Review by Neil Brooks

Photograph of reviewer Neil Brooks, above.  Click on image to enlarge.

*

Palores Publications’ 21^st Century Writers.  The Third Fifty, poems by Jenefer Ann Murray.  A5 Perfect bound book with a 3-colour cover and 65 pages. Published during year 2009 by Palores Publications, 11a Penryn Street, Redruth, Cornwall, TR15 2SP.  ISBN: 978-1-906845-05-6   £8.50.

The collection, as the title implies, contains 50 poems and is the third book in a series. The poems are written in the sometimes flowery language of a bygone era.

The author, pictured with her brother and their dog after the war, must be quite far advanced in years, and that's what makes this book so intriguing and interesting; for it's the enthusiasm for writing that shines through in almost every sentence. The strong subtext hammering through is that we are never too old to make good use of our grey matter.

To nail down Murray's own phrase, one that she uses in at least two of her poems, the poetry is awfully nice. Yes, on the one hand it is indeed what you'd expect to find on the book table at the village hall or in the dust motes behind the back pews at the local church, but it is also more; as the quote in the front of the book alerts us: In every work of art there should be space for the mind to travel between like and dislike.

The poem Sam's Shed is perhaps a metaphor for The Third Fifty:

At last when he was grown-up

and had a house with a long garden

he began to build it in his spare time

what an excitement, his shed. . .

In the poem Sam and Sybil take care of the garden, the flowers, the paths, the bushes, the trees. There's the old door and some beams and weatherboard walls...

Songs for people of a certain age. And, yes, I'm getting there.   Review by Gwilym Williams

Photograph of reviewer Gwilym Williams, above.  Click on image to enlarge.

*

Palores Publications’ 21^st Century Writers.  The Fourth Fifty, poems by Jenefer Ann Murray.  A5 Perfect bound book with a 3-colour cover and 73 pages. Published during year 2009 by Palores Publications, 11a Penryn Street, Redruth, Cornwall, TR15 2SP. ISBN 978-1-906845-07-0  £8.50.

Although the author has reached her mid-eighties she still produces some interesting poems and prose, digging deep into her past, building on life experience.  What we have here is an unconventional autobiography, presenting the poet’s life in the form of ‘snap-shots.’

In the poems, ‘Beginning,’ Little Brother’ or ‘The Inescapable Inedibility of Candles,’ just to mention a few, Jenefer Ann Murray gives the reader an insight into her childhood and how she saw the world then through the eyes of a child.  At the same time this is a child who is fully aware of what is to come later as she says ‘Being an infant is uphill work though.’ ‘Youthful Protests WWII’ and ‘Going down to Pentabulo,’ reflect early experience of men, but again filtered through the older woman’s awareness.

There are heart-felt poems here like ‘A Truly Miserable Moment,’ ‘Till Death us do Part,’ ‘Follow-on’ and ‘Sequel,’ which describe the devastating effect of choosing the wrong partner in your life. ‘Blind Man’s Buff,’ ‘Not Unusual’ and particularly ‘Grief Poem III’ present a side of life which the author is able to conceal below the lighter poems.   ‘Mighty Oaks,’ ‘Agapanthus,’ ‘That Old Sin,’ ‘Seaside Garden Summertime’ and ‘Rose Grower’ are on a lighter note and echo the humour in ‘Epigrams.’ In the poems ‘Ornaments Overhead,’ she compares the upbringing of her own children to that of a seagull mother with her chicks entailing the ‘learning curves’ . . . ‘you will have to feed the chicks,’ the anxiety of raising the offspring.

Finally, there are the wry philosophical poems of old age, ‘Where loss, departure and death are concerned,’ ‘it’s the other side of love.’

After reading this collection you have the feeling that you know the writer and understand her development from child to wise old lady. Review by Ingrid Riley

*

Fires of Memory, poems by James Knox Whittet.  A5 size Stapled booklet with a full colour cover and 23 pages.  Published November 2009 by: Wendy Webb Books, 9 Walnut Close, Norwich, NR8 6YN. No ISBN. E-mail: tips4writers@yahoo.co.uk   £2.50.

James Knox Whittet is a poet from the isle of Islay in the Hebrides. In this collection Fires of Memory we are seldom far from the cries of seagulls, the sight of swans dipping their necks into a loch, the mist-shrouded mountains, but lest you should think you are in for an undiluted dose of Celtic Twilight I must assure you that this poet has his feet firmly under a table, for example, of a motorway service station restaurant in Newport Pagnell at 3am. There in a bleak, tawdry atmosphere he sits observing three other travellers, who like himself are breaking their journeys “to destinations not wholly of their own choosing”.  A touch of Phillip Larkin here. His sympathy for people, particularly those who suffered, whether he knew them personally, or simply from a report in the local paper, is a pervasive characteristic. Hence the fine, moving title poem Fires of Memory, written in memory of a Norfolk farmer who, as a soldier helped, to liberate Belsen, couldn’t forget what he saw. He was haunted:   

                                            But memories of mountains of children’s shoes

                                            Spilled from each cupboard you opened;

                                            Glaciers of eyeless spectacles stared back

                                            At you, like sun strands on splintered glass.

 And campaigned to publicise the horrific truth.

Whittet, shows a mastery of traditional forms (perhaps he uses free verse elsewhere).The three sonnets display different arrangements of rhymes, and one of them Cadences runs on lines of four feet instead of the usual five. There is a clever terza rima and a poem of cinquains, a form quite new to me, where as in haikus the syllables are counted. Babyhood is encapsulated in 2/4/6/8/2 as follows:

                                                     Faces

                                              moon from above

                                              as I lie in this pram

                                                     wrapping sun strands around my frail

                                                     fingers.

I heartily recommend this small bouquet of beautifully crafted poems smelling of heather mingled with cooking oil.  Review by David Gill

*

I Wandered Only As A Cloud, incorporating Quiet Voices In The Loud Child, poems by Wendy Webb.  A5 stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover and 31 pages.  Published during year 2009 by Wendy Webb Books, 9 Walnut Close, Norwich, NR8 6YN.  ISBN-13: 978-1-903264-80-5 £3.50. tips4writers@yahoo.co.uk  www.norfolkpoets.blogspot.com   www.coastingnorfolk.blogspot.com

The shade of Wordsworth and echoes of his poems permeate this collection, daffodils bounce and rebound through the poetry as Wendy Webb walks and climbs in the Lake District.

‘I wandered lonely Dora’s field,

All winding clouds of daffodils…’

Sometimes it reads almost as a pastiche, 

‘though my heart now with pleasure fills

and dances where the warbler thrills.’

again referring us back to Wordsworth. The poems choosing to link Keats, John Clare, and Betjeman with the area imitate their style and mindset very cleverly.

            I was not always convinced by the flow and rhythm of the poems, occasionally seeming as though the writer was overcome by thoughts and ideas and tried to fit too many into a line or stanza. This was particularly noticeable in ‘Quiet Voices in the Loud Child,’ where the metre is often disturbed by the urge to express too much at once, then settling into well measured  verse.  Nevertheless, the poem is an epic achievement of loss, loneliness, hidden yearnings, with references to the Bible, Mythology, Peter Pan, - here is a leaping imagination encompassing many things to illuminate meaning.

‘I shade that beauty which has not yet grown,

in ghostly face drained into winter’s loss,

to grow myself a spring for Psyche’s pain

back into heaven , when her joy is born.’

Later in the reminiscence, journeyings. Norfolk to Devon, Dartmoor, Glastonbury Tor, the M6, M62, all seasoned with remembered joys and griefs, memories of old sadness resolved in new intentions and insights, culminating again in the spirits of daffodils.

            Wendy is prolific and entertaining, with an interesting and unusual view of things. Much of the poetry reads like a discourse between the poet and a remembered self, which, as eavesdroppers, we are privileged to overhear, and may learn much from the courage and optimism which glow softly through this work.  Review by Kate Edwards

Photo of Wendy Webb, above.  Click on thumbnail image to enlarge.

Index of Reviewed Publications, Pulsar Poetry Webzine #1 (December 2009), click on the surname of an author, underlined below, to link to the review

Genteel Messages - by Gwilym Williams

More Su - by Su Laws Baccino

Peeling Oranges and Lemons to Dartmoor - by Wendy Webb

Utterances - by Frédérique Lecoq

iota 82 - by various contributors

Incubations - by David Gill

*

Genteel Messages, poems by Gwilym Williams.  A5 size perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 54 pages.  ISBN 978-1-906357-17-7 Published by Poetry Monthly Press, 39 Cavendish Road, Long Eaton, Nottingham, NG10 4HY. poetrymonthly@btinternet.com  £5.25.

I really enjoyed reading this collection; it’s a book I actually took to work with me to view on a 12 hour shift, where I slowly (and with joy) read through.  I discovered and liked the poet’s rich imagery and observations, items that to some could appear mundane but he has made interesting. There’s sensitivity in his words too. Gwilym has tackled lots of different themes/subjects with humour and imagination; topics like flat packed furniture made me consider putting together flat-pack furniture, with-out reading the de-structions, which I tend to do. Gwilym has packed a lot into 54 pages some of the poems were like small sketches even caricatures of quirky human behaviour and the nature and how people act, Good companions/poets of the public bar. I also enjoyed his homage to his literary heroes Beckett/Bukowski/RS Thomas/ 'grunt' and found it all quite educational. I’ve not heard of Coluim Wallace (1796-1906), lots of references to history. I have never been to Vienna, it seems like a place to ignite inspiration if you’re a writer. Genteel Messages is a readable collection and has a chap-book feel to it! A bargain at £5.25.  Gwilym Williams provides an insightful view of many themes through a poet’s words.  I have many favourites 

Okabe’s Frottage Sites

Okabe’s pencil blurs rapidly over a surface

and an image appears on paper;

every stone leaves a unique imprint;

just like your thoughts.

Walking with Bukowski

Say, you might read a passage to me

from Buk’s new book

the last night of the earth...

you’d like the feel...

the black and red cover...

the acid-free paper...

Neil Brooks

*

More Su, poems and prose by Su Laws Baccino.  A5 size perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 41 pages. Published in year 2007 by dibleydo. ISBN 978-0-9553656-1-4

Cover note by U A Fanthorpe.  £5.99.

The Suffolk coastline and countryside figure strongly in Su Laws Baccino’ poems.  At one moment we are comfortable in a ‘Dormant Land’ where ‘snow falls silently from indigo sky’, the next moment we are immersed in the 1953 floods where children ‘slipped slowly from adults’ frozen hands’.  But nature kind and cruel is not the only inhabitant of her landscape.  In ‘Sunrise’ the ‘Sizewell dome shimmers, mirroring the rising sun’, while elsewhere the residents of Acacia Square rebel against the introduction of wheelie bins.  And of course the hand of man has its place with the ‘warmongering politicians’ in ‘Who Cares’ puffing out ‘their bullet-proofed chests’.

The sea also figures in the two prose items included in the collection.  In ‘The sea was huge,’  Jack has a storm and Mother Nature to thank for his transition from simple fisherman to canny businessman.  The futuristic story ‘Crowded Out,’ set in 2050, describe a world where the boundaries between death and life are strangely blurred.

In summary ‘More Su’ is an eclectic mix and not always a comfortable read.  But maybe that’s no bad thing.

John Plevin

*

Peeling Oranges & Lemons to Dartmoor, poems by Wendy Webb.  A5 size stapled booklet with a two-colour cover and 39 pages.  ISBN 978-1-903264-77-5 Published in year 2009 by Wendy Webb Books, 9 Walnut Close, NR8 6YN tips4writers@yahoo.co.uk  £4.00.

A magical mystery tour. A curious mixture of clues and locations. A kind of join-the-dots poetry.

A so-called stream of consciousness. An almost A to Z atlas of Great Britain ...

Well, who knows? Maybe there is a something or other to be unearthed at the end of it all.

For me, Webb demonstrates much too often the old trick of using nouns as verbs. Almost a sleight of hand I think it should be, not blatant. Her bold style took a bit of getting used to.

Tardis me to 1947

or, for example

My rats all cockroach from the sinking ship

Clues, to something to be found beyond the poetry, abound:

Read the Qur'an to find (his name means 'Jew')

or, again by way of example

Scarborough 45, 'Take the exit,

after 300 yards turn left ...

Lines like the following unearthed memories of puzzle-setters like Dan James and Kit Williams and jolly car treasure hunts from village to village through the green and pleasant countryside:

Spent Botticelli's Venus discards Mars,

to Wessex peaceful Hardy, when all's Donne:

What to make of it all? There is a kind note inside the front cover guiding the reader to 4 other Wendy Webb books together with instructions as to The correct sequence to read these poems.

To be quite frank, without the lure of some precious artefact like the famous golden hare, I found it all rather too much.

The front cover shows a picture of a mound called Brentor Church. Perhaps it's also some kind of clue?

I think it best to leave the final word to Webb herself:

The moment is all challenge in the mud.

Gwilym Williams

*

Utterances, poems and photographs by Frédérique Lecoq.  A5 size booklet with a two-colour cover and 15 pages.  No ISBN  £6.00  Available thro’ frederique.lecoq@yahoo.com

Frédérique Lecoq is French. Utterances is her first collection of poems. These seven poems sprang from her profound feelings for the Cornish coastal town of St Ives during the first of two years spent there. I have to say at the outset that the booklet is beautifully produced with mounted photographs echoing the seascape imagery of most of the poems.

St. Ives establishes the closest possible relationship between town and newcomer: mother and child, opening with:

“You have welcomed me into your pregnant belly.

     I am reborn along the path of your estuary.”

The sea also plays the role of mother, but a murderous one. The last verse of The Sea runs as follows:    “Mother and destroyer,

                                 Your true colour is silver.

                                     You heave the hour

                               And swallow it like a flower.”

The photo here suitably shows a silver path across a pewter-grey sea.

However, the poem that appealed to me most was Surf. Here the language has a lyrical impetus: and some delightfully weird thoughts, for instance, where the poet walking along the beach wonders whether she will survive the encroaching winter:

                                “Will I wake up like the sleeping marmot?

                                Will I defrost like the dead frog?”

She also has feeling for assonance (has she read Verlaine?) as here:

                                “The bay echoes its last whispers to me

                                And disappears into the mist.”

The sixth poem St Uny Church signals the end of her poetic childhood. It’s a powerful poem with punishing imagery, e.g. after a short walk to St Uny Church

                               “ My organs are bleeding from the journey

                                 and drum against the ground under my feet.

Shortly after, her” body overflows with its own blood

                          returning to the estuary below.

                          It becomes a one-eyed crawling snake.”

Mercifully she revives, inspired by “the spirit of the poets”.

David Gill

*

iota 82, 2008/2, quarterly publication of poems from various contributors and reviews by Bob Mee. A5 size perfect-bound book with a two-colour cover and 56 pages. Editors: Bob Mee and Janet Murch. ISSN 0266-2922 Submissions and correspondence to: Nigel McLoughlin, Editorial Board, iota, Room QU223, Francis Close hall, University of Gloucester, Swindon Road, Cheltenham, GL50 4AZ.  Subscriptions address: Bluechrome Press, PO Box 109, Portishead, Bristol, BS20 7ZJ.  www.iotapoetry.co.uk iotapoetry@gmail.com Single issue £3.00. Annual Subscription £12.00.

Every issue iota provides reading of quality and variety, and number 82 is no exception.  The first few pages list the winners of this years’ poetry competition which are remarkable pieces of writing, like ‘Our Lady of the Doorway,’ by David King who won the first prize.

The poems ‘Arthur’s Self Portrait’ by Maggie Frolish, ‘Obedience’ by Hilary S. Bussey and ‘The Lodger’ by John Daniel, contain elements of anger out of bounds, anxiety and a kind of helplessness, even fatality, which is expressed in the lines, ‘He shouts. Like that. Burst of volume,’ I must not speak or shuffle my feet,’ ‘I study her face, wondering how a woman so cruel could produce such perfection,’ Insulating himself from the world.’

Calvin Green in ‘Old Man’ describes – on a more sombre note – a father figure whose life is ebbing away through cancer and strokes.  The son comes to the conclusion that he hardly knew him.  He resigns himself to the fact that ‘we all die, each with his own grief.’

There are many more outstanding poems for the reader to discover, like ‘Dead Stock’ by Sean Elliott who uses the day to day activities of a book shop as a metaphor for the way we treat other people, categorizing them and often discarding them.  ‘We . . . sift the nameless from the soon forgot.’

In ‘A cold coming’ Norah Hanson reworks the nativity story to show Bethlehem today with walls, checkpoints and weapons.  But now, as two thousand years ago, there is still love and hope in the world, ‘there is an energy which can conceive a child of peace in the womb of a virgin.’

Towards the end of this issue there are a number of reviews which are informative and also make interesting reading. 

Ingrid Riley

*

Incubations, being longish poems in prose contexts by David Gill.  A5 size stapled booklet with a full colour cover and 84 pages. Front cover painting reproduction: Johann Wolfgang Goethe in Italy by J.H.W. Tischbein.  Published in year 2009.  No ISBN.  Available from the author at: 38 Yarnells Hill, Oxford, OX2 9BE.  £3.50 (includes the cost of postage).  irenedavidgill@btinternet.com

What makes this more than another poetry collection are the prose pieces preceding the poems, a fascinating and useful device. How often have you wished to know the background to a poem, or the story which inspired it. Well, here that wish is satisfied. It is like being taken by the hand and led through a history – of David Gill’s travels, his ancestors, his wife Irene’s amazing family, the people he met and knew, their stories told in a way that makes you feel you know them too, his grandfather, who once served on the same ship as Joseph Conrad, his friend Peter in Saxony.

‘A letter to Peter Friedrich’ is the story of a lasting friendship, from when the boys became pen pals soon after the end of the war. A visit to Gdansk, the home of Irene’s grandmother in childhood when it was called Danzig, gives rise to a poem about two Post Office sieges, Dublin during the Easter Rising, and Gdansk when Germany invaded Poland.

‘No letters arrive, no letters depart,

Pigeons range quietly along upper sills

Where, below them, rifle barrels start

To quiver like sandpiper’s bills.’

            ’Nyakasura revisited’ is a wonderful tale of a school near the Mountains of the Moon in Uganda. The poet’s taut descriptions and imagery transport the reader into that landscape.

                        ‘The burnt sienna camelots

                        Of termites,pursueing their own

                        Strange collective lives.’

            In ‘Station Masters’ a connection is made between Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka, ‘The Battle of Berlin Zoo’ reveals much of the poet’s humanitarian spirit towards animals as well as mankind. ‘Samso,’a Danish island where Irene is taken, escaping from Nazi Germany, is exhilarating and beautiful, even with the frightening background of threatened invasion.

                        ‘Your careful hands,

                        Curators of seashells, tiny scallops,

                        Mussels like jewellery boxes

                        With opal linings.’

            A youthful Portugese is urged not to embrace futility or to lack hope, and ‘The Goethe Rose’ describes how a rose from Goethe’s gartenhaus in Weimer eventually

                        ‘unwraps it’s soft strong petals

                        in Caerleon beside the Usk.’

            Adventurous journeys, compelling events, described in flowing and intelligent poetry and prose.

Kate Edwards.

Extracts from Pulsar Poetry Magazine, Edition 52, September 2009

Reviews from earlier editions are also shown below

Suburbs of My Childhood, poems by Bill Vartnaw, published year 2009.  An A5 size perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 74 pages.  Cover design by Douglas Rees; photo at page 71 by Jim Scott.  Published by Beatitude Press, Berkeley, California, USA. Web www.beatitudepress.com   ISBN: 978-0-9815047-0-4  $12.95 Bill Vartnaw: taureanhorn@hotmail.com

          Bill Vartnaw (b. 1949) is a well-known Californian poet.  This present collection of poems covers the period 1972 to 1995, hence the title Suburbs of My Childhood.  His opening poem ‘The Pursuit’ proclaims: ‘I come to/this life to leave my fingerprints.’  Which he does, and some of them are pretty oblique. For example, we find in ‘Contact Sport’ a basket-ball game sandwiched between scenes of demolition, shrewdly philosophical points being punctuated by the Boom! of the lead ball against the brickwork. Or he asks a simple(?) question: ‘what use is/a rain barrel/ in summer time?’ (‘Sonata’) Amazing how much goes on in that barrel at an atomic level – before the rain comes! ‘Cezanne’s Apples’ includes the line ‘nature morte avec pommes (still life with poems),’ and before you can fault him, the deliberate mistranslation leads to a thought-provoking revelation of a natural connection between apples and poems. Vartnaw’s free verse poems, are often difficult (it has to be said) but well worth decoding.  David Gill

*

Of Birds and Bees, poems by A. F. Harrold with drawings by Jo Thomas.  Hardback A5 size book with a two colour cover and 47 pages.  One hundred copies for sale.  Published in year 2008 by Quirkstandard’s Alternative, 79a Northumberland Avenue, Reading, Berkshire, RG2 7PT. Web: www.jothomas.net and www.quirkstandsalternative.co.uk and www.afharrold.co.uk  ISBN-13: 978-0-9557081-2-1  £20.00 + £2.50 postage and packaging.

