have been through the editorial mill and that straight away drew me in, carried me along. Helps too that the subject matter is a love of the natural world and not the over-examined self. Artistry of the fourth poem in had me utter the word brilliant. Here's the poem, Home Farm -

He lopes past the farm with

its old-fangled brickwork,

its hay and its dung, and

he sets off the sheep in

their crammed metal pens, and

the clamour of ewes and

the mewl of their lambs is

the ringing of bells, and

the silly flock act like

he's someone to follow,

a piper or prophet.

If twine was untied, they

would all trail him home, up

the zigzaggy lane with

its oaks full of tannin,

past fields where the newbuilds

ooze out from the suburbs,

and over the hill, where

the city is crouching,

where fleeces are fashioned

as warm second skins, and

the flesh turns on spits in

the awful big windows.

This is such a lovely collection, taking us from the terror of the abattoir to a blackbird's glissando to an eagle's '...minuscule 'm' / on the open page of the sky...' to a warrior queen peregrine, light-absorbing ravens, bumbarrel longtail tits, archangel avocets and the etymology of cranes. In the tradition of the two Thomases, RS and Edward, and with a touch of the John Clares, this is a celebration of, along with the inevitable worries for, the natural world. Mark Totterdell goes beyond craft to create small works of art – August and The Robin Singing Through the Traffic's Din in particular. Descriptive, informative, enchanting, with a wry humour and a dark whimsy: I really don't know what more I can say to heartily recommend All the Birds. Suffice to say that anyone who loves the '...pink and orange gems of / spindlberry...' has to be alright by me.

The Tall Golden Minute: Linda Saunders Tremaen Press www.186publishing.co.uk ISBN 978-1-7397814-9-1 108 pages A5 £12.00/$15.00

After only the first poem I diagnosed myself prone to Linda Saunders' free form tale-telling. Reminded me of John Freeman's comfortable anecdotes. She is equally adept at the same startling image - '...sun flash on cars...' that grants an immediate and certain recognition of authenticity. One can trust a writer with that ability.

And that was only the first poem. I confidently read on.

So much here I wanted to quote. This from Now in the Dale, '...clarity in the shallows / for the slippery light to invent / substance from shadow...' The insubstantial perfectly captured. And I decide that first comparison was misleading: where John keeps to blocks of broken lines Linda enjoys shaping poems around their subject matter so that one is unsure what is coming next page over. I read on.

She writes of what and where I know, northern moors and the birds there. The coincidence in Swale Time: I too have had watches slip from my wrist in my own hill wanderings. Other recognitions had me wonder about the appeal of certain birds to poets, spotted flycatcher for instance, perch and out, perch and out. Any bird's arrival though will startle us out of or into a reverie, hers never taking me quite where I had anticipated.

Her poems are as long as need be. Possession, her telling of a Northern Brown Argus had me hold my breath. Her tale of a Holly Blue had the same effect. Again in Too Soon to Winter. The same delicacy of observation, attentiveness to detail is, I suspect, what holds one. Possibly her painter's eye for detail, aspects of light. She brings the same attentiveness to sound. I'd love to quote all eleven stanzas of Counterpoint, but will have to content myself with just the first two.

A sound half-heard, too uncertain

to ask definition, but consigned or dismissed

to a frequency that knows its own business

without intruding on yours -

a sub-song, an ice cream chime

muted by distance, or strain of cell-phone jingle,

drifted up from the city's basso profundo,

a ripple or riff of some forgotten theme -

who's listening anyway?...

So very much to delight here, her capturing of oh-so-ordinary moments, as in Everlasting Flower, a generous speculation on two fellow bus passengers. The collection ending with recollections of her childhood, considerations of her parents. All in all a collection to enjoy, to revel in. I have never met Linda Saunders but feel that I know her now, and have been grateful for her company.

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Your Woman is in Pieces: Louise Anne Bulcher www.tearsinthefence.com ISBN 978-1-900020-08-4 80 pages A5 no price given

Being not so much a biography as a collection of self-hating thoughts on her past, Louise Anne Bulcher doesn't confine herself to any one format. At times she splurges a reminiscence, digresses, speculates, considers... While elsewhen the past is tightened into a format, equally effective. I have accepted my mortality, / It just hasn't accepted me. (Confessions of a self-proclaimed suicidal nihilist.)

That comes much later. She daringly opens the collection with a 3 page diatribe on the difficulty of finding a poem to write, which diatribe is in itself a word-rich poem where she wants ...to scoop whole stories into my arms like loaves of warm bread, or ears of corn, or husks of wheat and from my tongue lame and soft in my mouth to unfurl like a tulip turning outside of itself. (Last Word.) Thus begins a life marked out in poems, and more the sense of a life than detailed incidents.

