reviews supplementary

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.