          These poems feel slightly overwhelming, some a little obscure on first reading, but when read twice, thrice, they gather one up into A.F. Harrold’s world, and what a place that is. The birds, insects, and other creatures in these poems, some observed in England, others in California, are described with scrupulous attention to detail, and often with loving humour. An aura of love pervades the pages, whether Harrold  is depicting ‘the tiny whirl - light bee,’ or a snail, ‘300 million years of design shining out,’ or visiting a girlfriend on Christmas morning. Plenty of joy and delight in this book, the poet marvels at the flight of a hummingbird, and is amazed to find a seagull performing the same reversing flight.

          “a wingtip on the wheel, an eye out the back window,

          elbow crooked over the seat’s shoulder- only

          the recorded message- this seagull is reversing-

          was missing. I came home laughing, unexpected.”

He sees a dragonfly;

          “the fat flying twig of nacre-armour shifts

          like a blur of geometry to a new there.”

I felt I was seeing these beings in a new light, a swan makes ‘his lomping lazy lope along that path,’ then becomes ‘a free-flying, flame- white arrow in flight.’

          Poems to lift the spirits, but not without a pervasive sadness here and there, a hint of melancholy, a frisson down the spine.

          ‘something unique and immovable

          was lodged inside me, troubling me.’

Soon dispelled by the interior of a seashell, ‘violet, smooth as unintended love.’

          Although this collection doesn’t contain any overtly ‘love poems’ it is an affirmation of love, nature, and life:

          ‘it’s all going on, great thrusting life, going on all on its own.’

I’ve quoted widely from this collection, because I feel the poetry will lure and draw you in far better than my prose. The illustrations are beautifully drawn, lending an almost spectral, dreamlike quality to the             pages.          Kate Edwards

*  

The Waters of Mars, poems and photographs by Frédérique Lecoq.  An A5 size stapled booklet with a three colour cover and 14 pages.  Hand made by the author in year 2008.  ISBN ?  Price? Contact details as follows: frederique.lecoq@yahoo.com or though web address: www.Flickr.com/photos/frederiquelecoq/

          As someone who has over the years struggled with foreign languages I am somewhat in awe of a poet from France writing poetry in English.  Frédérique Lecoq, born and bred in France and now living in London has in her collection ‘The Waters of Mars’, given us a series of poems reflecting her observations of the Cornish environment with many of the poems accompanied by her own photos.  The poems range from the rock pool in ‘Stillness’ where the ‘clock has stopped’, at least until the next tide, to the wider view of ‘St Ives, Town Of My Dreams’ which reminds her of the ‘miniature town’ she built as a girl and where she felt ‘safe and protected’. 

A nice compliment to the Cornish town and people.

However, it’s not all landscape and nature.  A number of the poems are concerned with memory and time and love.  These poems stand on their own, no photos are needed enabling the reader to make a connection with their own experience.  In ‘Autumn Leaves’ she recalls the loss of a loved one where the dead leaves on the ground are a reminder ‘that once I loved and have been loved’. In ‘Love and Reality’ she sees man as love and woman as reality where ‘Together, they give birth to truth’.  For all our sakes I hope she’s right.  John Plevin

*

Norfolk Poets and Writers, Anthology 2008, Edited by Wendy Webb.  An A5 sized stapled booklet with a full colour cover and 50 pages.  Poems from various contributors.  ISBN: 978-1-903264-74-4 £5.00.  Cover picture: Lavenham, Suffolk, 2008. Published by: Wendy Webb Books, 9 Walnut Close, Norwich, NR8 6YN.  E-mail: tipsforwriters@yahoo.co.uk

A diverse and thoughtful anthology of poetry, lots of interesting poems packed with feelings on varying topics.  I liked the nature themed poems as well as the observational and life inspired work. I enjoyed the sheer diversity of the writing and re-read many poems to absorb the flavour of the words and imagery. There were many references to the sea and coast  which has always been a great focus of the muse for poets/artists for generations. There were a few poems that made me laugh too, which is always good. The poem Teenage Anthem by Dee Gordon provides a slant on the Larkin poem, This Be the Verse, a comment on the attitude of youth from the parents perspective. It was nice to see a Sophie Hannah poem in the Invited Guests section. This Anthology is great tribute to the individual talent of writers and to all small press poets who scribe away for the love of words and language. It was a joy to review this anthology sat in my garden with the sun beaming down, for a change.

I liked this poem for its humour,

WORDS by Simon Ward

Somewhere beyond the sunlit leaves

a flight of multicoloured words is wheeling

forever out of reach, While close at hand

I hear the tapping which may correspond

to fifty thousand monkeys typing Shakespeare.

How long, I wonder, will they take,

when this particular ape

has not completed even half of line

to requisite perfection or design?                  

Review by:  Neil Brooks

* 

Joined-up Writing, an anthology of writing by members of Barmouth University of the Third Age.  An A5 size perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 128 pages.  Published during December, year 2008, by Round House Publishing, Dolgellau, Gwynedd, LL40 1LD.  ISBN 978-0-9560394-0-8 Editor-in-Chief: Richard Paramor.  Cover illustration by Gladys Lawson, page illustration by Jack Richardson.  £4.95

A diverse anthology of poems, prose and short stories.  The reader finds contributions that show great skill in taking something intrinsically ordinary and adding a little drama to give it more interest.  The writers have kept close to their own experience.

In ‘The First, but not the Last,’ by Cliff Probert, the reader’s attention is kept alive to reveal in the last line the image of the moon landing.

          We are left unsure as to whether John Reece’s story, ‘La Grande Sorpressa,’ his very close encounter with Sophia Loren, is in fact a dream?  He did accompany her to a book signing, but as for the rest, who knows?

          Many of the prose pieces investigate a state of mind, such as Sylvia Vannelli’s ‘The Void,’ where we discover the salient facts of the woman’s past life leading up to her final act.

          In the case of Richard Paramor’s story ‘Guy,’ we can only hope that the chilling account of a plane crash is a dream.

          In this collection there are familiar stories that are well written, although short, like ‘A Fishy Tale,’ by Glenys Lawson, ‘The Unexpected,’ by Margaret Ashby to Diane Andrews, ‘Taken for a Ride,’ and we are always left wanting to know more.

          Viewing the collection as a whole, however, the impression which remains is the quirky humour surrounding the familiar.  These writers, although I could not mention every one, are in my view at their best when they deal with subjects which are close to them.  Ingrid Riley

*

Alright Squire? No. 2, poems by Paul Tanner.  Small stapled booklet with a two colour cover and 21 pages.  Published during year 2009 by last chance before bath-time publications.  £1.99.                           E-mail: saneboy@hotmail.co.uk

          See page 41 of edition #52 of Pulsar for an example of Paul Tanner’s work. Basically: irreverent, hard-hitting, non-pretentious, in your face, ‘ave it!’  Not for the easily offended.  Recommended.  David Pike

*

Book & Booklet Reviews

Extracts from Pulsar Poetry Magazine, Edition 51, March 2009

Reviews from earlier editions are also shown below

iota 80, 2007/4, a quarterly selection of contemporary poetry.  An A5 size perfect-bound book with a two colour cover and 56 pages.  ISSN 0266-2922. editors: Bob Mee and Janet Murch, 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Warwickshire, CV37 0LR.  www.iotapoetry.co.uk Email: iotapoetry@aol.com  UK sub £12.00 or £3.00 per issue.

Iota, a poetry quarterly of 20 years standing, attracts verse from the UK, Ireland and the US, hence the range of cultural ‘feel’ in the featured poems. The dominant medium is free verse (sometimes slackening into prose), though it’s possible to smuggle in a rhyming verse if you are as subtle as Fergus Chadwick (‘The Wiser Clown’). I enjoyed a fair number of the contributions, not least for their imagery wired up to our technological age. Here’s Kathy Miles in ‘Space Junk’ using the magic of her poetry notebook to “open the door of the wind” and spot not only her lost socks and her Swiss Army knife but ‘All the debris of my life/orbiting the earth above my head/pieces of my skin becoming stars.’ And from Michael W. Thomas’s very challenging 2-page poem ‘You Won’t Fall’ this self-portrait with mobile: ‘You are known – one among them,/even with your futureman clothes/your pocket that chuckles and tweets/as messages tuck themselves in/from the ends of the sky.’  And from Liverpool there’s a poet who wishes he ‘could fly like a casserole’. Good luck to him!  David Gill

*

Ju Su, poems and short stories by Su Law Baccino.  An A5 size perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 38 pages.  Published during year 2006. E-mail: alfndibs@tiscali.co.uk ISBN 0-9553656-0-0 £4.99.

A diverse collection of poems, ranging from descriptions of scenes, places, people, to tales of travel, loss, and love. Her choice of words and imagery are often arresting,

‘And so ends summer, wind whipping pebbles;

ominous aubergine sky, mirroring the inky sea;’

She writes from a wide range of experience, having lived in several places abroad, but a strong impression comes from her poetry that she is happiest in her native Suffolk, to which she returned. The first section of poems, ‘Roots,’ speaks powerfully of her memories and current pre-occupation with the landscapes and villages.

                                ‘All around, yet far away, distant,

  isolated voices call.’

She doesn’t hesitate to remind us of the dangerous ways in which marshland and coastline have been used. ‘Stations……….power stations…’ However, she writes equally well of ‘les Alpes maritime, -

                                ‘Purring pines whisper above cliff-top sentinels

                                sprinkling dust that flies far on a diffident breeze.’

The section called ‘Life’ is full of contrasts, ‘Yearning’ and ‘Rebelling’ lively and joyful, whereas in ‘Vanishing’ sadness looms through the poem, even before we are sure what happened.

                                ‘With a wave they slipped away,

  disappeared.’

A piece of flash fiction is powerful and emotive, painting disturbing pictures of a terrible incident. I wasn’t so sure about the short story. Well written, atmospheric, but I wasn’t quite certain what was going on. A ghost? A dream? – but that may be a fault in my reading of it. See what you think! A worthwhile collection.  Kate Edwards

*

Reflective Images, a collection of English poems by Binayendra Chowdhuri.  An A5 size perfect-bound book with a three colour cover and 41 pages.  Published during year 2007 by: Varuna Asi, D57/32-C, Krishnapuri, Sigra, Varanasi – 221010, India.  ISBN 81-901245-4-4  Price: Rs. 50.00

This collection confronts the reviewer with several major problems.  Perhaps the most obvious is the question of cultural references.  With no idea of what the battle of Kurushetra, (Kunti’s Prayer), involved nor of who Karna and Kunti are, it is impossible to appreciate the meaning.  Chowdhuri makes such assumptions throughout, but fails to provide a ready-reference glossary.

The problems go deeper.  Time and again we encounter  examples of bad English:

‘stepping at your threshold,’ (page35),

‘. . . your. . . face breaks into thousand pieces,’ (page 36),

‘suddenly his attention caught of a lonely lady,’ (page 37), are but a few examples.

Another problem is the subject matter of the poems. ‘Inexorable Time,’ (page 8), seems to offer a weighty and portentous message, but on examination merely states that time passes.  Leaving aside the use of words such as ‘remuniate,’ (ruminate?), ‘An Admonition,’ (page 9), piles image on image, but never actually says anything.  Imperfect images coupled with faulty use of language and impenetrable cultural references make this a difficult read.  Ingrid Riley.

* 

Matters Arising, poems by Peter Johnson.  An A5 size perfect-bound book with a two colour cover and 62 pages.  Published during year 2007 by: Poetry Monthly Press, 39 Cavendish Road, Long Eaton, Nottingham, NG10 4HY.  ISBN 978-1-905126-93-4 e-mail: poetrymonthly@btinternet.com Price: £5.50.

Many of the poems in this collection have been previously published and as I progressed through the book I could understand why. Anger, sadness and self doubt prevail amongst the many themes.  Here is an extract from

‘Bipolar’.

I do not envy you

Having no scars

From self-inflicted wounds

I do not want to have

Your certainty

Of who you are

And will be tomorrow

I choose to have my flesh, raw

From walking on burning coals

And the hours I spend

Talking with angels

‘Memory Loss’ explores, one presumes, the process of getting over a love affair

Somehow

In my memory now

I never see you full face

You are never looking into my eyes.

I can recall you only

In profile.

The poet, however, has a developed sense of humour and this one struck a chord...

In The Fifties

....we wore black roll-necks

And coughed our way through

Innumerable Gauloises

To look like Jean Paul Sartre

-Or was it Camus?

And were found at all hours

Debating the finer points

Of existentialism

Not in pavement cafes

Of which there are few in Manchester.......

All good stuff and very enjoyable.  

Dick Stewart

* 

Mastering Music Walks the Sunlit Sea, Roundel and Sonnet Sequences by Alan Jacobs. An A5 size perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 63 pages.  Published during year 2008 by: Matador, 9 De Montfort Mews, Leicester, LE1 7FW.  ISBN 978-1906510-893.  E-mail: books@troubador.co.uk  www.troubador.co.uk/matador  Price: £6.99.

To fully appreciate Alan Jacob’s book of Roundels and Sonnets, it would be helpful to have studied more than a smattering of eastern philosophies and religions.  The imagery is rich, powerful and rooted in nature and things such as the moon, music, the songs of larks and philosophy have personality and impart wisdom and influence.  Heady stuff for your average reader.  However, one need not know about Buddhism, Platonism and Gnostic Christianity to recognize Jacob’s craftsmanship.  He is a serious poet with an ear for rhythm and rhyme, and his frequent use of alliteration and internal rhyme make for a pleasing read.  The sonnet and roundel are tough taskmasters, and Jacobs is up to the task.  Harold Webster

* 

A Lament For England, poems by Roland John.  An A5 size perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 98 pages.  Published during year 2005 by: bluechrome publishing, PO Box 109, Portishead, Bristol, BS20 7ZJ.  ISBN 1-904781-76-4 Web: www.bluechrome.co.uk Cover illustration, death of empire, by Erik Ryman.  Price £7.99

In addition to being a poet, Roland John is also reviewer, translator and expert on the poetry of Ezra Pound.  In other words he’s no stranger to the literary world and therefore should know his business.  Perhaps this artistic background explains his dim view of the silent majority in his poem ‘Attainment’ as being ‘dull as ditch-water’ with retirement only a ‘few years in safe captivity’.  Personally I felt more comfortable with his sympathetic view of the workers in ‘Foundry’ breathing ‘nickels, arsenic and lead’ then coughing ‘the black phlegm’, no safe captivity here.  Sympathy was also present in the hospital visitor  in ‘Just Visiting this Time’, knowing that soon he’ll come one last time only ‘to find your shadow on an empty bed’.  The long poem ‘A Lament for England’ traces the changes from a time of ‘Empire Made’ through a World War to the ‘lurch into hedonism and the perverse’ to reach a land of ‘increasing credit’ where we buy the perfect lifestyle.  Shades of the credit crunch here.

Roland John’s poetry mainly concerns people and places.  There is a sense of personal experience gathered over many years and in many countries.  Not always an easy read but worth the effort even for those of us secure in our ‘safe captivity’.  John Plevin

*

The Sons of Camus, Writers International Journal, special feature, “Gallery of Historic Spaces,’ by Morelle Smith; Autumn 2007, Issue 5.  For writers and artists over the age of 55.  An A5 size perfect-bound book with a two colour cover and 190 pages.  Written articles, poems and illustrations from various contributors. Submissions to Ann J. Davidson, editor and graphic designer, thro e-mail: scwijournal@earthlink.net                  Editor: Rubi Andredakis, Gropious Street, No. 30, Limassol, 3076, Cyprus;  e-mail: roubi@cytanet.com.cy  ISBN 978-9963-668-30-4  ISSN 1705-429X   Price: CY £5.00, €9.00, UK £6.00, USA $10.00, Can $15.00.

I was very keen and interested to read The Sons of Camus, an journal of international writing named after the existentialist philosopher and Nobel prize winning author Albert Camus, (famous for his first novel L’Etranger, known in English as The Outsider, which I read in my youth).

What I really enjoyed about this journal was the diverse mix of poetry, art, short stories, essays and archaeology – plus the special feature gallery of Historic Spaces, which I found well-written with imaginative descriptions, that made me want to visit the places and walk in the vivid landscapes amongst the ruins and sunlight.  This journal has it all.

I found the poetry accessible and strong, even mature as many of the writers featured are over 55 (as we are told in the introduction).  I like the bucolic sense the writers have for country life.  There were so many poems I enjoyed reading.

One of the poems I liked:

The Mountain

The mountain doesn’t like to be enveloped by haze,

It doesn’t like brooks with tamed torrents,

It doesn’t like the wounded embrace of the spruce trees

That hold back landslides.

The mountain doesn’t like anything.

With the icy hunger

Of its powerful, deified body, it absorbs everything,

Torments everything with the mute laughter

Of it concealed cracks and chasms.

The mountain fears nothing not even

Death,

It’s heart is a smooth rock

From which no edelweiss can be plucked.

Milena Merlak translated poem.

*

Book & Booklet Reviews

Extracts from Pulsar Poetry Magazine, Edition 50, September 2008

Reviews from earlier editions are also shown below

Sympathetic Magic, poems by Brian Fewster.  An A5 size perfect-bound paperback book with a full colour cover and 92 pages.  Published on 31^st January 2008 by: Poor Tom’s Press, 89a Winchester Avenue, Leicester, LE3 1AY.  ISBN 978-0-9543-3715-5 price £6.00. 

There are many powerful poems in this collection, the rhyme and metre flow without effort, the rhythm sometimes so strong one feels compelled to read a poem aloud. Brian uses many poetic forms, sonnet, sestina, villanelle amongst them, each form appearing the right one for the poem within it. Often the writing is sad, as in ‘Three poems for Jane,’ which are heart-moving. Others are suffused with humour. There are lines of particular beauty, as in ‘Moorland’…

                                                ‘Clouds disintegrate,

                                                 sliding over the hill’s edge

                                                 into the sky’s lake.’

                I turned to the title poem several times, something in it eluded me – is it about the search for order in a chaotic world?…

                                ‘By now the past has generated more

                                 thick sheaves of junk to bin and guilt to store.’

It would seem early man had more imaginative ways of dealing with life’s pressures and disappointments…

                                                                                   ‘…means

                    of filtering their words through magic screens.’

The poet’s erudition, his knowledge of art, science, philosophy, come across strongly, a metaphysical quality is woven seamlessly into the poetry. An intriguing collection, making one think and ponder on the diversity of life, love, and everyday scenes.  Kate Edwards

*

from the field book . . . a  collection of poems from Carol Thistlethwaite.  A perfect bound book, with a full colour cover and 100 pages. Price £4.99 plus p&p or £1 e-Book. Publisher: BeWrite Books UK, 32 Bryn Road South, Wigan. Lancs. WN4 8QR; www.bewrite.net  ISBN 9781905202768 paperback 9781905202775 e-Book.

These poems are an adventure, an excitement of birds, a journey through fields and woods, across marshland and sea - shores. Afterwards, you will be glad you set out, got your feet wet in long grass and rock pools, perched on cliff tops, you’ll see birds with a new way of looking. You’ll know their ways, their being, their similarities and differences, as diverse as humans. Next time you see a swallow, you will recognise it in a different way…

                ‘…Excited chatter

                Saharan sun-scorched faces…’

It reminds one of how far they have come,

                ‘tracing the curves of earth,

                weaving lovers’ lace

                through the skies.’

Watching rooks in tree tops…

                ‘To know the thrash and thwack

                of life all-precarious.’

Carol uses words in a way that gives us new insights into the avian world, the poems are alive with discovery, giving our perceptions a keener edge. Even if, like the poet, (a long time member of the RSPB) you are a dedicated birdwatcher, these poems will expand and broaden your horizons by the sheer diversity and vitality of the descriptions and language. The bird’s various habitats are searchingly portrayed, how they live, survive, and have their being is lovingly depicted, on some pages the arrangement of words portrays the birds in flight, on others, we can hear their scrawls and cries and rustlings, and we learn more from this than from any number of technical books.