A woman haunted by poetry, by the lives of poets, she here forges her own mythology. I quickly came to love her juxtaposition of senses, sight and smell and suspicion – smells of pain and polyester..., smells of cold and polish. Relishing the romance of suicide she recounts foolishness and horror, the fantastic anchored to what we all know, '...everything English was old and dirty... (Foreign.) My nursing experience readily authenticates her own impressions of ward life, patients gathered together and watched over. Here in the collection however there are no delusions. An eye set on seeing everything a determined honesty is at work here: Words are nothing, even my cunt writes better. (Decade.) And I think I might make her page-long unpunctuated 'States of Being' into a motivational wall poster. we must find ways to speak hard truths with mouths stitched up we must not lie we must fathom the unimaginable we must learn to live in and with disaster we must bruise like ripe fruit on the waste heap we must tolerate the crisis we must oil the latched gate our escapes in silence we must unrape ourselves we must solicit empathy we must bribe the state prosecutor we must laugh at our own calamity... A must read.

The fox, the whale & the wardrobe: Dónall Dempsey Vole Books dempseyandwindle.com ISBN 978-1-913329-83-9 A5 122pages 10.99

Free verse, short lines in 2-3 line stanzas, page after page. Very soon became apparent that there's an over-explained sentimentality at work here. '...I always / nostalgic / for the future // as if it were / only the past / happening again...' (Time Ever). Heaven gets several mentions, anthropomorphism too – talking/thinking creatures, buildings, things – and he tells fondly of relations large in his past. He sets off on whimsical journeys, tells of his children's growing awareness. Some tales I could sympathise with; as poetry though it failed to excite, said/did nothing new. So much could as easily have been written as prose. I suspect, though, that delivered confidently/confidingly, some may go down well at readings.

Learning Springsteen on my language app: Sarah Salway www.indigodreamspublishing.com ISBN 978-1-912876-76-1 A5 52 pages £9.50

I delayed reading this as I only ever saw Springsteen the once, from outside a tent during the Maryport festival. My glimpse saw him through a tent flap wearing a hat on stage. And that was all that I knew of him. First couple of poems here however made me wish that I'd picked up the book sooner. These poems are, in the best sense, allusive and provocative. Provocative in the sense that they send my mind whirling off in other directions, the kind of poems that draw one in and the deeper one goes the greater the rewards.

Being old and not knowing Springsteen, or apps, still I got the title poem, his lyrics awkwardly intruding into her thinking/creative processes, almost like stops, barriers to be overcome. Other poems challenge the accepted, move the mind sideways, and if whimsy has a purpose here, it is not just the repeating of pretty notions.

...Every day outside my window

the world's longest picnic table

is taking shape and from my cowslip garden

I hear strangers share secrets

and lost wishes...

In fields of dandelion clocks

In case I have created the impression that all here are word-based games, they're not. Some, like Cryptic, plumb the emotions. And some, from out of their confusion of images and notions just one will leap out, grab the mind. Her Rambling for instance, the final stanzas sent me off to Frances Cornford's From the Windows of a Train. Which had me realise that I know more of poems and very little of pop music and therefore of Springsteen. Does he always wear a hat on stage?

Osiris #97 editor Andrea Moorhead, Greenfield, Massachusetts 01301, USA www.osirispoetry.com 62 pages B5 $12.00 €12.00 (Subscription/Abonnements $24.00 €24.00)

Celebrating 51 years of publishing this multilingual issue – usual quality paper, usual quality production – contains work in Danish, French, Italian, Norwegian and English; linguistic diversity being as necessary to sustain as species- and biodiversity. Paul Ilechko laments as much in Lost - 'So much has been lost / birds plants language...'

Not only are the languages here diverse, editor Andrea Moorhead does not confine herself to one format. While many are aligned left and separated into stanzas, there are others centred, or make use of white space, or are one block prose poems. All poetry life is here. And that's before we arrive at Robert Moorhead's intriguing compositions, Andrea's one photograph.

I loved the magic realism of Marc Vincenz in his The Strange Reappearance of Madeleine de la Fontaine. And I was really taken with Smitha Sehgal's confident assault on language in Indian Monsoon. Here are the first 4 stanzas -

flaming pot

of honeycomb summer

a flurry of starmelt

clamber of fire ants

up the peepul bark

ramble of leaves

under copper sky

dustwaltz

cry of the hornbill

across nomad valleys...

In his two poems Peter King's scattering of lines – not a space out of place – had me reflect on my own similar experiences/sensations/considerations. (Mark of a good writer to get his reader taking it to be about himself.) Almost a given that I would again come to envy Andrea's own apparent facility with prose poems. The single sentence of One Afternoon, creating a sense of being adrift, unanchored, a moment trying to make sense of this life/time. Likewise in her two other prose poems and the shorter ones by Annemette Kure Andersen.

Looking forward to Osiris #100. How will the Moorheads celebrate that?

In the Garden of Eden after a Heatwave : Yvette erbacce-press.com 5 Farrell Close, Melling, Liverpool, L31 1BU 90 pages A5 £9.95 ISBN 978-1-912455-45-4

Here image follows upon image, sense upon sense. Be so easy to label this surrealism/symbolism; or an ism yet to be determined. What Yvette (her pen name) really does, and does well, is subvert expectations built into language. 'Skin thick with sand, / I grab your teeth / and cling to past conversations...' Honeymoon on Treasure Island. 'I crawled through a sunset. / You were aspic, dipped in amber / legs akimbo, cold hands - / that fear of being seen...' Love letter from Moll Flanders to. 'Lie-back and count your missing toes...' The Skeleton's Honeymoon.

More than a few of the poems are about undone bodies; and fanciful, Yvette takes us on linguistic trips, citing the real among the imaginary as in this from Jane Eyre graduates in early June -

still learning

how to live alone without absence hanging heavy

how to share a house without seeing others

how men speak like forest fires with voices raw

from billowing smoke

I found myself, page after page, looking away to absorb what I had just read, then reading the page again. A collection to give one pause, like visiting an Oracle and coming away to think, What was meant by that? Or was it just how she sees? How she thinks? Wondrous whichever. And as odd as her poems may be one knows that they are exact, are as intended. '...you know that feeling / of searching for yourself in someone's eye...' Marriage Circus.

You grow jungles in the sink.

Eat your way through bricks and windows

to raise plants in porcelain, exhausted

when your nails crack, you borrow

Grandma's...

Death of a Saleswoman

Part Two, there are three, concerns itself with legends of family past, and is more readily identifiable. Almost. '...You cannot write in dialect; the jagged landscape of your grandad who squeezed salt through his veins till his hands shrunk....' Elocution Lessons. My birthplace Blackpool often figures, not always favourably if dourly fantastic. Yvette even sometimes sounds like me - '...(Obsess over / some fucking / syllables. I / sound like someone / I should know.)...' English and Related Languages. So much recognisable. Poetry as art and just so many tight works of art. So much to enjoy. I got to the end and started again.

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Reviews posted here will be of those books that didn't, by reason of their subject matter or manner of telling, belong in the pages of The Journal.

Aeneas & Son : James Russell KFS, 51 Pipit Avenue, Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside, WA12 9RG ISBN 978-1-912211-99-9 B5 260 pages £16.00

James Russell does not confine himself to one genre, one style, one format (see previous reviews below). In a fore-note James assures prospective readers that no knowledge of Virgil's The Aeneid is required, the tale entire having been transposed to 1950s Southern England, where Aeneas has become Eddy, a mummy's man. The mother of mortal Aeneas was Aphrodite.

The tale is one long free verse poem and reads easily as prose. Doesn't take long before I give up wondering who might have been who in the Greek pantheon and I enjoy our trios – to begin with – misadventures in and about London. The spirit and things of 1950s are as I recall. In retrospect I join with our hero in wondering why '...Standard Tens are [were] nearly always lavatory green...'

Led westwards by I Ching – and I suspect I might have earlier misascribed our hero – nonetheless pursued by some dirty rotten Greeks (non-classical) I was having as much fun reading this as I did his Craigie's Clevedon Poems. 'She grasps one of his shoulders pushing / and pulling as if to reactivate a toy or stalled donkey...' 'To leave London on a western quest makes him a kind / of hero, albeit a barely intelligible one...'

Their quest is one long jolly, to use fifties terminology, and takes them from pub lock-ins in a 'biscuit tin village' run by '...A speechless bint... looked / like she worked in a prison run by nuns.' One very soon comes by the impression that our author James knows well both saloon and snug; and his relish and ease in the telling of this tale is what gets this reader turning the pages.

While our characters are in Ealing a two-stroke BSA Bantam gets compared to a farting woman. I had a BSA Bantam and his description brought to mind that very distinctive two-stroke smell. Other smells came later - '...Farting necromancers, / clawed diviners fill the groaning shelves of our mental libraries...'