                ‘black-headed gulls crowd in,

                over-dipped in ink,

                web-feet-first,

                blotting the page.’                                                

Kate Edwards

*

Virtual Eden, poems by Pat Earnshaw.  An A5 size stapled booklet with a full colour cover and 32 pages.  Published in year 2008 by: Gorse Publications, P.O. Box 214, Shamley Green, Guildford, GU5 0SW.   ISBN 978-0-9524113-8-5.  Price £4.50 post free UK.

To fully appreciate this little book, one needs to put aside a few grown up attitudes about imagery.  An eight-year-old child knows that inanimate objects like tombstones and dark rooms actually can and do talk to us.  We can and in fact often do slip into reveries and revisit past experiences and become true artists, invisible observers of others’ and of our own behaviours.  The book is a gathering of poignant reflections that transport the poet back to another time within her childhood.  The memories are as beautiful as they are painful, but they do not always describe an Eden.  My favourite poem, and one I think that must be absorbed before reading the rest, is “Dredging for Memories,” which prepares the reader for what is to come: “Lost in a wilderness of fantasy/ mismatched with memory/ I tuck myself into a crevice/underneath the torrent of a waterfall, and safe from ambush,/ am content to watch the world....”   Harold S. Webster

           *           

Distant Close, poems by Will Daunt.  An A5 size perfect bound book with a two colour cover and 64 pages.  Published on 14^th February 2008 by Lapwing Publications, c/o 1 Ballysillan Drive, Belfast, BT14 8HQ.  ISBN 978-1-905425-73-0   www.freewebs.com/lapwingpoetry/ and e-mail lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com Price £6.95.

This one will appeal to the resolute reader. It’s not easy. It’s not meant to be easy. Reading it left me exhausted. I can’t imagine the effort required to write it. Daunt’s regular readership will know what to expect in the way of puns, metaphors and word tricks. The rest of us will have to dig-in, prod and poke. It’s a bit like cleaning your ears. Something will emerge eventually. Perhaps grit? Incidentally, I read the book to disintegration. It simply fell apart in my hands.

The title piece Distant Close comprises the last 15 pages of the book and is a kind of a nosey parker’s cul-de-sac guide going from no. 1 to 13 and then back down the other side from 12 to 2. Eavesdropping at 13a: Aviary produces the following:

Bird song? I’ll give you bird song

‘til you’re sick of twittering, Look –

much better, listen. I’ve reversed

this cage called home, culled half

the usual clutter, made each room

a gaping prison…

The first part of the book is basically an assortment of postcards and paraphernalia from bardic travels.

In Stirling Efforts

…voices diverge

like words in a wilderness –

grit fills the vacuum

Poetry with grit. That sums it up nicely.   Gwilym Williams

*

The Magnificent Guffaw, poems by Richard Wink.  An A5 size stapled booklet with a full colour cover and 40 pages.  Published in year 2007 by erbacce press publications, Liverpool, UK.  Cover design, editing and typesetting by Alan Corkish.  ISBN 978-0-955754-8-8 www.erbacce.com ¤5.50 $3.99 E-mail: aprilmaymarch777@yahoo.co.uk

I really enjoyed reading The Magnificent Guffaw. It tenderly describes the modern day madness of human nature and what it is like to live in a city in these times.  I enjoyed the humour and tenderness contrasted with the mud of everyday routine and the mundane things of life. I liked the concise way the poet delivers his voice of urban tales and hope.  I sat and read many of the poems out loud in my garden, (the neighbours probably thought I was bonkers!), but it seemed the right way to absorb the words.  I loved the way he describes the British culture of booze and nightclub-worship with an enigmatic vision - “On the dance floor they question my sexuality / Sure I can smile honey” – it reminds me of the eternal hangover of my drinking days.

I thoroughly enjoyed this chap-book and am resolved to read more of Richard Wink’s work.  Some of my favourites were: I Feel Mysterious Today – “There is a weird smell coming from the fridge/ as I walk through the door/ the cat licks its balls/ in a touching display/ on my returning” and Guts Up – “On occasion you can confuse them by playing a mental from the local hospital/ chuck a rotten cabbage/ scream like a dirty filthy banshee/ By this rule of thumb/ madness conquers fear”.  Neil Francis Brooks

*

Sunflower Equations, poems by June English.  A slightly larger than A5 size book with a full colour cover and 76 pages. Published during year 2008 by Hearing Eye, Box 1, 99 Torriano Avenue, London, NW5 2RX.  ISBN 978-1-905082-34-6 www.hearingeye.org Price £6.95. e-mail: books@hearingeye.org 

Sickness, abuse, infidelity beat like hammers throughout the poetry of June English.  And if this isn’t enough we can add the difficulties of growing up in wartime Britain, clutching our ration books and gasmasks, peering fearfully down the alley where baby Rosie died ‘while Mummy danced with G.I. Joe.’  Fairy tale endings also seem to be excluded.  Peace, marriage and a new life in a new and distant country offer little in the way of sanctuary with the ‘silent months of snow,’ the ‘talk about bullies and bond slaves’ and where ‘my blouses cover the blows.’  Harrowing stuff, a view of a life on the margins of the unbearable.  But in the midst of all this pain there are glimpses of a gentler existence: the uncle who makes violins sitting ‘cross-legged, penknife in raw-boned sailor’s hand,’ and perhaps finding love in ‘Sonata’ and the ‘summer nights we’d sneak away’ to where your ‘hands worked rhythmically in tune – to rouse latent sonata chords in me.’

After reading her poems I’m reminded of past childhood visits to the fairground, of being thrown around and tossed through the air, half frightened to death but wanting desperately to go back and experience it all again.  John Plevin

*

The Cast-Iron Shore, poems by Pat Jourdan.  An A5 size stapled booklet with a full colour cover and 40 pages.  Cover design, editing and typesetting by Alan Corkish.  Cover painting by Pat Jourdan. Published by erbacce-press publications, Liverpool, during year 2008.  Price £4.00  www.erbacce-press.com  ISBN 978-0-9555754-9-5

The city of Liverpool provides a backdrop to most of Pat Jourdan’s poems, whether a winter scene in ‘February Sundays,’ . . . ‘a surprise Liverpool on fresh paper,’ and almost obligatory, ‘Ferryboat to Birkenhead,’ or, The Cast-Iron Shore.’

In the title poem she describes the broken remnants lying around on the shore, ‘the fag-ends of industrial days,’ and goes on throughout the book depicting the remnants of her childhood and later life. 

There are many focal points here of remembered incidents: the German prisoner-of-war catching the girl’s eye in ‘After War,’ the soldiers and the aid worker striking a contrast in ‘Shannon Café,’ and even the brother ‘his internal landscape changed from ours,’ marked forever by unmentioned experiences in Afghanistan, (That Far-Away Look).

The poet’s voice here is confident and experienced, but even this does not protect her from the occasional strained image, such as ‘Apricot skies dashed with sparks – like an orgasm gone wrong,’ or ‘the dotted chewing-gum stars on the pavement.’   But these are minor sins when measured against the image of ‘Kathleen Ferrier, Telephonist,’ penned in by the rules while her voice soars in her head.

Here and there, the reader comes across some vivid images, ‘the surge of the tide,’ and ‘the smell of salt-charged air,’ (Shoreline), or in ‘Heresy,’ describing the baby’s eyes ‘bullet-blue from heaven, dropped sky dolloped into skin.’

All-in-all an interesting and wide-ranging collection.  Ingrid Riley

Book & Booklet Reviews

Extracts from Pulsar Poetry Magazine, Edition 49, March 2008

Reviews from earlier editions are also shown below

I Went With Her, poems by Alan Hardy.  A slightly larger than A5 size perfect-bound book with a three colour cover and fifty two pages.  ISBN 978-1-905126-98-9.  Published in year 2007 by Poetry Monthly Press, 39 Cavendish Road, Long Eaton, Nottingham, NG10 4HY. poetrymonthly@btinternet.com UK price £5.50

This is Alan Hardy’s second collection and some of the poems have been previously published in, as he puts it, ‘the usual suspects.’ For me, ‘Night-Porter’ stands out, head and shoulders, from the rest of the material. . .

. . . you will understand that seedy look and smell

of interrupted sleep,

slightly querulous avoidance of eyes,

in the fidgety night-porter’s crumpled shame

having to make a living waiting for others

to deign to ring a bell

in his beaten-down eyes,

you will see the fervour and hot-headed contempt

that massacred the Tsar and bred a coup,

The book, on the whole, is a little less interesting than the above poem would suggest and one gets the impression that the poet is sometimes lacking inspiration, for example there are a couple of poems concerning flies, another on wasps. This made the reading slightly hard going; however, I was considerably cheered by the Pythonesque gem on the rear cover, ‘. . . He won second prize in The Hastings International Poetry Competition 1994. ’  Dick Stewart

*

Sound Signals Advising of Presence, poems by Peter Hughes.  An A5 size stapled booklet with a full colour cover and seventeen pages.  Published in year 2006 by infernal methods, Quoybow, Stormness, Orkney, KW16 3JU.  ISBN?  UK price £3.00.

Even if one has never been to a Scottish island, these poems wholly convey the feel and atmosphere of such a place – the lost and lonely shores, the slow tracking of time, as though the tides, the sands, the wind, move everything to a rhythm of their own.

A phrase that caught me, referring to ‘we & the strange house’, was ‘that resound to little adaptations & imagined trespasses.’ (The ampersands are the poet’s own.) The house, what he sees from and around it, the sea, tides, are the recurrent themes, uninhabited buildings, a deserted peninsula, loss and loneliness drift through the pages, but hope as well, - ‘the most stunning sights are the normal daily occurrences.’ The words are like a reverie floating through the poets consciousness, like driftwood cast on a deserted beach

Perhaps one should never ask what a poem is ‘about,’ but I would have liked to be a bit more certain that this was a return, that a house was being restored, or did I get that completely wrong? ‘Green hill,’ ‘green doors,’ ‘an unblocked chimney,’ ‘undressed walls,’ all speak of a place, a time, a moment in a landscape, hinting at lives led within it, in an arresting collection of images.  Kate Edwards

 *

In the beginning was the song, poems by Glenys Jones.  A slightly larger than A5 size perfect-bound book with seventy four pages and a full colour cover.  Published during year 2007 by: Matador, 9 De Montfort Mews, Leicester, LE1 7FW.  E-mail: books@troubador.co.uk  Web site: www.troubador.co.uk/matador  ISBN 978-1905886-975   UK price £6.99.

The book’s cover gives the lie to the old cliché that you can’t judge a book by its cover - the sunlight on the mountain, the soft blue sky, the rugged rock, the out of focus gorse, the withered grass, the undersized tree reaching valiantly skyward all serve to illustrate exactly what’s in store.

Glenys Jones is the time-honoured reluctant poet finally pressed into the limelight by family and friends; a kind of Welsh Lao Tzu at the gate you could say, but it’s all very well done and often done with a light touch. The collection takes its title from the poem beginning with the following lines:

Before we spoke, we sang

With the birds in the trees

The wind on the lake

This hints at transmigration; an ancient Celtic belief system and this kind of thing fits well as I’ve hinted to Jack Tait’s cover image. Jones is less happy with modern hustle and bustle. Here’s Epitaph: One in full:

A womb

A tomb

And in between

Life

A crowded room

Full of shouting

Where no-one speaks

Aunt Mabel, 90, one of the original conspirators, must be delighted with her niece.    Gwilym Williams

Iota 78, 2007/02.  Poems and reviews from various contributors. A perfect-bound book with a two-colour cover and fifty six pages.  Editors: Bob Mee and Janet Murch of Ragged Raven Press, 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Warwickshire, CV37 0LR.  E-mail: iotapoetry@aol.com  + web address www.iotapoetry.co.uk  ISSN 0266-2922  Year sub £12.00 UK, rest of the world £18.00.  Individually £3.00 per copy, UK.

You will not like all of the poems in this slim edition, perhaps not even most, (one might say the same about Whitman's "Leaves of Grass”); but if you read "Iota" carefully, you will come to the conclusion that, whatever its shortcomings here and there, this is an important gathering of work after all.  It is, I think, a platform on which aspiring poets may stand and build intricate images of original thought that tweak the mind in new and refreshing ways.  Just about the time you are ready to dismiss it all as vague prose in short lines, you come across poems that cut deep, that touch a chord and knock the smugness out of you. 

All in all, considering the publication's purpose, the editors have chosen well.  Harold Webster

*

A Real Man, poems by David Savoury.  A perfect-bound book, slightly larger than A5 size, with a three-colour cover and ninety four pages.  Published during November 2006 by Paula Brown Publishing, 26 Uplands Road, Drayton, Portsmouth, PO6 1HS. Information via e-mail: paulabrownpublishing@btinternet.com ISBN 9781905168125  Price?

David Savoury’s ‘A Real Man’ represents some twenty years of work, but for all that it’s not always an easy read.  The publisher’s introduction claims that the poetry ranges ‘from the surface of a man’s skin’ to ‘the boundless perspective of the cosmos.’  Quite a stretch.  Helpfully the poems are grouped into broad and ambitious themes: self and society; the fragility and wonder of humanity; and the dichotomy between flesh and spirit.  All good subjects for the poet.  Self and a rather bleak view of society are present in ‘The Suburbs’ where ‘refuse congregates’ in black sacks ‘like so many mourners.’  In the poem ‘Beach’ humanity is reflected by love turning towards sleep ‘leaving me in our darkness.’  Our insignificance in the wider scheme of things is measured in the poem ‘Growing Desert’ addressed to God where man is just ‘a grain of sand… dead  in a boundless vacuum.’  I found the poems in ‘A Real Man’ grew on me.  A slow process but worth the effort.  John Plevin

*

Waves, 2007: 37^th Annual Anthology of the Society of Civil and Public Services Poetry Workshop. Poems displayed in an A5 sized stapled booklet with a two-colour cover and 28 pages.  Membership is open to anyone who works or has ever worked for a civil or public service organisation. Chairperson/Editor: Liz Rowlands, 19 Arkley Court, Maidenhead, Berkshire, SL6 2YR.  E-mail: pw@gothicgarden.freeserve.co.uk  ISSN 1475-144  Price £2.50, includes post and packaging.

This is a delightful anthology from the above named society.  The collection covers a wide and varied range of subjects.  In ‘The Upstairs Cat,’ Muriel Stammers cleverly evokes the nature of cats, threatening menace to other animals, but seeking the favour of human beings who are a useful source of food and admiration.

More serious themes are also chosen.  Mike Boland in ‘Among the rocks of Albion,’ offers a romantic view of Britain’s past, “we are the land; locked into a grid of unseen power / that webs across the hills, woods, rivers/earthing us among the rocks of Albion.”

Angus Livingstone in ‘The Potter,’ describes how a routine activity gradually takes over the potter who dreams of producing the perfect pot, “and when it’s thrown and only then/she’ll know time and pain and cold/but she will smile before she sleeps.”

There are many more themes in this collection which should be mentioned, in particular the various evocations of nature, such as ‘Suburban Summer,’ by Terry Rickson, or ‘End of Summer,’ by Terry James.  This is an anthology which has something to offer everyone and stirs the reader’s imagination throughout.  Ingrid Riley

Minor Yours, poems by Peter Hughes.  An A5 size stapled booklet with a full colour cover and 11 pages.  Published during year 2006 by Oystercatcher Press 4 Coastguard Cottages, Lighthouse Close, Old Hunstanton, Norfolk, PE36 6EL.  ISBN 1-905885-008, price £3.00.

Minor Yours; (Mine or Yours?) poses just that dualistic question, as do the poems in the slim volume, with interesting cover illustration by the author (which, in colour therapy terms, would show that the artist had issues with gender, psychic stability and direction ….) The poems start to confirm this, moving from: ‘I’m a charcoal sketch/ a self portrait in an unframed mirror/ a subterranean rumour/ a trickle of coal dust……’  to ‘purposeful steps/ usually kill an insect or two/ you can hear them in the attic/ or in the alley down the side of the house/ maybe it’s a neighbour’s dog a fox/ or some less easily named/ nocturnal presence,’ then, with more definition: ‘time to clean out the pipes &/ listen to the dripping in the cellar’, confirming the duality: ‘pros and cons  light and dark/ your turn  my turn’,  ‘vicious and sympathetic by turns’, but (don’t worry about it!) ‘where no-one is watching or measuring/ setting you up to shoot at the target of yourself/’ while the last poem has more visual structure, the message is still lost, as it feels, is the poet: ‘though the dogs are waiting/ with reflections in their eyes/ for someone to tell them/ this is not happening/ someone will come back.’  Of course they will. And it’s important to say it when you feel it. And paint it. Wonderful words.   Janie Thomas.

Book/Booklet Reviews

Extracts from Pulsar Poetry Magazine, Edition 48, September 2007

Reviews from earlier editions are also shown below

The Mansion Gardens, poems by Alan Morrison. A slightly larger that A5 sized perfect-bound book with a three colour cover and 71 pages.  ISBN 1-905168-11-X.   Published during year 2006 by Paula Brown Publishing, 26 Uplands Way, Drayton, Portsmouth , Hampshire, PO6 1HS. paulabrownpublshing@btinternet.com  www.paulabrownpublshing.com  Price ?

Alan Morrison, the man who *re-jigged Under Milk Wood to much acclaim, is an out of the ordinary writer. His work abounds with strangely named characters like Short Shanks the Shopkeeper and The Turpentine Prophet.

The poetry in here will appeal to many a reader’s socialist feelings and includes a selection of Morrison’s epigrams, or as he refers to them - overbs. There are also lengthy pieces like Rats, Cats and Kings, a homage to Orwell in Catalonia and a number of poems written in a kind of Joycean verbalesque manner.

If you think you’d enjoy a mulligatawny of poetry served up, not by a flyblown waiter, but by a creative and thoughtful poet seeking to enrich the language, both with and without pub beer wisdom, then this handsome 172-page volume could be just the thing for you. 

*

Poems by Soran Hassan.  An A5 size, perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 48 Pages. ISBN 0-953681-7-0.  Published during year 2004 by: Writers Without Borders, 22 Margaret's Grove, Harborne, Birmingham, B17 9JH.  Price £3.99.

Wandering and searching for meaning in what must have been a very alien world, Soran finds a universal point of reference – the many faces of nature.  He sees the flowers growing, blooming and dying, ‘a wind rises / scatters the butterflies . . . nothing new in the garden.’  Soran uses nature repeatedly in his poems as a means of conjuring up ‘the world beyond boundaries,’ the life which he lost.

Aspects of the poems are underlined by drawings which echo ‘Guernica’ with their evocation of fractured reality.  Soran is trying to resolve his own devastating experiences, to cope with ‘the hugeness of suffering . . . to open the door to a new philosophy,’ – however difficult that may be, ‘but one door will open / the sun, the seas, birds, all things will enter / and one way will lead to felicity,’ (Sent to Coventry). The poet himself, ‘looked for a new land / where your dreams would not be slaughtered.’  The destination, Birmingham, might seem to us to be near farce.  But for Soran the city is not loaded with the baggage of associations – it offers a new perspective on life.

These poems portray a world we can hardly imagine, and we can only marvel that the poet has taken the vocabulary of his second language and approached it in an original and fruitful way, ‘under the canopy / of refuge poetry.’  Ingrid Riley.

*

The Triad, a collection of poems by Charles Portolano.  An A5 size stapled booklet with a two colour cover and 38 pages.  ISBN 0-9779035-9-1. Published during year 2006 by: RWG Press, P.O. Box 858, Rockford Il 61105, USA.  Price (USA) $6 (includes the cost of postage).   Copies may be obtained from: Charles Portolano, P.O. Box 17205, FountainHills, Arizona, AZ 85269-7205, USA.  Also view web:  www.thesouldecision.com E-mail: angeldec@hotmail.com

What do Americans think about America?  There are probably a million points of view, but in Charles Portolano’s ‘The Triad’ this particular American seems somewhat disillusioned with a society caring only for what we can hold in our hollow hands.  A similar message comes through in ‘Cutting across Kansas’: harangued by hand-made signs telling him abortion is murder, the car driver is more concerned with the thought that war is murder. The car-driving poet in ‘Cutting across Kansas���, perhaps like the rest of us, doesn’t like tailgaters, in particularly those driving a huge black Hummer fast like a black hole which when it finally overtakes presents him with the rear bumper sticker Honk if you love Jesus.  But the pellets of protest are tempered with gentler thoughts: the old man in ���Haunting’ walking the length of an old dry-docked sailboat his hand never leaving her side; and in ‘Gypsy Fever’ the flamenco dancers laughing loud loving life.