With mum unhelpfully phoned and I Ching again consulted, off we again go. '...have to admit, I'm always interested in the futures. / I mean, when I'm in the present, not when / it becomes the present & then it loses its interest...'

My interest was kept. Wonderful tale this, types and characters I've known and avoided. Jazz of the time and their going west to many of the places I've known. 'The church is small, austere, smelling of polish & history...' And shallow Weymouth. '...they love fistfights – first / or third person. They like their honesty. But mainly, / it's the sensual thrill of them...'

There is also the occasional taking of the piss on their misadventures westward. So much to raise a chuckle. Even a belly laugh. A knock on my office door asked what I was giggling about in here. In fact this tale only became hard to read when my glasses steamed up from laughing so much. I think that might have been about Muddy Waters.

Our Vesta-borne hero even revisits his near-Clevedon environs (the lingo is infectious) and that while having imbibed an hallucinogenic substance. One problem of my own making was because I always have at least two books on the go and my other was JG Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, which covers near enough same period as Aeneas & Son, and granted hero Ned didn't visit Shepperton, nevertheless the two tales kind of leached into one another. Count me disturbed.

Simply loved this book.

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Martin Booth — Gweilo: Memories of a Hong Kong childhood Doubleday, Transworld Publishers, 6-63 Uxbridge Road, London, W5 5SA hardback ISBN 0385607768

I knew Martin Booth briefly, all too briefly, in the 1990s — when I lived in Somerset and when he was about to get Booker shortlisted for his Hong Kong based novel, The Industry of Souls.

Lionel Phillips, the art collector and backer of a few artists at the tricky beginnings of their careers, started what we believed was the first UK Arts e-magazine, ixion. I was to help out with the poetry, Martin with the prose. I think we managed to reach issue 3, where all doomed periodicals fail. Or, in ixion’s case, fizzle out. To be generous to ourselves I think Lionel’s concept was a little ahead of the software then available, especially with regard undistorted reproduction of the artwork.

I moved from Somerset, but heard that Martin had been diagnosed with a rare brain tumour. What I hadn’t known was that that diagnosis had inspired him to use the last 2 years of his life penning this memoir of his Hong Kong boyhood. Which memoir I picked up this year on a bric’a brac stall at Chailey village fete in Sussex. (Dates slip by me, but it must have been around about 2004 that Lionel too died.)

To the book. Gweilo is Chinese (Cantonese) slang for a European male, and the book opens with this 7 year old gweilo setting sail from Portsmouth, the prose such that we straightaway know that we are in safe hands. Like many writers Martin was not one for casual chatter, so most of his childhood was new to me. And being one who can’t remember dates and chronology, I was therefore most impressed by his memory for detail, even down to where he stored his teddy on board the ship taking his 7 year old self to Hong Kong. Once arrived I continued to be impressed.

Aside from Martin’s powers of recollection what shines through this memoir is Martin’s love of humanity, his delight in people, in the tales they have to tell. Also his love of the place. The initial cultural misunderstandings had me giggling; and he earned my sympathy as he went native, his blond hair — a touch of it believed to bring good luck to the superstitious Chinese — being his passport into all the city’s quarters, even into Kowloon’s walled city, getting himself adopted by street traders and even by Triad gangsters.

The family dynamic however comes across as more than a little skewed. Martin adored his spirited and unprejudiced mother, while his contempt for his Pooter-like father grows page by page: ‘He never praised but only criticised or admonished. . . .’ A bully at work and a bully at home, he threw telephones at his Chinese staff and used belt or slipper on Martin for the tiniest infringement of his suburban proprieties. But as the family moves quarters around Hong Kong the father becomes outflanked by his more intelligent wife and his Cantonese-speaking son. However the family being in Hong Kong by virtue of the father’s employment at the Royal Fleet Auxiliary's base, mother and boy, who both love their life there, have to tread a fine line between outright rebellion and covert manipulation. Self-esteem though comes to Martin through his ability to speak street-Cantonese. So does he learn that his father’s Chinese office subordinates’ share his opinion of the tyrant. (I doubt that it was Martin’s intent, but by the end of the book I was actually beginning to feel sorry for his unimaginative father faced with this lively duo.)

As I am sure many readers have, I saw aspects of myself in Martin’s memories. His wanderings through what to begin with was an alien culture reminded me of my own in Bombay, getting lost to see what I could find. And of peculiar interest to me was that I almost, on leaving the Merchant Navy, joined the Hong Kong police. What stopped me was that I hadn’t fancied again being a superior, an Inspector, only by virtue of my nationality. Nonetheless the Hong Police inspectors here did acquit themselves, if not with valour, then with decency.