There must be room for protest.  Those of us alive in the sixties will always remember the power and impact of Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War���.  There is much in the world today that demands our concern, but the voice of  protest seems strangely muted.  Perhaps in his way Charles Portolano is doing his bit to remind us that we need from time to time to prod ‘The Hornets’ Nest’ and be ready to die.  John Plevin.

Homing, poems by Philip Ramp.  An A5 size perfect-bound book with a two colour cover and 88 pages.  ISBN 0-944550-72-X.  Published during year 2005 by Pygmy Forest Press, 1125 Mill Street, Springfield, OR 97477, USA. $12.00 U.S.  Copies may be purchased at $12.00 from: P.O. Box 34 Aegina Island, 180 10, Greece.

These words are a form of poetry that I feel drawn to: ‘Emotional but without histrionics, wilful but lacking the mayhem of dream; conclusiveness of falling, the insistent plea of logic in its refrain.’ They express the prosaic magnetism of someone who knows he’s not there yet, but is looking forward to the journey, enjoying the struggle of looking at the map and trying to decipher the way while looking up at the sunset feeling wistful in his head as well as warm in his heart, perhaps because of the company he keeps.  In his ‘Sometimes it Seems like Evening has the Answers   he says it differently: ‘as always, the expected time of arrival/depends on when you left.’ But has its own contradictions and these physical/metaphysical ponderings about nature in its many forms are what make the joy of rhythm and excitement of unravelling the thread of words forming the form, shaping the shape of his       poems.   Janie Thomas

*

Mackerel Wrappers, poems by Martin Cook.  An A5 size stapled booklet with a two colour cover and 36 pages. Published 24^th March 2007 by HappenStance, 21 Hatton Green, Glenrothes, Fife, KY7 4SD.  UK delivered price £4.00. ISBN 978-1-905939-05 3.  Further information from e-mail address: nell@happenstancepress.com and www.happenstancepress.com

                An entertaining and clever collection, with surprising insights and often a deep seriousness almost concealed by the dryness and humour.

                “Herring Gull at Mwynt” becomes

                                                                ‘…a High Court Judge,

                                                considering my bribe of bone,

                                                          and whether to cull me.’

                Several poems are about friends and characters he has known. “Mildred” discards her wheelchair,

                                                                ‘…striding out….

                                                …bullying the countryside.’

Clarence, Danny, George, Lillian, all come to life with their quirks and foibles revealed to us in very wry, often sad, comments. The Title poem tells of eating fish and chips ‘in a polystyrene tray’ as the poet regrets the passing of ‘unhygienic newspaper’. He ends by describing how the Romans wrapped their fish in ‘old poems (or even discarded prose) ‘and how their empire lasted a thousand years.’ “A Christmas Letter” is a delightful ‘reverse take’ on the Round Robins so often received at that season.

This collection brings many a smile, and sometimes dampens the eye, leaving an impression of a poet at ease with his words.  Kate Edwards

Book/Booklet Reviews

Extracts from Pulsar Poetry Magazine, Edition 47, March 2007

Reviews from earlier editions are also shown below

Poems About Places by Peter Naldrett. A slightly larger than A5 sized perfect-bound book with a two-colour cover and 45 pages.  Published in year 2006.  ISBN 978-1-4116-4072-6.  Price?  Available via: www.lulu.com or via Blackwell's, www.blackwell.co.uk.  E-mail: peter.naldrett@talk21.com

As stated clearly on the tin, these poems are about places. From Sydney to Vienna, Belfast to Brixton they’re all here and a very impressive travel journal it is. The blurb on the rear cover makes it pretty clear that these journeys have already formed the basis of much writing. I mention this because Peter uses a very factual and dead pan style for a poet and a teacher. Some of the endings of the poems left one hanging in mid air.

Avignon

I knew this place was in a song,

But I thought it was by Bryan Ferry.

No, no, no, that’s Avylon

But I stood on the famous bridge, anyhow.

Cold, cold, blowy and cold.

Universal culture drags me in McDonalds

Because toilets are free and clean.

And they even serve beer in this one.

That’s where I am now.

I am not at all sure that the romantic in me wanted to know that there is a McDonalds near ‘Le Pont D’Avignon,’ and of course, Bryan Ferry’s song is Avalon not Avylon but I strongly suspect that our teacher poet knows this and is secretly smiling whilst running his nails down the blackboard. Cunning. Dick Stewart           

 *

Orpheus in the Park, poems by Rose Solari.  A slightly larger than A5 size perfect-bound book with a full-colour cover and 81 pages. Published in year 2005 by The Bunny and the Crocodile Press, Washington DC, USA. Cover design by Randy Stanard of DeWitt Design.  Photograph of author by Jimmy Patterson.  ISBN 0 938572  43 1  UK price on application. 

Behind Travis Hall’s out-of-focus cover painting of the Mystic River, curving like the trunk of an elephant, is a volume of autobiographical work where entangled threads of elegy, myth, block-verse and the occasional essay combine to inform and/or divert the attentive reader.

Poetess Rose Solari, not without pluck, unburdens herself in the public arena, settles accounts with her late parents and generally takes care of unfinished business. She hankers to run after loved ones just as ancient Orpheus pursued Eurydice when she had perished from snakebite. A serious case of introspection dressed up in Grecian cloth you might think. And there you might be half right.

For me Solari scores best when she gets away from the antique Greeks and puts more of herself into the poem as she does for example in her poem My Mother’s Elephants written with feeling  – one of the most moving in the book:

                Because of their size, and the shape of their ears, and the sweetness          

                and wisdom she claimed to see

                in their miraculously-lashed eyes, my mother,

                for as long as I can remember, loved elephants.

Like mother’s pachyderms Orpheus in the Park is a lumbering but impressive animal of many parts. The 7-page addendum will fill-in your mythological gaps.   Gwilym Williams

* 

A Rum Do, poems by Ivan Wallace.  An A5 sized stapled booklet with a two-colour cover and 20 pages. Published in year 2006 by Bramble Press.  Available from Mr I. Wallace, 15 Drumhoy Drive, Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland, BT38 8NN.  No ISBN.  Price £2.50 (includes the cost of postage and packing).

This is not a collection that offers dramatically original insights or daring innovations.  Ivan Wallace gently probes everyday situations, the ‘little things,’ like a visit to the betting shop in ‘The Tip,’ or receiving medical treatment in ‘Blood Test.’  At the same time, everything is subjected to Wallace’s dry humour.  The blood test is administered by a cleaner, and the horse the old man was so sure of, loses.

Despite the humour, there is an element of genuine despair here. In ‘Giving Up,’ the man in the bar is giving up hope for lent.  In ‘Malice,’ the divorced man writes to his wife, ‘I’m so hungry I’ve just eaten a mouse,’ and she replies, ‘Next time try eating a rat, they’re more filling.’

This collection can be warmly recommended as the writer’s gentle humanity makes his poems well worth reading.  Ingrid Riley

The Good is Abroad, poems by Will Daunt.  An A5 size perfect-bound book with a 2-colour cover and 52 pages. Published in year 2006 by Lapwing Publications, c/o 1 Ballysillan Drive, Belfast, Northern Ireland, BT14 8HQ.  ISBN 1-905425-32-5.  Price £5.95  ��12.00.

To be a good poet you need to be an observer of life and nature.  To be a very good poet you need to be an observer with empathy.  Will Daunt in his latest collection ‘The Good is Abroad’ seems to demonstrate that he has both these qualities.  And perhaps even a bit more; he likes to play tricks with words.  The ‘Shadow Lad’ who ‘came fast to the world’ but ‘ran out of faces who���d let him fake lives’, and poor ‘Polly’ learning that ‘school’s full of places where you cannot hide,’ both are strangers to the absent ‘good.’  I must also admit to liking poets who are not stuck on style and form.  The occasional sonnet, villanelle and rhyming couplet dotted among free verse poems is my cup of tea, perhaps drunk in the ��Nursing Home,’ hiding in its ‘Welcome Room’ with one eye on the cricket until ‘pain stops play.’  John Plevin

*

Coasting Norfolk, poems by Wendy Webb and Guest Poets.  An A5 size perfect-bound book with a full-colour cover and 92 pages.  Published in year 2006 by: Poetry Monthly Press, 39 Cavendish Road, Long Eaton, Nottingham, NG10 4HY.  ISBN 1-905126-73-5.  Price £5.50.

Coasting Norfolk is the culmination of a year’s observations of East Anglia: history, art, culture, people, place; sketch impressions from near and far. I enjoyed the mixture of personal reminiscences and delight in the countryside – Wendy Webb’s work is sometimes romantic, rhyming, and feminine, (which I like), finding fun in the experiences and land she describes.  She is supported by guest poets: Brigid Simpson’s Selection of Norfolk Haiku and Norman Bisset’s Peace particularly appeal.  Somehow the minimalism of the haiku epitomise the peace reflected by the form, words and landscape: There isn’t much here but sea and sky, clouds and flocks of migrating birds, eye-patched like Nelson… while seeing far more and using the rhythm of bird names to bring colour to the senses and imagination.  It is an interesting collection of gentle poems which pay homage not only to the landscape but also to poetry about it.  Janie Thomas

Book/Booklet Reviews

Extracts from Pulsar Poetry Magazine, Edition 46, September 2006

Reviews from earlier editions are also shown below

Dirty Blonde at the Cash Machine, poems by Ray Hollingsworth. An A5 size, spiral bound book with x? number of pages and numerous black and white photographs, (pages expand concertina style). Photography by Stuart Nicholls, photographic model: Julie Patterson. Published by Kiss Production Ltd, 2006.  E-mail erotic.cafe@btopenworld.com   £9.95. ISBN 0-9536958-3-2  Available via Amazon on-line.

With this glossy collection of poems and photographs I was like a traveller unfolding and refolding maps. Open, the book is sometimes more than a yard wide. I should have tackled it on the floor with a boxed pizza and an uncorked bottle instead of on a small table in a pub corner. Try this for size from Tee Shirt:

“When you’re standing in a bus queue

and a girl comes up to you wearing a tee shirt saying

‘trust me, I am Jesus the Lord’

and gets so close that you can almost taste the flavour of her chewing gum …”

Hollingsworth’s words are backed up with atmospheric shots of model Julie Patterson in back alleys and under neon lights.  Dirty Blonde at the Cash Machine is a potent assortment of messianic verse, social commentary, inner-city rebelliousness and classy poster-poetry. Ray Hollingsworth is one to keep an eye on. You’ll find him at the pointed end of your next scenario.   Gwilym Williams

«

Measured Rings, poems by Ingrid Riley.  An A5 sized perfect-bound book with 83 pages and a 2-colour cover. Photographs by Peter Riley, edited by  Dr Graham Riley. Published in year 2005 by Ingrid Riley, 18 Uplands, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7BL.  ISBN 0-9525304-3-0.  £5.99.

Regular readers of Pulsar will be familiar with Ingrid Riley through her reviews.  Her latest publication ‘Measured Rings’ provides us with the opportunity to look at the poet behind the reviewer.  Many of her poems examine the impact of nature on our lives: the stripped Autumn trees recalling ‘the whisper of a loving breeze’; the noisy ravens dropping from the sky ‘like sombre rain’; and in Winter the whisper of death that ‘comes in slow waltzes’.  But not all is nature and seasons.  A section of the book deals with conflict and its impact on modern life ‘where tears feed their hoard of sorrows’.  The brushes with conflict come in different guises from neighbours from hell with their ‘windows blinded by spinning threads of fear’, to the ‘tormented souls’ embroiled in the war in Iraq.

Whether in the world of conflict or nature, Ingrid Riley’s poetry has a certain lyrical quality, perhaps best tasted in the quiet of the evening with a glass of wine and time to think.           John Plevin

« 

Cheap Therapy, poems by Nick Mannion.  An A5 size perfect-bound book with a full-colour cover and 84 pages.  Published in year 2005 by Matador, 9 De Montfort Mews, Leicester, LE1 7FW.  ISBN 1-905237-42-1  £7.99. E-mail books@troubador.co.uk  www.troubador.co.uk/matador

Despite an unfortunate title and unappetizing cover graphics, Mannion more often than not delivers the aesthetic goods. He writes perceptively and honestly of the ebb-and-flow of human relationships, with scarcely any trace of bathos or self-pity. I would add that his poetry, all true poetry, may assist our healing, but amounts to much more than mere therapy in the end.                                                                                                                              Blair Ewing

When the Thunder Woke Me, poems by The Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2005. The Foyle Foundation / The Poetry Society.  A slightly smaller than A5 sized stapled booklet with a full-colour cover and 32 pages.  Price? No ISBN. Published by The Poetry Society, 22 Betterton Street, London, WC2H 9BX. www.poetrysociety.org.uk e-mail: fyp@poetrysociety.org.uk   Contact: Andrew Bailey.

 A vigorous and warm handshake should be given to whoever in the Foyle Foundation decided to help the Poetry Society showcase young poets. Of course teenagers and young adults will not have breadth of experience to produce deep poetry I hear you say perhaps; but this would be too stereotypical and mostly wrong in this case. The collection of the best from the Young Poets of the Year Award of 2005 does have its charming naivety in some places, but there is much to frustrate any of us who struggle with the form well into middle age and beyond, with their maturity. “How to Watch a Child Die” by Amanda Chong could easily have been simply maudlin, but a delightful line saves it; “Turn away from the blank faces of your own children/ and make no associations/ Pretend you do not notice/ how your teenager leaves her food/”. There are a few deliberately-obscure-to-be-fashionable pieces, but I am happy to persevere with re-readings over the next few months… there are few enough volumes where I would have said the same. Some of these names, I shall watch out for, to see if they are published and grow further. To take, unfairly, one example, Ella Thompson provided in “Finding a Voice” a simple form of words that led to many layered meanings representing frustration and despair using landscape/classical metaphors. When I make connections using these words where perhaps none were intended by the poet, I know I have found a poem that is worth returning to. I would recommend finding yourself a copy and look out for future editions. Lachlan Robertson

«

Average Sunday Afternoon, short stories by Pat Jourdan.  A5 size perfect-bound book with 55 pages and a full colour cover.  Published in year 2005 by Poetry Monthly Press, 39 Cavendish Road, Long Eaton, Nottingham, NG10 4HY. ISBN 1-905126-29-8  £5.50.

These stories are entertaining and fun, though some are rather ‘samey’.  Sometimes I wished Pat Jordan had penetrated deeper into the psychology of the essence of her tale and made more of it, rather than leaving the first idea on one level. For instance, Miss Havisham Reconstructed makes for light-hearted reading in the knowledge that everyone, but everyone, knows Miss Havisham from Dickens’ David Copperfield, so the legend can be used, or built upon to advantage. So when Miss Havisham decides to up and make something of her life in today’s culture, rather than mope it away the very thought is funny and the story too.  She and Queen Victoria epitomise a psychological illness which still exists sometimes unrecognized, however, and rather than disregard that and use it for the joke, it could have been unravelled and turned around more cleverly, to everyone’s greater benefit, without losing the laughter.   Janie Thomas

Book/Booklet Reviews

Extracts from Pulsar Poetry Magazine, Edition 45, March 2006

Reviews from earlier editions are also shown below

The Blood In My Veins, poems 1995 – 2005, by U.V. Ray; A5 size, perfect-bound book with a 2-colour cover and 51 pages. Published in year 2005 by Cyberwit.net, 4/2B, L.I.G., Govindpur Colony, Allahabad-211004 (U.P.), India.  www.cyberwit.net  also www.uvray.moonfruit.com  ISBN 81-8253-042-3  Price Rs. 80/-  $15  ��9.

Minimalist hobo poetry has got to hit the spot like a shot of Polish vodka. Now when your mugshot is on the cover (leather jacket and shades) at nine quid a throw over the blurb promising primitive emotional vigour and your leading punch is that good old refrain to the young whore in Reno...that made my stay worthwhile then the poems inside need to be extra special, a lot more than mere jottings on the run. This is not always the case here. 

After the introduction which spoke of smashed up cars and trashed hotel rooms many of the poems turned out to be quite tame but The Painted Doll was in a different class; almost Bukowskian. It seems that U.V. Ray, the self-confessed Blue Coat School dropout, can do it if he tries. It's getting him to try that seems to be the problem.  Gwilym Williams

*

“Courtney’s the future she is,” poems from the people of Parks and East Walcot, Swindon.  Compiled and introduced by Community Poet, Tony Hillier.  Published in year 2005.  An A5 size stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover and 74 pages.  Price / publisher / ISBN? Poems / responses to Tony Hillier, c/o The Shop, 66 Cavendish Square, Swindon, SN3 2LR, telephone 01793 529938 or c/o Walcot Community Shop, Sussex Square, telephone 01793 512878 of e-mail tony.hillier@ntlworld.com

Tony Hillier brings together the residents of Parks and East Walcot Swindon and represents their views in poetic form. The idea was to create a sort of social survey from which to inform and lobby.  And sure enough, as I was reading this publication Prime Minister Tony Blair was present in Swindon armed with a pressure washer and a rather fixed grin, trying to remove some particularly stubborn graffiti from a brick wall. Deserves a poem in itself.

Some of the poems are unassisted but most were the result of collaboration between Tony and the author. The poetry has a nice rawness and you can hear the local dialect in the voices of the poets. Here’s an extract –

Kids Today

Trouble is no discipline

Teachers daren’t breathe on the kids

Kids today

Toddlers with their mums and dads,

Chuck litter on the floor

And not a word is said,

Not a blind bit of notice taken

Kids today. That’s parents for you!

Babies bringing up babies.

One has to admire Tony Hillier for putting this project together. The book gives a voice to a community, the result isn't pretty, but it is very effective. Dick Stewart

   «         

The Devil’s Advocate by Charles Portolano.  A chapbook of poems; A5 size stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover and 28 pages.  Published 2005. Price $5 including postage and packaging.  Published by RWG Press, P.O. Box 17205, Fountain Hills, AZ 85269-7205, USA. ISBN 0-9659495-4-0  E-mail: angeldec24@hotmail.com  www.thesouldecision.com

Charles Portolano presents a bleak and unrelieved vision of ‘the world spinning out of control,’ (‘End Time’), particularly the USA.  Many of the poems are scarcely-veiled attacks on politicians and their followers like ‘The bush is burning’ or ‘Duplicity,’ where the poet speaks of a dictator with a ‘crooked smile’ who is ‘always speaking out of both sides of his mouth.’

At their best the poems are an elegy for a purer, gentler America, as evoked in ‘Route 66’ where the famous highway is crumbling away into history, taking traditional values with it, ‘the landscape has changed / the times have changed / the people have changed / they think differently.’

Throughout the collection the mood grows progressively bleaker, we look forward to a message of hope at the end, into better times.  It never comes, ‘no Second Coming / no second chance / time’s up, game’s over.’  Ingrid Riley

Chanticleer Magazine, issue 11 (October 2005), poems, reviews, news and views.  A5 size stapled booklet with a 3-colour cover and 40 pages. ISSN 1478-0704  Price £3.00.  Editor: Richard Livermore, 6/1 Jamaica Mews, Edinburgh, EH3 6HN.

Chanticleer Magazine Issue Eleven includes a lively series of poems and prose on a theme of ‘Elven’: Elven being a dyslexic, ‘mind-the-gap’ ‘eleven’, which foretells elfish mischief.  There is something intelligent about finding fun in everything and reflecting it beautifully, and the magazine does not disappoint.  Forty pages of poems, essays, quotes and reviews starts with a quote which speaks of ‘necessary destructions’: by the poet ‘who speaks in the name of a creative power capable of overturning all orders… in order to affirm Difference’ and the ‘politician, who is … concerned to deny that which ‘differs’ so as to … prolong an established  historical order…,’ followed by a series of poems by Anon, of Scotland, which demonstrate the same poetic principle: that the fool - as in court jester,  or Anon – is cleverest because he can show amusement in, and lift, all life’s tragedies, without blame.  Other articles and poems are worthy of such intelligent inclusion.  A joyous interlude. Janie Thomas

«

Krax, No. 42. Poems, interviews, reviews, illustrations, stories, news – from various contributors.  A5 size stapled booklet with? number of pages.  No ISSN. Price £3.50 $7.  Editor: Andy Robson, 63 Dixon Lane, Leeds, Yorkshire, LS12 4RR.

Apart from the front cover, there’s not a page of Krax (Issue No. 42) that isn’t stuffed with poems, pictures, prose and reviews.  Clearly one of the Editor’s priorities is to squeeze in as much as possible.  Are other priorities discernible, for example content and quality?  As far as content goes a certain ribald humour seems flavour of the month, at least as far as this issue is concerned.  An above average example would be Richard Bonfield’s Zooplankton with its ‘vast paella of the weird.’  But there is also the occasional foray into a more thoughtful world such as that found in Harland Ristau’s poem Impromptu where most seem busy ‘searching muck for a moment of money.’

If you like your poetry to give you a fierce dig in the ribs together with the knowing wink, you’ll feel at home with Krax.  However, if you’re looking for something a little more meaningful you might be better off looking elsewhere.  John Plevin

« 

Iota 72, 2005/04; A5 size, perfect-bound book with a 2-colour cover and 60 pages. Poems, reviews and news from various contributors.  ISSN 0-266-2922.  Editors: Bob Mee and Janet Murch, Ragged Raven Press, 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Warwickshire, CV37 0LR.  Subscription £12/year for 4 quarterly editions. E-mail: iotapoetry@aol.com  or visit www.iotapoetry.co.uk

In a world of flash-by poetry publications and read-them-then-they're-gone internet websites, it's a delight to know that Iota is still pressing out regular eclectic writings from poets across the world. It is an example to us all. Simple, single layered poetry that pleases such as "Romance at an OPS Convention" by Harvey Goldner (In her blue diamond dress/ she looked like a springer spaniel/ but naked on the grass/ she looked like God) could have benefited from a critical editor, but this was a minor gripe. I was particularly struck by Paul Lee's "The Negative Children" that touchingly illuminated an incapacitating skin condition. I also revelled in the daftness of Nigel Humphrey's, "The Quantum Leap Explained". There are also plenty of thoughtful reviews and scattered advertising pieces from the Ragged Raven "arm" of the Iota enterprise.
Endpiece: As I survey my substantial booklet collection on the shelves, including many of Iota's, I worry for the future. There is nothing like being able to pull the printed page from the bookshelf as it will always be easy to access this material on impulse. Let's ensure that we don't, in this small poetry world, become too self absorbed and lose these publications.

We need some fresh ideas to keep us relevant and exciting for the future.   Lachlan Robertson

Book/Booklet Reviews

Extracts from Pulsar Poetry Magazine, Edition 44, December 2005

Reviews from earlier editions are also shown below

Iota 70, 2005/02; A5 size, perfect-bound book with a 2-colour cover and 60 pages. Poems, reviews and news from various contributors.  ISSN 0-266-2922.  Editors: Bob Mee and Janet Murch, Ragged Raven Press, 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Warwickshire, CV37 0LR.  Subscription £12/year for 4 quarterly editions. E-mail: iotapoetry@aol.com  or visit www.iotapoetry.co.uk

This issue of Iota is marvellous!  Spurred on by a ‘strange individual’ standing for parliament as candidate for the True English Poetry Party to highlight the need for a return to real English poetry which, he said, died out at the end of the 19^th century when poets began to write unrhyming poetry, the editors call two witnesses who say that rhyme is ‘…the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre …����� and  ‘a large proportion of the language of every good poem can in no respect differ from that of good prose. We will go further.  It may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition’ (Milton, about Paradise Lost and Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads).  This editorial is the hook upon which some well chosen poems are hung.  It works well. Congratulations Ragged Raven Press, Janet Murch and Bob Mee.  Subscribe.   Janie Thomas

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Iota 71, 2005/03; see previous review in this edition of Pulsar for Iota editorial information. 

Over the years Iota has retained a high quality of writing, and this issue, with contributions from Uruguay, Canada, the USA, New Zealand, Poland and Belgium, as well as the UK, carries on this tradition.  It is difficult to identify a common thread apart from the tendency in these poems to look at life from a ‘different’ viewpoint.

In ‘The Print Room in Summer,’ Pat Watson contrasts the cool, rarefied atmosphere inside with the outside heat where ‘pigeons jostle peevishly,’ and where, one concludes, ��Brit Art, videos, formaldehyde’ belong. This atmosphere of timelessness appears again in ‘Dry-stone Sketch,’ where Philip Burton uses the unchanging features of the Yorkshire landscape to evoke the timeless aspects of life, cleverly linking up in the end to the values embodied in the work of the Bronte sisters.

There is humour here, too.  In ‘The day mum kidnapped my lover,’ by C R Cajari, the mother takes the scruffy young man and re-makes him in line with her own vision, then ‘released him back into the wild / to wander among commuters dazed and confused.’ At the end of the collection, as usual, there are several reviews of recent poetry collections and a list of forthcoming events.    Ingrid Riley

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The Univer-Soul Language, volume 1, poems by Sharia Kharif, Heather Smith, Cedric Mixon, Jacole Kitchen, Monica Hill (Diselysia). A slightly larger than A5 size perfect-bound book with a 3-colour cover and 119 pages.  Published 2005 by Kobalt books, P.O. Box 1062, Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004, USA; www.kobaltbooks.com   Cover design by Holly Lane, cover model: Kesha Mixon.  ISBN 0-9754357-1-X.  $13.95.

The Univer-Soul Language – an anthology of poetry by five American poets of differing ethnicities and backgrounds.  Although the backgrounds are different the issues addressed cover the familiar ground of love and betrayal, of trying to find some meaning in the bumpy ride we call life.  Heather Smith sees in desire ‘the breeder of regret’ and ‘wonders if she is strong enough to make it without love’.  The introspective poetry of Cedric Mixon provides vivid images of a ‘black man stuck in the night,’ hiding in his ‘black-hoodie,’ trying to make it with his ‘pockets filled with boulders.’  Jacole Kitchen’s poetry is sensuous, full of wanting but not quite finding ‘the perfect man,’ ending up in a house ‘reeking of the stench that brokenness leaves.’  Solitude also figures in Monica Hill’s ‘song of loneliness,’ but finding in her poem to her daughter that ‘in a room full of strangers’ it is possible to ‘finally belong.’

I have the suspicion that these five poets are young and exuberant, creating poetry full of fast and furious rhythms and rhymes; perhaps people in a hurry bouncing off relationships like dodgem cars, seeking in Sharia Kharif’s words to ‘release the demons of wishful thinking.’  An opportunity, at least for me, hidden away in the quiet of the English countryside, to look at life through different eyes and different experiences – perhaps in the end this is the key attraction of poetry.  John Plevin

Carp in the Wind, poems by David Gill.  A5 sized stapled booklet with a full colour cover and 22 pages.  Published 2004.  Price £?  Available from David Gill, (Oxford); e-mail irene_david@gills38.freeserve.co.uk

David Gill, an accomplished and perceptive poet who once resided in Tokyo, is the dinner guest who painstakingly examines the fish, in this case the carp, for bones that might stick in his throat.  The 22 bones, sharp and penetrating, are removed, turned, examined closely from angles and assembled delicately on the side plate together with skeleton and skin. The result is an often witty assortment of mid-length fly-in-the-sushi poetry.

Several of the works have been published in various journals but this needn’t put the reader off for the best; In Yodobashi Camera Store, Albatross, The Smile of the Great Buddha, and the title poem Carp in the Wind; have not.  I suspect that with my particular favourite, The Smile of the Great Buddha, Gill may have stumbled across an innovative poetry form – the Japanese Sonnet.

This booklet is much more than the sum of its parts, contains no haiku and will repay rereading. Buy it before your next trip to Tokyo.  Gwilym Williams

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Krax No. 42, an A5 stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover and x? number of pages, (pages unnumbered). Poems, prose, reviews, news, cartoons and illustrations from numerous contributors.  Front cover picture, ‘Monkey Puzzle,’ by Harry Turner.  Published 2005, Editor: Andy Robson, 63 Dixon Lane, Leeds, LS12 4RR. No ISSN. £3.50  $7.00.

This was my first read of a Krax edition and it is certainly different from your average poetry magazine. I counted one hundred and twenty reviews of other publications, this achieved by microscopically small print and I suspect, a small army of reviewers. It was quite good fun to read the reviews of books that one has previously reviewed for Pulsar. Krax appears not to take itself too seriously; most of the poems are irreverent, humorous or resort to slightly dodgy rhyme. In all honesty, I have to say that some of the poems are dire, but I guess this means that everyone taking part can get into print. The illustrations are mostly fun with the exception of Alan Hunter’s which are seriously good. Every edition will, no doubt, have a few ‘goodies’ and in this one I thought Rodney Wood’s PHOTOGRAPHY, FILM AND TELEVISION took the honours.  Here is a short extract –

                I doze off in the cinema. The train passes shadows

                And I feel the roll and thud of wheels

                Before we stop at my station.

                I can’t wake and panic despite

                Telling myself I’m only dreaming.

                To find out, though I have to open my eyes,

                Get a snapshot of reality with my Kodak Brownie,

                Then go to Bonus Print and get it processed.

                A fun read and a good outlet for budding illustrators and poets.  Dick Stewart

Brown Eyes, A Selection of Creative Expressions by Black and Mixed-race Women.  Edited by Nicole Moore. An A5 size perfect-bound book with 268 pages and with a full colour cover.  Published in September 2005 by Matador, 9 De Montfort Mews, Leicester, LE1 7FW, UK. ISBN 1-905237-16-6.  £9.99.  E-mail books@troubador.co.uk web site www.troubador.co.uk/matador

When I think about my own ancestry, I realise that my people’s rich oral tradition was lost when our written history began in the mid 17^th century. This also resulted due to events that occurred at a time when whole branches of my family found themselves forced off their native soil and found themselves in the Americas. No, I am not black and my ancestors were not slaves; but Scottish. Many branches of my family would have been forced off their land in the Clearances and would have had no choice but to emigrate or face starvation at home. Yet why is there a persistent modern tradition of collecting the issues of black and mixed race peoples into collections such as this? Does the past lie so much heavier on those communities and why does there remain a need to revisit it? This anthology serves up an excellent collection of poems, interviews and essays to help answer that question. But equally, I would encourage black and mixed race readers to also search out David Craig’s “On the Crofters’ Trail: In search of the Clearance Highlanders” just to remind them that obscenities were perpetrated on others too.  Lachlan Robertson

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Straight Astray, poems by Alessio Zanelli.  An A5 size perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 104 pages.  Published in year 2005 by Troubador Publishing Ltd, 9 De Monfort Mews, Leicester, LE1 7FW, UK.  ISBN 1-905237-17-0    £7.99  €12  $15

Forewords (and sleeve notes) are there to sell a book to potential readers, they have a tendency to be effusive, example; “Reading Alessio Zanelli’s poetry is like taking a grand and marvellous tour of sights rarely glimpsed . . .”  The book is expertly produced, looks the biz and has excellent artwork on the cover.  The poems within, from my viewpoint, are a tad mediocre with nothing particularly inspiring and none that are dire.  I guess, as ever, it’s a case of “horses for courses.” Example poem, one that I liked, New Year’s Dictum: An adage has that what/one does upon the new/year’s day is what it will/be mostly doing through all/the year. If that’s the case/then quite long sleeps, a bit/of writing teamed up with/rash drinking wait for me.  Overall score: 6½ out of 10.  David Pike

Book/Booklet Reviews

Extracts from Pulsar Poetry Magazine, Edition 43, September 2005

Reviews from earlier editions are also shown below

Attic Warpipes, poems by Tommy Frank O’Connor.  An A5 size perfect bound book with a full colour cover and 82 pages. Published 2005 by Bradshaw Books, Tigh Filí, Thompson House, MacCurtain Street, Cork, Ireland; www.tighfili.com   ISBN 0-949010-99-5 price €12.  

This is a debut collection from the highly acclaimed poet, novelist and storyteller from Co. Kerry. Much of this work has seen the light of day in magazines, including Pulsar, over the years. The Poet splits his work into four sections and I was particularly taken by the first section ‘Tune in the Marrow’ which is largely a remembrance of past life in Co. Kerry. This is an extract from A Masters Rest, in memory of a master fiddler -

                A glass of porter banishes his blues,

                For chase he plays a set of reels and polkas

                Into tired yawn of tomorrow's early hours.

                Without a wife he has become groom

                To his fiddle, a troubadour

                Drawing the cork out of the draught of gloom.

                In Homing, the poet shares a train journey –

                Smoke in our -NO SMOKING – carriage draws her from the page,

                A doe scenting danger.

                Her eyes appoint me Fire Brigade.

                On return she releases her bosom

                To the infant’s hunger.  I point my eyes

                At my airport novel but it has nothing

                To this rapture.

The poems are warm, relaxed, polished and mature.  In short, this is a very special book by a very gifted writer.  Highly recommended.  Dick Stewart

The Poetry Church, a magazine of Christian Poetry, Vol. 10, No. 1 Spring 2005.  An A5 sized stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover and 40 pages. Editor: John Waddington-Feather.  Published by: Feather Books, PO Box 438, Shrewsbury, SY3 0WN. E-mail: john@waddysweb.freeuk.co    www.waddysweb.freeuk.com No ISSN. Price UK £3.00, US $6.00.

Editor John Waddington-Feather, author of the Revd. Blake Hartley Mysteries, urges contributors to Pray and write in the Spirit at all times and it seems to me that they do just that. This issue, the cover stamped with an unsettling bold black cross, like an invitation to a funeral, contains 38 poems and 7 prayers arranged in strict alphabetical order for the doubtless devoted readership. There’s not much in here to satisfy the unsettling quandaries of the Doubting Thomas (R.S. or otherwise) although Robert Irwin comes close: Exit from the carrel / and low stackroom lined / with bleak files of remorse.

It’s an eclectic, but conservative, ecclesiastical collection with lines like The lake of sulphur silent waits … So keep unto the narrow track from Sean Kinsella interspersed with lighter touches: Standing on the seashore / Reminds us life alters / As the turn of a tide from, in this case, Mavis Catlow.

Rock-solid cathedral bookshop material with theology enough for the usual suspects.   Gwilym Williams

Gwilym William, poet / Pulsar reviewer: Ennis, Ireland September 2005.

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TLAZOLTEOTL poems by Sandra Lester.  An A5 size stapled booklet with a black and white cover and 76 pages.  The booklet also contains illustrations by Sandra Lester and Raven Lassey.  Published November 2004 by: Q Q Press (COLLECTIONS), York House, 15 Argyle Terrace, Rothesay, Isle of Bute, PA20 0BD.  ISBN 1-903203-384.  Cost ?

I found these poems, urgent, fiery and fervent; often lyrical, but vibrant and tragic. Sandra Lester is a strong writer, with a passionate personality.  She collects experiences of earlier loved influences and weaves them into  poetry, contrasting them with rage and hatred against betrayal of power for the global imbalance of war over peace, famine over plenty, insecurity and pollution over security and purity. There are two epic poems which are both powerful: Mutiny 2000 – a tirade to mark the millennium, and Candy Cotton Kid and the Faustian Wolf – Ms Lester’s ‘informed psychiatrist’s’ view of Ted Hughes’s responsibility for Sylvia Plath’s suicide.  It was this last poem that brought me to my final judgement.  There is no ‘Truth’ in her view.  It is evocative literary supposition cloaked in a wolf’s cover of professional opinion; which can be a most damaging psychological confusion.  Men have always been selfish and cruel and women are always hurt by it.  But Ms Lester should know all about examining oneself for flaws before projection. 

Be careful if you buy it.  Enjoy the words, but understand the real, not the supposed, meaning.   Janie Thomas

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Helkappe, poems by Sandra Lester. An A5 size stapled booklet with a two colour cover and 64 pages.  Cover photograph and Purple Box photograph by Tom Benjamin. Published May 2005 by: Q Q Press (COLLECTIONS), York House, 15 Argyle Terrace, Rothesay, Isle of Bute, PA20 0BD.  ISBN 1-903203-449. Cost £6.50.

I rather like the fact that half a page is used at the beginning of this booklet to explain the meaning of the title: apparently it’s a Norse magic mask. It usefully offers the reviewer a short cut to explaining what it is all about. “The poetry in this collection delves beyond the masks we are forced by our society to wear, and the masks we chose to wear.” So in that spirit, I read on. Many of the poems read as irritating aphorisms on getting through life: “Astute people always outwit themselves in the end”. However, the longer pieces are more enjoyable (I hate being told what to think) and I was particularly enthralled by the proclamation-like “Beasts and Men:” “I, the Firebrand, challenge you as I gallivant to the gibbet.” Wonderful, almost gothic stuff! There is even a set of academic notes at the back to set out the meaning of some of the more obscure or invented words. It is an article of faith amongst aspiring poets that we should let the poem lie there and allow the reader/listener to derive the meaning. It is bad form to have to explain a poem. Well, nuts to all that, I like the fact that here, the poet is anxious to please and explain. In fact, surely that is the point about masks: you can’t wear one forever and stay sane.   Lachlan Robertson

Lachlan Robertson, poet / Pulsar reviewer: at North Swindon Library Pulsar Poetry Evening.

Chanticleer Magazine, issue 9, poems, reviews and letters from various contributors.  An A5 size stapled booklet with a three-colour cover and 40 pages. Editor: Richard Livermore. Published by: Chanticleer Press, 6/1 Jamaica Mews, Edinburgh, EH3 6HN. ISSN 1478 0704   Price £3.00.

 Issue 9 of the Chanticleer Magazine, the so called ‘cock issue’, is a mixture of poetry and prose (extracts, quotes, reviews and a somewhat overlong essay on philosophy).  Poetry should seek to say interesting things in an interesting way.  Most of the poems in this issue do neither.  Myles Bigland in his review of the previous issue concluded that there ‘seems to be a definite predilection for homo-erotic works;’ this issue follows the same pattern.  I read with interest every word of the Editor’s philosophical essay, but I suspect my interest was sparked primarily by my advancing years and the pressing reality of Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’.

It cannot be easy to be the editor of a poetry magazine, so I wish Chanticleer well.  However, if as the editor professes he is keen to get the ‘message across’, then no matter what the message is, quality must be his first priority. John Plevin

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Poetry Express, the quarterly from Survivors’ Poetry, No. 20, Autumn 04 / Winter 05, Bumper Issue.  Poems, news, reviews, events and workshops. An A4 size stapled booklet with a three-colour cover and 47 pages.  Mailed free to all members.  Sponsored by the Arts Council, England.  Survivors’ Poetry, Diorama Arts Centre, 34 Osnaburgh Street, London, NW1 3ND. info@survivorspoetry.org.uk

The editor, James Ferguson, states in his editorial that he would like ‘the magazine to have something for all readers.’ Note: the magazine is also available in large-print format.  This bumper edition covers a wide range of material, from original poetry to translation, travel impressions, a substantial review section, and includes, in my view, some poorly reproduced paintings.

In the article, ‘Canvas and Wall,’ Mario Petrucci expounds at length on something he never succeeds in defining.  In ‘Numberless Calvaries,’ Christina Viti examines the poetry of Dino Campana.  Her, largely prose, translations of his work can only hint at the originals which appear to have been rather over-burdened with fevered imagery.  More interesting are the poems from Stevenage Survivors, in particular Neil Hopkins ‘Harwich’ which succeeds in blending the sights and sounds of a real place with the poet’s emotional responses.

The last quarter of the issue contains a selection of reviews, some of which, I feel, would have benefited from editing. It seems to me that the problem with this publication is that it tries to be all things to all men.  In future issues it might be better to concentrate on two or three subject areas?   Ingrid Riley

Book/Booklet Reviews

Extracts from Pulsar Poetry Magazine, Edition 42, June 2005

Reviews from earlier editions are also shown below

Kung Fu Lullabies, poems by Chris Kinsey.  A5 size perfect-bound book with a 4-colour cover and 79 pages.  Published 2004 by Ragged Raven Press, 1 lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Warwickshire, CV37 0LR.  www.raggedraven.co.uk   ISBN 0 9542397 7 6   £7.00.

The Cantonese character on the cover means ‘life force' and that is exactly what this handsome book of modern lullabies is all about.

From the poem ‘An invitation to imaginary numbers’ the lines A skein of geese tows the dark / flies a ragged noose around our roofs illustrate the multi-layered intensity to be found in this first collection. In a poem about County Mayo Kinsey cleverly works the half-rhythm in a manner reminiscent of Christy Brown:  famine came to our car picnic / her anguish more barbed than the fence which caught me.

Other poems such as ‘Alwenna’s flock’, ‘A smell of petrol’ and ‘Progress’ are commendable for their understated fury.  In sponsoring and supporting this intelligent and insightful poet the Arts Council of Wales and Ragged Raven Press have spent their money wisely. Now you can too.  Gwilym Williams

Short Essays on Experimental Poetry by Doreen King; ‘Experimental Poetry in the 20^th Century and Beyond.’  A5 size perfect-bound booklet with a 3- colour cover and 48 pages.  Published 2003 by Feather Books, P.O. Box 438, Shrewsbury, SY3 0WN. ISBN 1 84175 137 5  price £?