Where I haven’t been able to come close to identifying with Martin is in his powers of recollection. Only 2 years older than me I simply don’t have his memory for detail, or for events. But then, when I was a nurse, writing up notes straight after an incident, I was never any good at the antecedents.

For anyone interested in China Gweilo has to be essential reading. For anyone else Gweilo is worth getting hold of for its life-affirming outlook. And don’t wait to chance upon it on a bric’a brac stall. First-hand copies are still available.

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Pat Boran : The Invisible Prison The Dedalus Press, 13 Moyclare Road, Baldoyle, Dublin 13, Ireland. www.dedaluspress.com ISBN 978-1-906614-15-7

I unreservedly enjoyed this book. I have to say however that had it been published in England it would probably have got done under the Trades Description Act. The cover, largely grey to black, shows an apprehensive short-trousered boy, daffodil in hand, standing before the bent bars of a cage. Given all the recent hullabaloo over Irish Bishops covering up for paederast priests, given the title (The Invisible Prison smacks of an abused self shut away), add in the gloomy cover and, believing that it was going to be a painful read, I put the book to one side. When I did steel myself to open its pages it took me no time at all to realise that The Invisible Prison is the very antithesis of a misery memoir.

This biography is no linear narrative. As piecemeal as memory it is a series of vignettes each hooked on an incident, an individual, a place, on things — bikes, various shops, plastic planes — on family trips . . . . A prison does figure, and it’s a real prison, Portlaoise, with the town built around it. Much like Shepton Mallet or Princetown in England. And for the townies the prison is so obvious, so taken-for-granted, an absence in its centre, that it is invisible. What we are left with is a fond family history.

A third of the way in I was still finding it strange to be reading an autobiography by a living author that wasn’t a disclosure of abuse, but rather a celebration of the lives that made his. Some of the local knowledge was lost on me, but Pat Boran’s eye for detail, ear for nuance and his prodigious memory make him a born raconteur, and I was more than happy to go with the flow.

This is such a celebration of childhood — universal, timeless — it felt as if at times he could be telling of mine. Then a mention of something current, an item of news or more likely a popsong, had me realising that I was at that time the age of his parents. Yet still the general tenor of the book could have one believing that he is telling of a childhood, so innocent, so lacking in resentment, that it belongs to another age altogether.

The writing is clear and unfussy, the style that of a man taking me into his confidence, giving me tale by tale the incidental histories that go to make up his life. And with many an entertaining digression, but none of the drawn-out tedious length of a Tristram Shandy. A hundred and sixty pages in Boran himself gives us the credo for the writing of the book: ‘. . . . we do not after all experience history sequentially, but in clusters of thinly-connected events spread out over days and months and years.’

So, as well as being told of his wheeler-dealer father, patient dependable mother, a cast of siblings, schoolfriends and neighbours; as well as being invited out into the playground of his father’s sheds and makeshift storehouses, the imaginary worlds therein; we are there too when general history does come washing by. When the prisoners’ allies come clamouring to town demanding for the Portlaoise’s prisoners political status, and leaving blood on a shopfront.

This though is a life on the edge of a nation’s history. There are teachers to tell of, fads to relate, bog-cutting to be done. Where Boran is exceptional as a contemporary memoirist is in his acceptance of the adult world and all of its — even with hindsight — odd values and behaviours.

Poet that he is there are many lovely lines and some pitch-perfect descriptions. Of his parents coming up to retirement: ‘He and his wife would be a late middle-aged couple growing old in patterns they had built around themselves.’ But please, please don’t take the mention of ‘poet’ here for what is usually inferred by ‘poetic’ in a review, which is the use of self-regarding flowery language. As I said before Pat Boran’s prose is clear and unfussy.

Towards the end of this universal boyhood the tale does briefly become peculiarly that of an Irish Catholic boyhood. But even that Pat Boran had this curmudgeonly old atheist reading with sympathy.

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Grownup War: John Daniel Pennycomequick Press, Weir View, Weirfields, Totnes, Devon, TQ9 5JS ISBN 978-0-9504253-1-3 £8.50

With the same enviable lightness of touch in his prose as in his poetry John Daniel’s semi-jocular approach to his memoir reminded me initially of Spike Milligan’s ‘Hitler, my part in his downfall’. Although here it is the minutiae and local topography of childhood that is being recalled, most often fondly, along with the mysterious values and preoccupations of grownups.