Dr Doreen King writes, “Poetry needs to be both emotionally appreciated and intellectually understood. People who enjoy the poem, but who do not understand the composition, structure, background etc. are like tourists visiting a foreign land. They enjoy the cultural activities, but they do not understand the people.” As stated on the tin the reader is treated to many short essays on experimental poetry, for example poetry and art/society/media/music, along with some more general essays on poetry forms, concrete/sound/visual/haiku/picture, computer and interactive poetry.   

The author tells us that the essays started life as lecture notes on contemporary poetry, concentrating on the period between 1950 and 2000. Let me give you a tiny taster – this on The Renku. “Each stanza is a 2-line haiku (or haiku-like verse) or a 3-line haiku (or haiku-like verse). There are alternating 3-line and 2-line stanzas and both forms are equally important. The terms stanza, link and haiku are used interchangeably. This is because each stanza is a 2-line or 3 –line haiku and each stanza is linked to the preceding stanza”.

There are pages and pages of this sort of stuff and whether you get anything out of this book will depend on whether you are in the intellectual analysing school or the Linda Lewis “I don’t know the meaning, I just feel the feeling” camp.  Either way, I have to say I found it all pretty poorly written with much of the material still, seemingly, in note form. The book is full of spelling and grammatical errors and illustrated in much the same style as my old school magazine with what looks suspiciously like lino-cut art.

Not my cup of tea but if you like spending your evenings posting Haiku on the BBC poetry web this could become essential reading.  Dick Stewart

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Goost, (a haiku sequence), by Doreen King.  Small perfect-bound book with a 3-colour cover and 60 pages.  Published 2003 by Feather Books, PO Box 438, Shrewsbury, SY3 OWN.  ISBN 1-84175-141-3, price?

I am always impressed by those who can craft the haiku form, given that the traditional Japanese format of 3 lines and 17 syllables offers so little to work with. The piece therefore has to be good enough to stop you in your tracks, gasp perhaps with pleasure at the underlying idea, admire the perfection of the meter or perhaps bask in the intensity of the image it has provoked. Beyond even that, to develop the haiku beyond its traditional confines is an extra level of skill and therefore if it is to be done well, must impress even more. In this booklet, you will not find traditional haiku poems and this author has not, unfortunately, displayed an interesting development of the form. I found some of them clunky to read; “sighing, cooing sea/ it rocks backwards and forwards/ the sun beaming down” or simply stating an inane truth; “that grapefruit is the size of just enough”. The small booklet included many pages of ink drawings of vaguely oriental aspect and added nothing to the meaning or to the aesthetic.

small book of haiku

sows seeds in the springtime mind

not germinating

The Japanese character, (above) means, springtime.  Lachlan Robertson

Paradise Road, poems by Bob Mee.  A5 size, perfect-bound book with a full-colour cover and 103 pages.  Cover painting by Bob Mee. Published 2003 by Blue Fish, 7 New Street, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, RG9 2BP.  ISBN 0 9546197 0 6.  £7.00. E-mail: bluefishpress@aol.com

Poet, editor and boxing correspondent, an interesting if somewhat unusual mix of talents.  The prose and poetry in Bob Mee’s ‘Paradise Road’ takes us on a journey through time and space.  We meet and grieve with Ada Ellis, the young World War I widow crying for her lost husband and for ‘all the babies we’d never have’; we dip a toe into the history of boxing in ‘New Orleans, 1892’ when ‘James J. Corbett knocked out John L. Sullivan in 21 Rounds’; nearer to home with the ‘Swans, and Jeffrey in the Pub’ we learn to like Jeffrey ‘because he knows he has nothing to say but says it anyway’.

But does Bob Mee’s poetry pack a punch?  Maybe the extended title of one poem gives us a clue: ‘Don’t tell me anybody could write my poems, don’t tell me they go nowhere, do nothing.  What the hell do you expect?’  I suspect Bob Mee is full of words, hay makers from the heart full of passion with few if any concessions to structure and rhyme.   John Plevin     

P.S.  Where is Paradise Road?  A street in Las Vegas populated by Elvis look-alikes.

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Iota 69, 2005/1, a selection of contemporary poetry edited by Bob Mee and Janet Murch.  A5 size perfect-bound book with a 2-colour cover and 60 pages.  Published by Ragged Raven Press, 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Warwickshire, CV37 0LR.  ISSN 0266-2922.  £12.00 annual subscription or £3.00 an issue (UK).  www.iotapoetry.co.uk 

The latest issue of Iota offers a wide spectrum of poems from as far afield as the USA and Australia as well as local contributors.  There is no over-arching theme to the collection.  Rather the poets here offer gentle observations, such as Oliver Andrew in ‘Neighbours,’ describing how his neighbour fails to appreciate the things which annoy him so much but stands, ‘on his patio . . . watching the clouds, the stars.’  Some are less gentle, as in Gill McEvoy’s ‘Gunpowder, Treason, etc.’, which juxtaposes the noise and confusion of Bonfire Night with a child’s view of a marital argument, ‘a pale egg rising on my father’s brow, a roman candle whitely blossoming.’

Several poems in this collection are deeply cynical and disillusioned, such as Hugh Fox’s ‘Pissed Off,’ where the old man lists all that is wrong with his life, ‘pissed at being 72 in the perfect house in the perfect town, countdown close down to zero.’

The joys and downfalls of life are vividly expressed in this issue which, as always, is a pleasure to read. Ingrid Riley

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2004 You, Haikus by Gerry Gilbert, BC Monthly 54, Annual Edition.  Black and white stapled booklet with unspecified number of pages. ISBN 0 920250 25 4 price ?  Published by: BC Monthly 54, P.O. Box 48884, Stn. Bentall, Vancouver BC, Canada, V7X 1AB.

We drift through life not really recognizing the purity of poetry, nor seeing the sparkling essence of that reality.  2004 YOU is a queer reminder of that purity, rather like confetti is a reminder of a wedding.   The book contains Haikus for each month: 300 for January, 322 for February, 350 for March etcetera: 3958 in total.  But the quantitative is the only frustration here, as can be confetti, for they are all arranged scattered over more than twenty pages on both sides, which takes a while to read.  It’s easier to dip, and be reminded of the qualitative: that a few well-chosen words: ‘not trying to be/in a hurry can become/quicker than worry; or : the tiny housefly’s/evasiveness thrillingly/ intelligentle;  or : HOME CLOCKS’ TIMES VARY/ BY A FEW MINUTES SO THAT/ THE RIGHT TIME’S MENTAL can tell all one wants to know that day or that month – or perhaps even that year.  Janie Thomas

Book/Booklet Reviews

Extracts from Pulsar Poetry Magazine, Edition 41, March 2005

Reviews from earlier editions are also shown below

Transitions, poems by H. C. Kim. A Slightly larger than A5 size perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 81 pages. Published 2004 by The Hermit Kingdom Press, Suite 407, 3741 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.  ISBN 0-9723864-6-7.  US $11.50, UK £7.50, EU €12.50. www.TheHermitKingdomPress.com

This quasi-theological-political collection of changes composed in Cambridge (UK) and Bangalore (India) is written in American English. Some of the thirty-four poems are accompanied by meaningful monochrome snapshots; the police car before the church, the ubiquitous leaning bicycle; two examples. In the first group of poems time is perpetually flying: It is Christmas again / Time just seems to fly / It seems like yesterday… There follows a sequence in which boy-meets-girl: I will be there to shield you / To protect and uphold you.

The third and final section contains colourful impressions of Bangalore. This, in my view, is the most interesting part of the work. The poet wonders what the future holds for India: Will India repeat the errors of the West? / Will the society degenerate…

In his preface, written on American Independence Day 2004, H. C. Kim expresses the hope that we can “make this world a better place”.

Deep waters and a fair enough try.  Gwilym Williams                                                      

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Kicking Lou’s Arse, poems by Alun Rees.  A5 size stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover and 60 pages. Harpist illustration by Bill West. Published 1^st November 2004 by Bucephalus Press, 67 Hady Crescent, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, S41 0EB.  ISBN 0-903212-02-1. £3.00, $6.00 or €6.00.

This book of nearly eighty poems is a collection dating from 1962 onwards and many have been previously published although titles have been changed and revisions made.’ Kicking Lou’s Arse’ is also the title of one of the poems which deals with the fighting of leukaemia (Lou Kemia) by a lady named Jennifer. This is one of several rhyming poems –

Yet never, never did you moan

About the traitor in your bone.

A poem worthy of mention is “Strange Harvest” which, I assume, refers to the Aberfan tragedy of 1966.

I have buried my children alive;

Now let them grow

Into white and yellow flowers

To rid this valley of its gloom.

By far my favourite poem from this book is “Stonedancer”, an account of a mad man who dances on the cracks of flagstones in the belief that he can summon dancing bears-

He never could summon the bears he knew were dancing

Somewhere out on the rim between dark and light,

Dancing upon the cracks between fear and love,

Hoping that people would come. But still he danced.

Good value and worth a read.  Richard Stewart

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Seven League Stilettos, poems by Jane Kinninmont; an A5 size perfect-bound book with a 3-colour cover and 87 pages.  Published 2004 by Ragged Raven Press, 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Warwickshire, CV37 0LR.  ISBN 0-9542397-6-8, £7.00.

Seven League Stilettos is a first collection by a young poet keen on cats and clothes.  And, if her poems are anything to go by, keen on life and love.  There is, in her free verse poetry, a freshness, a love affair with language, and a willingness to dive into waters of uncertain depth.

In ‘Sweetheart’ she sees in a sleeping lover’s hands ‘tiny question marks around the duvet’, and in ‘Totalitarian Love’ she borrows ‘from Joe Stalin’ and projects a lover’s face ‘gigantically onto the sky’.  But her poems are not all bliss, lovers sometimes leave, leaving the poet to ‘darken the sky, slam shutters across every star-hole’.  Death and despair also intrude: the death of a young friend in ‘For Lee’; the old woman in a room where ‘the face of the clock is dimming’.  And there is room for irony: ‘Oxford Street’, where ‘the streets are paved with plastic’; and the jaded sensitivity of the traveller, forgetful of past aviation endeavours, and soon to ‘move to Mars and moan about the weather’.

An exuberant poet bursting with words.  I can’t see her being satisfied with a first collection.  She’ll be back and being a modern young writer we can monitor her progress on her website: www.janeswriting.co.uk   John Plevin

Senegal Blues, poems by Brian Daldorph.  Slightly larger than A5 size perfect-bound book with a 3-colour cover and 83 pages. Cover design by Christine Ewing. Published 2003 by 219 Press, P.O. Box 352, Perry, KS 66073, USA. ISBN 0-9722945-2-X  www.zigpress.com $10 U.S.

By making his book a collection of poems set in the framework of a travel diary, Daldorph puts his poems into context. His ‘Blue Notes,’ journal entries detail the places he visits and illustrates them with black and white photographs.  This helps set a mood for his poems which reflect the poverty and hardship, the colourful markets and the begging children, as well as his own reactions.  In ‘On the Beach,’ a ‘big-eyed boy’ asks for money, provoking the thought, ‘what I’d really like to give him / is everything my children have.’ Several of the poems attempt to get inside the mind of the people. ‘The Happy Man,’ describes the daily round of one of them, prayer, food and contemplation . . . and the next day, the next, the next of perfect happiness.’  We might well question whether the happiness of the women whose work enables him to lead such a perfect life, is itself quite so perfect?

The acute observations, travel notes, drawings and excellent photographs all complement one another to give us the feeling that we have almost experienced the journey ourselves.                                                                                                                                Ingrid Riley

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Chanticleer Magazine, Poems and Reviews, Issue 8, January 2005, a stapled 40 page booklet with a 3-colour cover. Editor: Richard Livermore, 6/1 Jamaica Mews, Edinburgh, EH3 6HN. Cheques payable to: Richard Livermore. ISSN 1478 0704, £3.00.

Chanticleer Magazine, in my view, is just about the most irritating poetry review booklet I have surveyed to date.  Not only does it narrow its choice of poetry to some fairly dire poems, it has long expositional editorials attached to various excerpts that treat the reader to boring 'context' that do nothing to enhance the work explained.  There seems to be a definite predilection for homo-erotic works, prose as well as poetry.  Frankly it doesn't enlighten me.  The sub-title of the magazine is 'setting the cat among the pigeons'.  It doesn't get close to being controversial.  I can’t recommend this edition of Chanticleer Magazine.  Myles Bigland                                                                        

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Logic and the Heart, love poems 1999 – 2003, by A.F. Harrold.  A5 size perfect-bound book with a 3-colour cover and 71 pages.  Published 2004 by Two Rivers Press, 35 – 39 London Street, Reading, Berkshire, RG1 4PS.  ISBN 1901-677-38-9, £8.00.  www.tworiverspress.com

There are three sections to this very interesting series of love poems by AF Harrold:  The first contains nine poems about his father’s last moments and death; the second recalls a particular relationship’s process, ending, and development past that ending; the third explores a cosmic universality of moment, season, philosophy, and meaning in love with its paradoxical qualities.  Each series is sensitive, deep and meaningful; discreet and private, yet all-embracing and connecting.  I found great enjoyment in the different intellectual levels explored, and appreciated the gentleness of spirit in the structure and rhythm of the work, which lies, sometimes, alongside an explicit physicality intrinsic to the poetic style.  This collection is so successful that it could be suggested that logic was also in the heart of these poems.  Janie Thomas

Krax, No. 41, (2004), poems, photographs and illustrations from contributors. Stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover; numerous un-numbered pages.  Krax, c/o 63 Dixon Lane, Leeds, LS12 4RR, Yorkshire. No ISSN.  £3.00, $7.00.

From its Chrome Yellow and green felt pen cover to its bursting-at-the-seams with multi-typeface prose-poems and printing often impossible to squint at, this has all the feel of a 1970’s student rag magazine. This is gee-whiz poetry mixed up with amateur cartoon illustrations, with an eclectic mix of Jorie Graham-esque fractured text and even the recognisably poetic. I was driven to distraction trying to read the reviews set in a block text as thick as clootie-dumpling and as hard to swallow. I was enchanted by the odd gem of a poem, sneaked into the gathering like a professor at a hen-night. An irritating but strangely compulsive read with a liveliness that encourages me to think that however much I may be a traditionalist, thank god for the energetic and experimental.  Lachlan Robertson

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Edition 40 Reviews, plus earlier input, below:

The Cemetery of Pleasures, poems by David Gill. A5 size stapled booklet with a full colour cover and 26 pages. No ISBN. Available for £1.50, (includes the cost of p&p), from: David Gill, 38 Yarnells Hill, Botley, Oxford, OX2 9BE.

A selection of short poems, some written on sunny afternoons after work in a café over-looking the sea near Lisbon. Unsurprisingly, most of the poems are very laid back, quite descriptive and possessing a sort of ‘inner calm’ perhaps tinged with what the poet describes as ‘a strain of melancholy that seems to underlie Portuguese life.’

Like a good photographer, David captures ‘the moment’ with ….

Riders in Batalha

In the middle of the abbey square

A dirty moped leans, head locked, relaxed,

Its rider bulleted into mass.

A few dry leaves play tag in the wind.

A helmet, on the pavement, rocks.

Seafood

So, this morning, now as always,

tiers of hunters haunt the foreshore,

while their bright-roofed prey await

the next congenial sea, their Moses,

to wash them softly, luckily away

to the asylum of the deep.

Grilled prawns and glass of cold white optional. I was also washed softly, luckily away.    Dick Stewart

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Smoke, editions 52 and 53.  A5 sized stapled booklets with two-colour covers, approximately 22 pages of poems and illustrations. ISSN 0262852X, subscription £4.00 for 5 issues, post paid.  Editors: Dave Calder and Dave Lenkiewicz, artwork by Alice Lenkiewicz.  Published by: Windows, Liver House, 96 Bold Street, Liverpool, L1 4HY.

As in the past it is impossible to identify any unifying themes in the poems included in these two issues, unless it is the tendency by many of the poets to take a quirky, side-long look at everyday events or action.

In ‘Trying a Different Shampoo,’ Helen Clare identifies the shampoo she is using and is assailed by guilt and fellow-feeling for her lover’s wife, ‘I’ll be watching women with trolleys and wondering.’  Several of the poems are perhaps too personal and thus obscure, but others reach out to a wider world, such as ‘Party Time,’ by Tim French which puts a new slant on the familiar police chase around an estate, ‘and a sign on the bumper that tells the world he’s “just divorced.”’  In ‘Dallas,’ by John Andrews there is a nice irony in the favourite uncle who establishes his own importance claiming complicity in the Kennedy assassination while all along it was just a story.

But hidden away in issue 53 is a poem which can bear comparison with the truly great.  Sandra Liao’s ‘Four Acts of Poverty,’ is spare and concise, keeping the deep emotions expressed under tight and masterly control, hardly and adjective here, the words simple, but in execution a true gem.  Ingrid Riley

In Visible Worlds, poems by Brenda Tai Layton, published 2004, A5 size stapled booklet with a 4-colour cover and 28 pages. Cover artwork, Blue Horses in Lathkill Dale by Martin Holroyd.  ISBN 1-903031-90-7. Printed by Poetry Monthly Press, 39 Cavendish Road, Long Eaton, Nottingham, NG10 4HY. Available from Portland Books, 93 Warwick Street, Leamington Spa, CV32 4JR; £4.00 + £0.50p p+p.

Writing poetry gives you the opportunity to be honest; without this honesty the reader simply turns away.  Brenda Tai Layton is an honest poet, she doesn’t let you turn away.  In her book ‘In Visible Worlds’, she writes about people, mainly black people, and what it is like to have ‘to walk the wrong way up the slide’.   Her poems are inhabited by characters clutching their ‘cardboard suitcases’: the cleaner with ‘legs barely broader than the wooden handle’ of her broom; the boy Specky, his short life existing ‘on the blade of bad things;’ and, the free woman, Susan Smith, lured back to Africa with the promise of ‘rich harvest,’ finding only famine beneath ‘freedom’s locked granary.’  Have you ever wondered why the word black is so often an adjunct to something negative?  In her poem ‘Think of a Colour’ Brenda Tai Layton demonstrates that being black, living in ‘the absence of light,’ has enabled her to break out of ‘the word’s prison.’  Let’s hope that we see more of her in the future.  John Plevin

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A Sunlit Mirror, poems by David Clarke, slightly larger than A5 size stapled booklet with 23 pages and a full colour cover.  ISBN 0-904179-68-0, £5.00 for a limited edition signed copy.  Published 2004 by Hippopotamus Press, 22 Whitewell Road, Frome, Somerset, BA11 4EL.

This collection of fifteen poems tries, charmingly, to recreate a love based on remembrance of infantile longing after fifty years of lifetime, once new opportunity arises.  The words wander wistfully through parkland, recollecting past joys, reflecting as a sparkle of sunlight on the lake, as in a mirror, but remain otherwise unspoken.  There are three voices: the man, the woman and a narrator, which merge into one tale of romantic longing that childhood innocence might become a mature marriage without losing the delight of inspiration.  Strangely, an introductory poem by W H Auden sets the context that when affection becomes adoration, and claim requires recognition, the lacuna between the loved and the beloved widens to unbridgeably universal proportion between stars and stargazer.  It is a mystery tale too.  I find myself wondering whether Ann replied to the romantic poems addressed to her?   Janie Thomas

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Tremblestone, Number 4, August 2004; poems and reviews from various contributors.  An A5 size perfect-bound book with a 2-colour cover and 84 pages. ISSN 1463-9181.  Editor: Kenny Knight, Assistant Editor: Delilah Fogerty.  Single issue price £4.00, three issues £10.00, six issues £18.00.  Cheques payable to ‘Tremblestone,’ Stowford House, 43 Seymour avenue, St. Judes, Plymouth, Devon, PL8 8RB.