‘Grownup War’ could as easily have been subtitled ‘When War Came to Ruislip’ Except that the memoir opens with the likelihood of war being discussed by fathers in their deckchairs while the author is building a sandcastle, with World War 2 subsequently becoming the accepted growing up norm. Newsreels and newspaper headlines form the background to the wonderful illogic of boyhood that sees John through scout troops, Sunday schools, marbles and stamp collecting, through being a non-Jew with a Jewish name, his parents’ rise in the world, new suburban rituals, an acceptance of wartime liaisons ... His interest throughout is in the near-by, tales of, interleafed throughout with war’s statistics of gore, and an occasional black and white photograph, pace WG Sebald, gracing the text.

My being just a few years younger than John I can happily vouchsafe the artefacts and practices in use then, and not so happily corroborate many of the attitudes, this being the fag-end of ‘service’ with its peculiar loyalties and resentments. Certainly a memoir to be enjoyed as much for the memories it provokes as for those John Daniel recalls.

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Conan Doyle: Micah Clarke Nelson’s Library, T. Nelson & Sons, London & Edinburgh Over the years I have been drawn to bookshops, mostly secondhand, and have rarely left without at least one book freshly bagged. Consequence is I have, literally, stacks of unread books. Occasionally reproached by these silent heaps I will pick a book at random, have it speak.

Unable to recall the impulse that had me buy it, or where I bought the book, if the first few pages don’t invite my attention, off to the charity shop it goes. Not Conan Doyle’s ‘Micah Clarke’.

Its depiction of religious intolerance and the murderous and sacrificial zeal of fanatics, the uses made of such by those seeking power, render this tale of Monmouth’s rebellion remarkably apposite — pace Hindu and Muslim fanatics, the US Christian and Israel’s religious right. Sect agin sect, we haven’t 4 centuries on moved a whit, and that in itself is a cause for depression. But Conan Doyle’s use of language. . . .

The richness of the language is a rumbustical delight. Putting aside, of course, seventeenth century occasional usage which would now be deemed racist. But to take belated offence at those few mentions and not at the wanton killing and tyranny of a corrupt monarchy? Rather I overlooked that as being thoughtlessly of its time and rejoiced in the rest of the fulsome vocabulary, in the many words now marked (obs.) in my Chambers. ‘. . . .supple-backed courtiers, and strutting nobles, and hussies with their shoulders bare, who should for all their high birth have been sent to Bridewell as readily as any poor girl who ever walked at the cart’s tail. . . .’

The mouth-shaping writing aside — and I have to say that I much prefer Conan Doyle’s non-Sherlock Holmes books, ‘Rodney Stone’ for instance — what gave me as much pleasure in ‘Micah Clarke’ was my so intimately knowing the terrain, the Somerset where I spent 20+ years of my life. I swear I even recognised some of the characters.

Scour library skips and secondhand bookshops for a copy. Enjoy!

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Anxious Moments Before The Next Big Event: A. C. Drainville Skrev Press, 41 Manor Drive, Hebden Bridge, HX7 8DW, UK. www.skrev-press.com ISBN 978-1-904646-46-4 £9.99 $18.99 €18.99

Title is the synopsis: fifty year old Canadian professor considers leaving his wife for his student lover. Style, manner of telling — William Faulkner love-softened by Lawrence Durrell, the prose so image-rich, allusive, so unlinear, metaphors expanded and explored, it is as if poetry. Told in sections from imagined POVs, characters’ sections within can segue from 1st to 3rd to 2nd person singular.

Central character, principal narrator, is Édouard — angry, guilt-ridden, accusing, trapped. A word-game-player, pricker of Canadian pomposities, he tells of the beginnings of his academic career, the conning of academe by intellectual sleight-of-hand, pick’n mix cut’n paste assemblages, readily accepted so long as they had footnotes. His is the hectic pace of a need-to-tell confessional, a going over every detail of the affair and its antecedents — Selma being the student he did finally have the courage to seduce. Now, unable to bear her distance from him, there is in this telling self-vilification for his lover’s little tricks, a self-berating for the betrayals, a hint of boastfulness too . . . . From what little he knows he imagines the past and current lives of all the other characters — Selma possibly abused as a child by a friend of the family and with the passive connivance of her parents; his father self-sedated into retirement; his one-living sibling; his mother choosing stasis, not to live; his wife choosing not to suspect . . . .