Like all magazine format books, this is an eclectic volume of poetry, prose and reviews. The poetry itself ranges from the familiar and comfortable such as Martin Anderson’s  “Voyageur”: “it will probably fail to reach her/ in that country where so many favours/ have to be begged, palms crossed with/ inscrutable haste, simply for a letter to arrive,” to the irritatingly obscure. I am not comfortable with prose pieces that attempt to wear a poetry jacket, they simply look uncomfortable and out of place. The reviews on the other hand I found a joy to read with a generous amount of space given over to getting under the skin of the work.  I did find myself passing over the more obscure broken line and chaotic layout poems but for those who like jigsaw puzzles, there may well be nuggets of gold here too. A very professionally put together piece of work.  Lachlan Robertson     

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When Divas Dance, The Diva Squad Poetry Collective, edited by Chezia Thompson Cager.  Poems by Chezia Thompson Cager, Clarinda Harriss and Kendra Kopelke.  Slightly larger than A5 size, perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 103 pages. Published 2004, Maisonneuve Press, PO Box 2980, Washington, DC 20013, USA.  www.maisonneuve.com ISBN 0-944624-43-X, price?

This collection of three variously good works by three eastern seaboard poets is as provoking as enjoyable.  Chezia Thompson Cager’s work demonstrates a range and control of technical skill that impresses, yet isn’t used merely for its own sake.  ‘The Black Dog of Fate’ is a recitation of incidental, as well as meaningful, events in a young black man’s peripatetic life in the early twentieth century, with his Dog as his guide and protector.  Clarinda Harriss’s work generally didn’t enthral this reader.  Perhaps it’s an overt concern in her poetry with form rather than having anything meaningful to say.  Kendra Kopelke has a lot to say and says it entertainingly without obvious posture.  ‘Ode At The End Of The Century’ is a truism that should be considered carefully in the face of present evidence in our cultures.  ‘To My Thumb’ is a profound and disquieting piece that keeps one from thinking that Kopelke is merely looking whimsically askance at life’s vagaries.  Myles Bigland

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Rescript, selected poems by David Holliday.  A5 size stapled booklet with a two-colour cover and 58 pages.  Published 2004 by Bucephalus Press, 67 Hady Crescent, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, S41 0EB.  ISBN 0-903212-01-3, price £3.00.

David Holliday, ex-editor of iota, is alive and well and living in Chesterfield.  A singer in, and occasional conductor of the Chesterfield Male Voice Choir, he still finds time to write poetry.  The selected poems in ‘Rescript’ are a mix of rhyming and blank verse poetry with the occasional villanelle or pantoum thrown in.  The poems fit around a number of issues such as man’s vanity, time, and the place of science in a world largely ruled by myth.  Many of the poems are peppered with characters from history: Alexander with ‘the world at his command’, earning the tribute of a ‘buzz’ from a fly and a ‘hum’ from a bee; the priest in ‘Galileo’s Canon’ preferring  ‘blind faith’ to ‘sight enhanced by eyes’.

What struck me in many of the poems, was the ingredient of thought.  There is a mature poet here touching on issues that should interest us all.  In his poem on XIX Century music he concludes ‘the living listen to the speaking dead’.  In music perhaps, but elsewhere I suspect we are more like his ‘Ouroboros’, the symbol of eternity, ‘the worm that feeds upon its tail’.  Final word: my daughter sneaked a furtive peek, her verdict – “quite good,” she thought.  Praise indeed.   John Plevin                                                                                                                                                   

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Acumen 48, January 2004, New Poetry, Pros and Reviews. An A5 size perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 122 pages.  Editor: Patricia Oxley, 6 The Mount, Higher Furzeham, Brixham, Devon, TQ5 8QY.  ISSN 0964-0304.  Single issue price £4.50, UK annual subscription £12.50, (for three editions).  www.acumen-poetry.co.uk

Acumen skips the editorial in this well produced magazine and kicks off with a lively “Box of Cuttings” of quotes and press cuttings on poets, poetry and the use of the English Language - all good stuff. I originally marked up five poems for mention which is a good sign. India Russell takes pole position with The Pattern Of The Real, which discusses the filtering of our memories over time….

All that was in essence nothing

Fades to nothing

But those true experiences

Which have their source in heaven-

The magic rain-blessed kiss

                                                                                                           In the darkening London square………..these remain…

Mario Petrucci writes about the 1986 Chernobyl clean up in Ukritye …

“Soles grow too hot for blood. Still they shovel the graphite that is erasing marrow, spine, balls…” Chilling reading for anyone living near Winfrith in 1976.  Still, that’s another story. Acumen has eight 1,500 word poetry reviews, a fat letters page and some good poems. Worth the money.  Dick Stewart

Flight Patterns, poems by Joanne McFarland.  An A5 size perfect-bound bound book with a full colour cover and 53 pages.  No ISBN.  Published during 2004 by: Gold Leaf Books, 546 Union Street Studio 2B, Brooklyn, NY 11215.  Price $12.00.  E-mail: Jam.Art@juno.com

Arrangements in different patterns of words, sights, and descriptive colour in captured conversation form the basis of this collection about domestic circumstance in Brooklyn, New York.  This is Joanne McFarland’s third collection of poems, in which ‘there is a deepened sense of spiritual maturity as if the poet has fully opened herself . . . in a way all our lives depend on knowing . . . as she weighs creation against fate’ in two groups of poems: ‘Signs’ and ‘Men.’  I found the collection interesting but not deep.  Like birds flitting across the page, the poems are flights of fancy or insight that flash momentarily through habitual happenings, with telling word of phrase.  Like Woody Allen reminiscences, they do not penetrate the depths of my soul.  But I do not live in Brooklyn.  Janie Thomas

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Relations to Angels, a collection of poetry by Paula Puddephatt.  An A5 size stapled booklet with a two-colour cover and 40 pages.  First published 2003 by Q.Q. (Collections), York House, 15 Argyle Terrace, Rothesay, Isle of Bute, PA20 0BD.  ISBN  1-903203-317, price £5.00.

This collection includes many deeply personal poems which seem to originate in physical or mental suffering; ‘See me through the pain . . . and don’t blame me, if I don’t feel even remotely human, over night.’  At the same time, the author looks beyond immediate suffering and sees that  ‘although, things do go terribly wrong,’ the need to carry on is all-important. Her frankness and sincerity is tinged with wry humour in ‘My Extra Head,’ where the doctor’s trite response to this ‘side-effect’ is to claim it as a success for her treatment, while totally dismissing the patient’s dismay, ‘but I have to learn to live with it.  That’s what my doctor said.’

In all the poems the approach is direct and the language deceptively simple.  The ultimate message, too, is simple:

‘There is an inner strength inside of us, my friends: a flame that, once ignited, sometimes flickers – never quite expires.

This is a fascinating collection that leaves us looking forward to more.    Ingrid Riley

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The Picture From Here, poems by Tom Kelly.  An A5 size stapled booklet with a two-colour cover and 36 pages.  Published 2004 by: Sand Chapbooks, P.O. Box 1091, Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, SR2 8WD.  ISBN 0-9545241-2-8, www.sandwriting.co.uk  price£4.00 

Poignant is a word I would choose for this collection; such as in "I Never Thought" or "Street." I never thought I'd be driving through the gates/ and down the slow path to your graveside. Poems about watching children grow up are always heart pluckers and these do so with, (well there's another word I would choose), panache. The poet has a wonderful sense of using words simply,  to create just exactly the right  feeling  as in "The Story of My Life" with its perfect opening lines; You can squeeze the atmosphere/ produce samples that would eat metal. If I had a criticism, and it would be a minor one, I would suggest that the rhythm often catches you out... like a break step that makes it hard to read on the page. I managed to work around this in some of the poems by reciting them aloud. However, overall I have no hesitation in recommending this work.                                                                                    Lachlan Robertson

Vanishing Point, poems by Tony Petch, (Ragged Raven Poetry); an A5 size perfect-bound book with a three colour cover and 84 pages.  Published during year 2003 by Ragged Raven Press, 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Warwickshire, CV37 0LR. E-mail: raggedravenpress@aol.com ISBN 0 9542397 3 3, £6.50. 

Tony Petch's Vanishing Point has much to recommend both to the casual and observant reader.  This latest collection draws together some disparate themes that might jar in the hands of another, yet gain coherence through some delicately poignant touches.  The metaphysical 'Traffic’ opens up the paradigmatic nature of our everyday experience of car journeys and their relationship with the infinite.  A few pages later we are given a view of 'Cider-Making in Herefordshire' that is faintly disturbing in its association with blood: "At the festival of pressing/ a noisy horse makes the cogs go/ jerking the teeth on the axle so the orchard is crushed...In a bad year cider is made out of stones."  I find myself curiously in sympathy with that line, not merely from a rural up-bringing but because it fixes ones attention on the perennial violence churning in the traditions of our nation.  The deft touch in 'And now here's another' of "MacDonald's Guide to the Emotions" encapsulates the haphazard approach we all face in the relationship stakes;  'We collide at junction twenty six/ and stay together but I'm thinking/ this can't really be love and I do all the grief stuff internally in advance/ so that by the time she turns me off by turning off at the next slip road/ to announce she only wants to stay good friends/ I'm able to swing across a huge spectrum of previously worked through feelings."  Apologies for that verbatim quote but I think it illustrates the strength of Tony Petch's skill and I can highly recommend this slim but appealing volume for further consideration.    Myles Bigland                                                                                                                                                                                       

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Iota 65, poems and reviews from various contributors; an A5 size perfect-bound book with a two colour cover and 60 pages. Edited by Bob Mee and Janet Murch, Ragged Raven Press, 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Warwickshire, CV37 0LR.  E-mail: iotapoetry@aol.com  Web address www.iotapoetry.co.uk  £2.50 each or annual subscription £10.00.

This issue of Iota presents a wide range of poems from as far away as the USA, Italy and Ireland, as well as local contributions.  Generally the poets offer either gentle observations, such as Joanna Ezekiel in ‘The Cocoon of the Brighton Train,’ where she “drinks in the sun at the window,” or quirky, oblique snapshots of life, as Matthew Lloyd’s choice of a “crap haircut,” to symbolize the hopelessness of the unemployed.

Howard Wright’s ‘The China Cabinet,’ offers an almost surreal approach to the idea that you can’t take it with you.  Michael Newman’s, ‘The Journey,’ links the simple act of using the M25 with the fascination of Concorde’s last flight. 

In ‘Vacant Possession,’ Jenny Hockey paints a poignant picture of lost love which is Dylan Willoughby’s theme in 'Arrabbiata,’ but in his case given a humorous slant.  We also find some interesting characters here like the woman the children believe to be a witch in Gillian Stoneham’s poem, and the gardening fanatic in 'Hedgings,’ by Roger Elkin, “Ever since he'd nicked those cuttings from the local park, he lived for privet."

The collection ends with reviews, (some of them merciless), of recent poetry collections as well as a useful section listing poetry festivals and  competitions. IngridRiley                                                                          

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Turpentine, poems by Pat Jourdan; an A5 size perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 72 pages. Published during year 2004 by Motet Press, 17 Sea Road, Galway, County Galway, Ireland.  ISBN 0-9542399-1-1, price 6.99, (presume €?).

First impressions are all important with a book.  You need a cover that will attract the eye and make potential readers select the book from a rack of many others.  The vibrant painting on the cover of Pat Jourdan’s book grabs your attention and takes you to the next, and all important stage, the poems within.    

The thing that strikes you about Pat Jourdan’s work is that her poems are accessible, (without being shallow), and have something interesting to say; you don’t have to swallow a dictionary or possess intricate knowledge of ancient book-wormery, for example, ‘Sepia,’ – “The emigrants are proud/the emigrants are economical:/ they all crowd together in one photograph. Here is the sepia testimony.”  Most people will, (I think), be able to sympathise with the early morning blues, ‘Six a.m.,’ “How to tell the disc-jockey/that this year has no sound, but is sliding, elusive, into another day/ dragging our school-child self/into another classroom?”  I like, “dragging our school child self,” excellent.

The poems in Pat Jourdan’s book are varied, and well written.  Numerous publications are sent to Pulsar for review, note: I kept this one for myself.  DP.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

The Nature of Things, poems and prose by Alan Marshfield; a slightly larger than A5 size perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 589 pages.  Published during year 2003 by Abraxas Press, 13 Copthall Gardens, Mill house, London, NW7 2NG.  ISBN 1-9031-9419-1, £15.00.www.abraxaspress.co.uk  E-mail: am@abraxas.fsnet.co.uk

Poems can be a puzzle.  At first sight do you always fully understand the intent of the poet?  If you’re like me, probably not.  Alan Marshfield believes that poems should be accompanied by a commentary, and that the two together form the ‘essence’ of the poem.  Not everyone would agree, believing that each poem should stand in its own right.  Personally, I like the commentaries, finding satisfaction in the exercise of analysis and understanding.  My only concern is that this may, at times, be at the expense of emotion, with the poem running the risk of losing the hook that enables the reader to relate the poet’s words to some personal experience or deeply held belief.

In ‘The Nature of Things’, Alan Marshfield gives us the best of a lifetime’s work, and the opportunity to sample poems created over a period of some 50 years.  Readers of Pulsar will already be familiar with his work, here is a chance for them to swim in deep water.  If at times you feel in danger of drowning, you can look to the notes for a lifeline.                                                                                                                                                                                                      John Plevin

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Krax Magazine, No. 40, poems, prose, reviews and artwork from various contributors; A5 size stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover, no pages numbers, (but numerous pages).  No ISSN.  Editor: Andy Robson, 63 Dixon Lane, Leeds, LS12 4RR.  Unit price £3.50/€14/$7, or 3 x issue UK price of £10.00.  Cheques payable to: A. Robson.

Krax is a magazine of light-hearted contemporary poetry, which has been going for thirty years.  I started by feeling as if the main collection was from men trying to find ways of not feeling hopelessly out of control in the downward spiral into illness of some egocentric lives; (I don’t know about you, but it seems that USA is taking over our humour as well as our radio and TV programmes and Iraq, which can feel suffocatingly claustrophobic, when wit is lacking.) But nearly being a gimlet-eyed old lady is my problem, obviously, and laughter is a good way to change attitudes and recover magnanimity, and the poems in the mag. are amusing and some are really good.  The mix of writing type also recovers strength for the mag. by the honesty of an interview comment about poetry writing.   Read it and see what you think.                                                                                                                                                                                               Janie Thomas

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A New Way With Time," poems by Jimmy Crighton. An A5 size stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover and 36 pages. Published during year 2003 by: Poor Tom’s Press, 89a Winchester Avenue, Leicester, LE3 1AY. ISBN 0-9543371-1-5, price £3.00. 

When someone has lived for a long time and collected many and various experiences along the way, it forms a rich seam from which to mine poetry. In fact, I have been grateful for being a late starter... think of all the inane, ill-informed and embarrassing rubbish that I could have been producing for the first 39 years of life? Some might say that I should have waited longer. Jimmy Crighton waited until he retired before writing his poetry and this booklet reflects upon that life with deep maturity. With regret I have to say that this is a posthumous collection. I loved every one of the poems within it, but I will quote only from the last: "There are no
poems left/ that are not poems of love/...Save my poems -/ they are all you will have of me."  A poignant and affecting collection that I would hope to match at the end too.                                                                                                                                                                                                     Lachlan Robertson

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Velocity, the best of Apples and Snakes; anthology by UK contemporary writers - poetry, short-stories, non-fiction, artwork, anecdotes and essays.  A slightly larger than A5 size perfect-bound book with 315 pages and a full colour cover. Published on 15^th November 2003 by Black Spring Press Ltd., Burbage House, 83-85 Curtain Street, London, EC2A 3BS.  ISBN 0-948238-28-3, price £9.95.       

Velocity is one of those fiercely trendy “Kickers, dungarees and Circus Skills Workshop,” type of books that could only come from our dear Capital. Positively reeking of  80’s Camden Town, I was beginning to lose the will to live until I got to page 94 and Joolz  Denby’s gripping essay ‘Trouble,’ which deals with a real life story of a child prostitute in Bradford. On the poetry front, Christopher Twigg’s ‘A Vision’ hit the spot, comparing the plight of the poor underground commuter with tinned sardines – “the sardines in their golden oil- like corpses all dishevelled flaking foil” and  “in darksome waters where their friends are found – Their friendship now is tightness new defined –” I also liked Owen O’ Neill’s ‘Schoolbag�� – the poet looking back forty years, the bag becomes a symbol of his childhood – “sour hawthorn black ink woody pencil shavings, rubbers tired of rubbing and all the crumbs of stale bread and education. It was all the real learning I ever had inside that bag.” Fair value for a tenner.                                                                                                                                                  Dick Stewart

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The Shakespeare Memorial Room, literary anthology, items from various contributors; a slightly larger than A5 size perfect-bound book with a three colour cover and 157 pages.  Published during year 2003 by:  Writers Without Borders, 22 Margaret Grove, Harborne, Birmingham, B17 9JH.                     ISBN 0-9539681-4-6, price £8.95.

This anthology was produced by the Birmingham Group, ‘Writers Without Borders,’ and combines poetry and fiction.  The contents vary greatly in style, clarity and complexity; some are sombre, reflecting issues of English language and its interpretation, differences in culture and religion, as well as the ‘exploration of desire.’

A short story, Further Than Beyond,’ by Milorad Krystanovich deals with comprehension of the English language and how it can build both walls and bridges.  In poems, ��Guarding the Botanic Gardens,’ ‘Rescue’ and ‘Advice’ the poet, Roi Ankhara Kwabena, talks about precious memories of a distant life, very different from the one in England.  In the short story ‘Strangers in a Strange Land,’ Alline Yapp-Morris depicts a whole life in a few pages, describing the difficulties encountered by immigrants in Britain and back home.  The story contains sufficient material, in five pages, for a whole novel. 

Each of the authors have experienced great hardship living in Britain between 1961 and the present time.  The introduction states, “memories of the past provide several of these writers with images of transition and loss, which mirrors the depth of their pain.”  This interesting collection makes a useful contribution to our understanding of, and compassion for, these ‘strangers’ among us.                                                                                                                   Ingrid Riley

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At The Edge of Light, poems by Lynne Wycherley; an A5 size perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 58 pages.  Published on 21^st November 2003 by Shoestring Press, 19 Devonshire Avenue, Beeston, Nottingham, NG9 1BS.  ISBN 1 899549 89 7 price £7.95.

If I had to pick a word to describe Lynne Wycherley’s largely free verse poetry, I think I’d go for elegant.  Born at the edge of the Fens with its ‘endless horizons’ and chilled by the ‘long-nosed wolf of wind,’ she shows in her poetry a love of landscape and wildlife; there is a nod to John Clare here.  But there are people in her landscapes: the Earth Man father ‘slow tongued … handling pheasants with barbaric tenderness;’ the non-Fens Mother, ‘still queasy’ in an alien world; the distant lover with fibre optics translating his breath into light.  Perhaps the best way to enjoy Lynne’s lyric poetry is snug before a log fire, the wind outside howling, and ‘no pixel screen, no Web to banish distance.’  A first collection from a gifted poet with a natural feel for words; let us hope there is much more to come.  John Plevin

Elsewhere, poems by Michael Murphy.  An A5 size perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 58 pages.  Published on 21^st November 2003 by: Shoestring Press, 19 Devonshire Avenue, Beeston, Nottingham, NG9 1BS.  ISBN 1 899549 87 0, price £7.95

Michael Murphy was born in 1965, in Liverpool and worked as a theatre director in Britain and Eastern Europe.  His poems and essays are prize-winning and widely published.  Somehow  you know all this, reading his words in a dreamy osmosis of absorption.  I envied even his cold … ‘…flitting from job to job for a year and a half – Hauling baskets in the marketplace at dawn’ … for the treasure of the descriptive image, feeling a depth of erudition and loving the man who weaves words, warm for their sensitivity, sharp for their sadness, and innocent in their knowing.  Elsewhere is about now and here, for everyone.  It’s an exploration of another dimension, bringing a world of observation into wisdom: finding the beauty of the occasion just caught in reflection, glancing backwards, caught in the rhythm of light or humour before it’s lost.  Life and passion are held here, balanced.   Janie Thomas

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Adam Thorpe “Nine Lessons from the Dark,” poems. An A5 size perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 79 pages.  Published on 20th November 2003 by Jonathan Cape, (Cape Poetry), Random House,  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA.  ISBN 0 224 06385 5 price £8.00.  Available from high street book stores.