A wistful cynicism pervades throughout: ‘Not all of what I lived happened, but all of it is true.’ On life seen lived: ‘. . . . the subordinate will be told to be more grateful, he will learn a lesson in obedience.’ On Berkely: ‘Death by learning, too many carcasses picked over for too long.’ (The piecemeal dialogue in that section is a faultless rendition of professorial gatherings.)

As Édouard wants to leave his wife so too does he want to throw up his whole way of life. Throughout his career he has advertised ‘Vote for Sale’ nihilistic verses in the local paper, an occasional cock-a-snoop to college authorities, but never going far enough to get himself the sack. Anger at his own weakness is matched by his anger at the world: ‘I know nothing, but live still by borrowed horror, seeking revenge.’ An observant, intelligent and articulate tale of contemporary hopelessness which does, in its articulation and telling, nonetheless give one hope.

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Michael McIrvin : The Blue Man Dreams the End of Time BeWrite Books, 32 Bryn Road South, Wigan, Lancashire, WN4 8QR www.bewrite.net ISBN 978-1-906609-34-4 £7.99

If you’ve ever wondered why the most heavily fortified embassies throughout the world belong to the USA this tale will give you the answer. Here we are presented with the beyond-Machiavellian antics of the CIA, those covert/overt representatives of a USA that we from elsewhere, and patently many within the USA - Michael McIrvin is a norteño - have come to know and hate. (Loathe is too passive a verb.)

An ex-CIA operative wakes up in an alley naked and blue. Blue all over. He wasn’t blue before he fell asleep, except for his one-time code name. Sickened by CIA-authored atrocities in Guatemala, drawn to Mayan folk tales, taunted by a shaman, he fled, has spent the last 20 years on the run from the CIA, the last year shacked up with two sisters, switching - with their blessing - between the pair.

Chandler’s mean streets lead to D H Lawrence’s Plumed Serpent, Crime and Punishment meets wholly amoral Truth and Death. For this is an extended meditation on Death, its centrality both to Mayan and, yes, to Western culture, our news primarily concerned with killings, calamity deaths, wars, the importance of events measured by the number or status of the dead. X-Box killing games, murder mysteries. . . . Snuff movies?

How exactly to define this tale? A spy-thriller? Once he has been found, and turned blue, our narrator knows that the CIA have found him and that they mean to kill him. Or is assassination not their intent? Do they mean to re-recruit him? The Guatemalan shaman reappears .....and there are flashbacks to CIA-inspired mayhem and torture methods. Ideology of sorts plays its part, so too the making of myth.

Told in the first person with many a digression, I couldn’t make up my mind whether to describe his blueness as an extended metaphor or his return to the killing lands as a taut allegory. Suffice to say it has its Hamlet-type ponderings, a consideration of Life through the many lens of Death, although at a far less leisurely pace than that employed by the graveside Prince of Denmark. And deeper than this, ". . . .a pose of thought by an automaton who plots and plans but does not think in the truest sense of the word . . . ." We are given plenty to think on here, not least the superficiality and inherent destructiveness of our Western way of life.

Comes a senseless killing. Or a killing whose only motive was to intimidate. Our narrator/hero goes looking for revenge, the plot thickens . . . . and all hell breaks loose.

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Dave Pelzer: A Child Called It Orion ISBN 0-75283-750-8

Another one from the stacks, put off from those years that I was daily dealing with the results of the book’s subject matter.

‘A Child Called It’ is more a detailed testimony than an attempt at literature. Written for those with no experience of child abuse, here towards the end it is couched in winning-over sentimental terms, which sentimentality always makes me suspicious. I see such sentimentality as the other side of the abuse coin. When not physically abusing her scapegoated son, for instance, for the benefit of others Pelzer’s mother cooed over him in sentimental terms.

Public awareness of abuse began here in the UK in the mid 80s with the furore over the Cleveland Report, the sentimental public not wanting to believe that parents could do such physical damage to their children, nor make such sexual use of them. ‘A Child Called It’ was published in the US in 1988.

As a case study written from a child’s point of view it is worth reading. That it is written doesn’t, however, make the author a writer. A writer has a love of language, language almost before content. Here content, and the need to convince, is paramount. A writer, writing for its own sake, wouldn’t have let much of the vocabulary and sentence construction pass, especially when purporting to come from a seven to eleven year old boy.

This is not to detract from the document. This was a sorry tale that needed to be told. I’m only sorry that it had to be told. Sorry too that the author saw fit to give it a motivational, uplifting ending. I can see that as a person his overcoming such a cruel beginning he wants to tell of his victory. But as a book the ending comes across as a tad schmaltzy.

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Peter G Mackie: The Madhouse of Love

The Madhouse of Love: a teenager’s own story: Peter G Mackie

chipmunkapublishing, P O Box 6872, Brentwood, Essex, CM13 1ZT ISBN 9781849912372 £10.00

http://www.chipmunkapublishing.com

This is no conventional narrative, delivery far from smooth. Its disjointedness, disjunction however could be taken as representative of a piecemeal way of thinking. Left-justified paragraph follows left-justified paragraph often with no obvious connection.

Peter G Mackie calls it his ‘piano mind’. At least I take it he’s the true narrator. Feels so very much novel as fictional memoir that I had difficulty throughout separating author Peter G Mackie from fictional narrator ‘Tony’.

The tale entire reads like a collection of occasional jottings strung together in an order that probably means something to the author, but leaves the reader new to the subject to puzzle out what and where he is and who is saying what. The tale though more or less covers his admission to a children’s mental health unit, and the characters met there. A new member of staff - I think, it really is hard at times to tell who’s who - said that he is here "...with people all mixed up whose minds are a load of blobs."

That it is hard to tell here who’s who is not necessarily a criticism of the novel. It wasn’t always too clear to me when I worked in such places who were the patients and who the staff: psychiatry atracts oddballs. As to the novel I swung between trying to decide if the prose was meant to be descriptive or if its mode of delivery was a representation of the narrator’s mental state. About half way in I decided that it was both.

The delivery is certainly representative of his mind’s chaos, thoughts drawn in from elsewhere, associations not apparent, adapting psychobabble into his developing intellect, all mixed in with his adolescent embarrassments, angst, misreadings and mumbo-jumbo spirituality; as well as finding undue significance in something worn that day, something casually said, a mundane detail with no apparent relevance to the anecdote being related.

One readily understands the narrator’s confusion. Contact being mostly with his fellow patients, troubles of their own, certainties were hard to come by. Add into other patients’ morbid preoccupations and impulsive behaviours his own mental and physical exuberance of youth, awakening sexuality (theories of) and emotional extremes, where every outburst or behaviour was examined as a symptom and the poor lad stood no chance... Hard there to even decide what love was, let alone how to enact it.

The further one gets into the tale the larger and more cohesive the paragraphs become. But still stilted. Names still get thrown in with no introduction, other details with no apparent relevance. Although these non-sequitors do deliver up some delicious moments of [unintentional?] humour. Come the end, while our hero’s behaviours are still impulsive, his antics and his seeking to make some kind of sense of his confusing world do impress.

If one wants insights into such institutions, and they still exist, then this is a book well worth the getting.

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Glen Lyon: Kenneth Steven Birlinn Limited, West Newington House, 10 Newington Road, Edinburgh, EH9 1QS ISBN 978--78027-177-4 151 pages £7.99

When Kenneth recently stayed with me for his workshop stint at the Maryport LitFest we swopped our latest books, my Marraton for his Glen Lyon. I don't think I'm indulging in false modesty when I say that I may have got the better deal.

Written during Kenneth's stay in Iceland and opening in almost saga style, lyrical distance of legend, nature dominant, Glen Lyon is transparently a tale written by a man who walks the wild places, has that unarguable veracity. '....to be out in the hills and lochs and the wildness of it all. It had breathed in him; he felt the blood of the land and he heard it under his feet.'

Such as it is the plot is this - a man with an axe, a simple man but not a simpleton, arrives in the wilds of Scotland, builds himself a house in the woods, meets and marries a girl from the nearby village; but with his own past all the while nipping at his heels, and getting in the way of his present. But a bigger present than his own, a present that the whole past has never left, that lies under and behind every fresh act. Myth, love and ancient beliefs as important as bus timetables.

Bracketed by uncertainty, our hero's escaping of a troubled past, the struggle not to become as his own parents, and a seeking to fulfill his guessed-at destiny, descriptive power alone carries the tale along. Because as with the wandering of wild places this book is full of beautiful moments, places where I hung a step, paused for a breath, beheld a view, a description so perfect....

Glen Lyon is a book whose hero I readily identified with. Ah, I hear a reader of this review say, but you and Kenneth are of like mind, like experience, of like aspirations. You both know as writers how success is of a moment and how failure drags along, how little control you have over that not under your own hands.

I am confident though that Glen Lyon isn't a book solely for writers. Anyone who has escaped a troubling past, who has tried to make something other of their lives will have fellow feeling with the characters here.

For all its topicality Glen Lyon is a work of art. A work of art I recommend be read - indulge me - to the accompaniment of Peter Maxwell Davis's Orkney compositions.

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