The author is a well-established author and poet whose offerings here are well crafted, thoughtful and substantial. By the first I need only refer to what I consider to be a most beautifully written concise description in Blueberry Picking in Michigan;

“Sorcerer lipped, indigo-woaded, we grin like clowns.” By the second, the majority of the poems are descriptions and reflections, often triggered by small events. I can almost picture the author standing still in a contemplative pause at what he observes, e.g. ; the fossils in Market Day. By the third I could mean either the fact that there are 38 poems across 77 pages or I might suggest that each poem is dense with words that need to be spoken and relished, with ideas that leave you thinking about them long after the reading has ended. I feel this is the best poetry book I have read in a very long time, and I shall search out more of this author’s work.                                                                                                                                                                                          Lachlan Robertson

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Orbis Quarterly International Literary Journal, No. 127, winter 2003, news, views, letters, features, prose and poetry.  An A5 size, perfect-bound book with a 3-colour cover and 81 pages.  ISSN 0300-4425,  subs £15 per annum, (overseas £20/€32; $32).  Editor: Carole Baldock, 17 Greenhow Avenue, West Kirby, Wirral, Cheshire, CH48 5EL.  E-mail: carolebaldock@hotmail.com

I found this journal to be a diverse selection of writing.  I have not read Orbis before so had no preconceptions. Personally, I wasn’t impressed with the featured writer Ramsey Campbell, who offered a slightly confusing scenario; a street was chosen, using the alphabet to present an almost statistical survey of the inhabitants, something I found mundane. However, the journal became  more enjoyable with further reading. As ever, there is always something that grabs you, reaching out to your own taste. Kathleen Kenny’s poem, (Smitten), did this for me:                                                                                                                                               

You have on your recital shirt,
your sonneteering waistcoat
Our cigarettes kiss
as your fists jut
like knuckle dusters over my thumbs.

I also liked the work of Ann Leahy (Bolstered), Michael Kriesel (Zen Strawberries), and Peter De Ville (Vicars Things, Council Estate, Southampton). Oz Hardwick’s prose offering, Ms Popnjay was enjoyable.  After initial hesitation this collection grew on me.                                                             Neil Brooks

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Paula Tree, A First Collection of Poetry by Paula Puddephatt.  An A5 size, 40 page stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover.  Published in 2003 by Q.Q. Press (COLLECTIONS), York House, 15 Argyle Terrace, Rothesay, Isle of Bute, PA20 0BD, Scotland.  ISBN 1-903203-252,  price £5.00

Poetry just happens, sometimes - the right words in the right order, as Coleridge put it – to fill the right gap.   I must thank Paula Puddephatt.  One of her poems – Angels – ‘A dark angel swam across the moat, And scaled the walls of your castle, Just to gain admission … You hear his anguished Cries, from outside: like those of Cathy’s ghost. … The Angel of light, meanwhile, Asks only your permission … to come inside, and allow her to Defrost your heart’, illustrating a postcard with a photograph of a beautiful little girl-angel for the final stanza said exactly what I needed to say to resolve an argument, so I sent it.  Sometimes the right words are the hardest sought-after and most anguished result of a life of struggle.  

These poems are worth the effort. The light shining through the darkness is illuminating, for the happier poems are the best. That is the perfect message.  Send for the postcards.  Janie Thomas.

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Lancashire Working, Kite Modern Series, poems by Will Daunt: an A5 size perfect-bound book with 40 pages and a full colour cover.  Published during year 2003 by: K.T. Publications, 16 Fane Close, Stamford, Lincs., PE9 1HG.  ISBN 0 907759 98 X, price £4.95 (£5.50 by post - £8.00 overseas).

Beneath the surface of Daunt’s poems there are constant reminders of the changes which have taken place. Lancashire, as the cover photographs show, is no longer a grim industrial landscape, but an area of mixed affluence, where people are concerned with their cars, homes and leisure pursuits.

Daunt takes the familiar, even banal details of life and uses indirect imagery to present an original interpretation.  ‘A dog chases a car, ‘bounces, then rolls, rubber burning.’  A burglar roams the streets, ‘that breaker of our house, the tumour, briefly made at home.’  Decorators apply an artex ceiling, ‘making skies of alabaster . . . , icing past mistakes.’

Nowhere does Daunt describe the beauty of the landscape, although his photographs show that he appreciates it.  His theme is his reaction to a close-knit society and the way it has made him a part of it.   Unfortunately, however, Daunt tends, perhaps deliberately, to obscure the meaning in many of his poems by his oblique approach which is often difficult to follow, ‘. . . but more than neutral . . . at home . . . and less foreign, through novelty? . . . solidly . . . feed resistance to elsewhere . . .’ This distracts from what is otherwise an interesting collection. Ingrid Riley

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Clark Gable in Mansfield, selected poems by Deborah Tyler-Bennett; an A5 size perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 64 pages.  Published during year 2003 by:  The Kings England Press, Cambertown House, Commercial Road, Goldthorpe, Rotherham, South Yorkshire, S63 9BL.  ISBN 1 872438 85 7 price £4.95.  E-mail: sales@kingsengland.com

 A first collection, selected from the two hundred or so of Deborah Tyler-Bennett’s poems published in Britain and abroad.  Her poetry is all about people and the places they inhabit ranging from Kirk Alloway, where Robert Burns’s parents are buried, to Calgary in Canada with its Chinese taxi drivers and Native American girls bagging moccasins for the tourists.  The verse form she chooses is eclectic, free verse lying alongside ballads and lyric poems, and a striking sonnet sequence about the stores, cafés and nightclubs of Paris.  Her poetry shows great sensitivity with a real feel for people, past and present.  Once again we should raise a cheer for those Comprehensive kids in ‘Geography Lessons’ lifting strong voices high above the crowd.  In her poem ‘Love, Chanel’ Deborah regrets that many affairs are simply cheap lips, tart Asti in a champagne flute.  No sour Asti bubbles here, her poetry is real Dom Pérignon.

Final question: was Clark Gable ever in Mansfield? Yes, in 1943 to visit the American Hospital with fire-lipped typists keeping him like a picture in a locket.  John Plevin.

Hard Water, poems by Jean Sprackland, (Cape Poetry); an A5 size, perfect-bound book with a full colour cover and 53 pages.  Published on 14^th August 2003 by: Jonathan Cape, The Random House Group.  ISBN 0-224-6959-4.  UK price £8.00.  Available from high street book stores.

I confess up until now I haven't read any of Jean Sprackland's work but this collection is a great introduction to a unique talent.  Sprackland’s work has strong narrative coupled with vivid imagery and displays the vulnerability of human experience in language that is accessible, compelling and mysterious.  I laughed out loud after reading Barbie on the Roof.  The poet taps into childhood memories in an incisive manner. This particular poem stirred my own childhood memories about my sister’s Barbie doll, (and how I used to enjoy throwing the thing as far as I could!). Throughout this collection I was shocked and delighted with the array of different poems shedding domestic truths and innocence, defining everyday life in a perceptive way. Her work reminds me of Carol Ann Duffy but has a different tone and a sense of belonging is seeping out in poems like,

Shocks/
Remember those first thrills, the charge that went cracking through you?
Sunday afternoons we went out on our bikes,
me and next-door Julie.
She had black ringlets and a wicked smile.

Other poems are quirky observations of people in Sprackland's neighbourhood like the poem   MR SMILEY

This man catches a train twice a day.
It's easy, like water running when you turn on a tap,
like the six o' clock news.

This book left me wanting more; with this in mind I will endeavour to read her first collection, ‘Tattoos for Mother's Day.’  Jean Sprackland has a strong voice I would recommend this publication to anyone who enjoys contemporary poetry.  Neil Brooks.

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The Lantern Review, Summer 2003, poetry from various contributors, edited by Pat Jourdan: an A5 size stapled booklet with 48 pages and a 2-colour cover.  Editorial address: 17 Sea Road, Galway, County Galway, Ireland.  Price £3.00 (or €3.00).

 With contributions from Ireland and Canada, this is an eclectic mix of poetry and extracts from prose works. The prose is best left without comment, but in compensation the booklet was packed full of delightful character sketches – “but thanks so much for validating my library card; it shows/ you were thinking of me when you hands were idle.” – and sub-Jorie Graham obscurity. I particularly liked the simpler poems of cutting humour such as to be found in Terrorist – “That mountie could not hide/ disappointment … to tell him/ I was burying my aunt.”  I considered this to be an entertaining collection and would recommend it in the future. The next edition comes out in January.  Lachlan Robertson

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Outliving, poems by Bernard O’Donoghue, a slightly larger than A5 size, 56 page, perfect-bound book with a full colour cover.  Published during April 2003 by Chatto & Windus, London.  ISBN 0 701 17481 1, price £8.99.  Available from high street book stores.

"The Names of the Hare" by Seamus Heaney provides the subtext for the hunter hare visual on the cover of Outliving.  If the mythological enemy that hunts man can name him, how safe can man be in a fragile world? If you imagine poetry as the experience you have not had or the place that you have not been and perhaps cannot go in reality, Outliving will be a comfortable mostly narrative read of interesting observations on man's evolving mental states, as they are centred in British Isles geography.  Moving between dinnseanchas/the poems of lore of places, immrams/voyage poems and free verse,  (like more contemporary Irish writing),  the poet discovers the plausibility of awakening to live in the "now" moment.  As a startling journey, it sets the tone of the epiphany in the poems - startling not unusual or weird: but strangely familiar syntactically with the whimsy of a blues logic fraught with the irreconcilable, as in the poems "The Druid's Fostersons Debate at Teamhair" or "Serauns."

Outliving is a journey for the patient attentive reader, who ascribes to the ancient view of Irish poets as repositories of traditional knowledge and seers/prophets who teach us life's big and little mysteries. Chezia Thompson Cager

And A Bird Sang, 20 poems by Alan P. Barrett, an A5 size, 24 page, stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover.  Published by: Poetry Monthly Press, 39 Cavendish Road, Long Eaton, Nottingham, NG10 4HY. ISBN 1 903031 17 6, price £1.50.

A very diverse collection, some historical, some contemporary and some nice War and Post War memories. Alan P. Barrett has a knack of neatly capturing the scene …

 The Harrowing of the North ..

Seven stubble-fires up on the Wolds, outlawed these days,

Were the ember ending to a harvest month,

And then it was October, with the sun like a refugee

Trudging on a southing trail, sloughing warmth.

On  personal relationships , Eighteen Lines , for Emma …

When I was a minor god, in your eyes,

We discovered ponds, found a hopeful duck

And us throwing crusts seemed to be one way

To make you safe, to blue your childhood’s skies.

 Well, it's probably a generation thing, but this booklet struck a deep chord with me, out of twenty poems I got a big bang out of about eighteen of them and they are all well written and accessible. If you know what thirty bob is, you won’t have wasted your money.   Dick Stewart

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Small Press Verse and Poeticonjectures, poems by Alessio Zanelli, a slightly larger than A5 size, 156 page, perfect-bound book with a full colour cover. ISBN 1 4010 6830 8.  Published during year 2002 by: Xlibris, 436 Walnut Street, 11^th Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19106-3703, USA.  UK price £?  Available online via Amazon.co.uk. 

Alessio Zanelli is Italian, born in Lombardy.  His native language is Italian, yet he writes poetry in English - a self-taught language.  As someone who has lived and worked abroad for many years, and knows just how difficult it is to be really fluent in a foreign language, yet alone comfortable in a foreign culture, I’m impressed.  ‘Small Press Verse and Poeticonjectures’ is his second book of poetry.  Many of the poems included were first published in the small presses and web magazines around the English-speaking world.

A writer of lyrical free verse poetry, often about the people and places he has come across in his life and travels, he is a self-confessed admirer of the work of Emily Dickenson.  In ‘Dineh Ritual of Recall,' he explores the deportation, The Long Walk, of the Navajo from their lands in Arizona to resettlement in New Mexico; from North America he takes us back to Italy with his 'Sketch for my Hometown, Cremona’.  We can learn a lot about ourselves from how others use our language.  Alessio Zanelli has paid our language, Edward Thomas’ English words, a rare compliment, in turn we should take the time to read what he has to say.                                                                                                                                                              John Plevin

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Smoke 51, poems and illustrations from various contributors, A5 size, 21 page, stapled booklet with a black and white cover.  Published by: Windows,  Liver House, 96 Bold Street, Liverpool, L1 4HY.  £3.00 for four issues.  ISSN 0262852X.

This collection ranges from the overtly humorous, such as ‘Charlotte Bronte Gets a Laptop,’ by Carole Bromley, with its original take on various aspects of the writer’s life, to the dark portrayal of an old lady’s existence, seen through the eyes of children in ‘Revisiting No. 33.’

Kershti Hall's ‘Cow Girl’ offers an ironic view of animal welfare, while Neil Campbell’s ‘Shoelaces' is a bitter-sweet evocation of changing perspectives as we grow up.

Cliff Yates’ ‘The Band’ is a reminder of the sixties, when most young men were dreaming of future success in music, with the hint of disillusion already present in the last two lines: ‘Singer-songwriters don’t need a bass-player / I give it twenty minutes then go home.

Irony is once again characteristic of ‘Sealed with a Loving Kiss,’ 1944, where Derrick Buttress’s real message is hidden beneath the surface. The poems are complemented by Keren E. Lawless’s unusual line drawings which have a Japanese feel to them.  Ingrid Riley

Slingshot, poems by Giovanni Malito, a slightly smaller than A5 size stapled booklet with 13 pages and a 2-colour cover.  Published during January 2003 by Donut Press, 118 Napier Road, London, E11 3JZ.  E-mail:  donutchops@yahoo.co.uk   ISBN 095419831X.  Price £4.00.

If you have preconceived ideas of what poetry should be like, forget “Slingshot.”  You will meet Giovanni Malito’s blunt opinions on a variety of themes.  There is honesty and above all stringent humour – a tongue-in-cheek approach to everyday basic considerations, expressed in direct, practical and sometimes poignant imagery.  For instance, considering the benefit his teaching is likely to have on his pupils, he confesses, “I knew I couldn’t deliver / what they had come for.”  In “Devolution,” there is a cynical realism as he assesses them as “kids – that would kill ultimately for money in a war.”  Similar treatment is given to the ever-present theme of relationships, often to his own detriment: “my first real romantic love left me / after I said something I shouldn’t have,” finally admitting that if they had married, “my wife would have been turning 43 next month / instead of only turning 33 today.”

So don’t look for a wealth of clever imagery in Malito’s poems.  What you get is honesty, wit, and a pungent assessment of everyday situations.  I enjoyed it.                                                                                                                                                   John H. Hope

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The Divine Peter, (John Wolcot, alias “Peter Pindar”), selected verse by Eric Ratcliffe, an A5 size, 62 page perfect-bound book with a 2-colour cover.  Published during year 2002 by Four Quarters Press, 7 The Towers, Stevenage, Herts., SG1 1HE.  ISBN 0 9535113 5 9, price £3.50 + 0.69p p&p.

Not so much a book of poems but a homily to John Wolcot, the18^th Century satirist and general pain in the neck to the Royals of the day.  I had very vaguely heard of the subject under the alias, “Peter Pindar” but it surprised me how much he had in common with modern day journalists in his often very modern concept of ridicule. This is a point repeatedly made by the author… perhaps too any times as I grew tired of the polemic. I did not set out to enjoy this booklet and the individual style of the author rankled a little. However, when I read the verse concerning George III’s visit to a brewery, I was hooked. “Now majesty into a pump so deep/ Did with an opera glass so curious peep/ Examining with care each wondrous matter/ That brought up water.” The poet did correspond with Robert Burns and both it appears have used the louse as a means of satirising the rich. A discovery I might explore in more detail! I enjoyed the booklet well enough to search out more material, and there is a wealth of such available. If this is not your first introduction to this Satirist, go elsewhere. Otherwise, it is a pleasant afternoon’s reading.                                                                                                      Lachlan Robertson

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Certain Fictions, poems and pieces by Alan P. Barrett, A5 size, 28 page stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover.  Published during 2002 by: Poetry Monthly Press, 39 Cavendish Road, Long Eaton, Nottingham, NG10 4HY.  ISBN 1 903031 45 1, price £2.00.

These poems are based on explorations of gender improbability: men trying to understand women and women wondering why they cannot understand them, usually within a partnership-love reference.  There are those poems which take us outside the author’s personal quandary into the universality of Solomon, (wondering why he was wise? Because he could understand women, parents and children – and rule a kingdom! See), Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, and forward into Tarot and Space Age metaphor. ‘Certain Fictions’ poems wander through interesting as well as well-trodden paths.  It’s good to read others’ questioning investigations: ‘…stepping out of time/in second-hand moonlight, third-hand sun/under the subtly under-lit clouds’  but disappointing, I felt, to always seem to come back to the  ‘Quondam’ answer to the frustration. : ‘I think sometimes: it might be the beer’.                        Janie Thomas

Joined Up Thinking And The Importance Of Hair, poems and prose by Keith Morton; an A5 size, 477 page, perfect-bound book with a full colour cover. First published during year 2002, ISBN 0 9540628 1 7. Published by: Linear B Publishing, PO Box 17162, Edinburgh, E11 2WT.  Price £12.00.

When first glancing at this book I thought here's an interesting title, but the image on the cover led me to believe it was a kind of music
manual. The title of this book reminded me of the 60s classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; an interesting title but the author in this case did not back-it-up, throwing the reader off balance with French phrases and songs like Deep in thought with a chorus, 'She loves him, now she loves him not / He got about as deep as a brier in a plant pot.' Each chapter had more French phrases then Del Boy in an episode of Only Fools and Horses. As a novel it was hard work to feel empathy for the characters with names like Dolores Darkling and Prescott Darkling – and with a celebrity suicide in tow, plus pretentious dialogue - almost trying to be rock ‘n roll with the opening chapter spouting f words. There were some interesting descriptions like 'concrete telephonic thunderbolt' when describing being woken up by the telephone, but overall the read was more graft than enjoyment.

I don't know if this book would appeal to readers in the 30-something / 40-something age bracket? You get the feeling it has been written for a certain audience, which in this case was not me. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry on finishing.    Neil Brooks

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Cherrybytes, haiku by Doreen King, pocket size (A6), 76 page, perfect-bound book with a 2-colour cover.  Published during year 2002 by Hub Editions, Longholm, East Bank, Wingland, Sutton Bridge, Spalding, Lincolnshire, PE12 9YS.  ISBN 1-90374-24-8. Price £5.00.

This collection claims to, “firmly set haiku in the 21^st Century.” There has been much debate on the extent to which it is safe to vary the shape of traditional forms without losing all claim to an accepted category.

I have always understood that Oriental forms – haiku, kenyu, tanka – are strictly defined.  Not only is the line and syllable content firmly established; the elements of a season must be encapsulated, a mood evoked, the final line providing some reflection on the first two, and continuity of thought implied.  On the strength of these requirements it would appear that not a single haiku in this collection meets the criteria.  John H. Hope.

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The Tip of My Tongue, Cape Poetry, poems by Robert Crawford, A5 size perfect-bound, 51 page book with a 2-colour cover. Published on 10^th April 2003 by Jonathan Cape, Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1 2SA.  ISBN 0-224-06968-3, Price £8.00; available from high street book stores.

 ‘The Tip of My Tongue’ is the fifth book of poetry by Robert Crawford.  Anthology addicts will already be familiar with his name from the Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 that he edited with Simon Armitage.  What do we make of his poetry?  Erudite certainly, and steeped in his Scottish background and heritage.  But happily, as with his other days the tip of my tongue / is further off than Ayres Rock, he admits to the difficulties we all face in our search for that elusive word that lifts a poem or a truth to a special place. And he is not always the academic as the student poser shows in ‘Ferrari’ with his Existential Choice of pie over couscous, and kissing his new love like a cashless king.  If you like poems that are crafted with a love of language, sprinkled liberally with place names and the dialect of the poet’s ‘chip of a nation’, then this could well be for you.  John Plevin.

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Poetry Express, quarterly, from Survivors Poetry, Winter 2002/03, No.16; A4 size, 15 page, stapled magazine with a 2-colour cover.  Free of charge.  Editors: Alison Combes, James Ferguson, and Roy Holland. Editorial postal address:  Survivors Poetry, Diorama Arts Centre, 34 Osnaburgh Street, London, NW1 3ND.  Registered Charity No. 1040177.

This Arts Council backed publication promotes the poetry of ‘survivors of mental distress.’  Books, plays and poetry events are given lengthy reviews and there is a wealth of information on festivals and competitions. The poems certainly give an insight into life in hospital, for example Ben Burr’s    Crash

Crash!   Stars of light

             Burned above every bed,

             The only sound

             The rotary fan

Crash!  The morphine came on again

             The stars blurred and

             The waves intensified …

The magazine also provides a forum for mental health issues. In this ‘Spirituality Issue’ co-editor Roy Holland examines the Mental Health Foundation report that argues that mental health services should recognise the role of spirituality in peoples lives – “… in the arid and disempowering atmosphere of a hospital it seems a good idea to set aside a space for meditation …”

 A very well presented London based free newsletter that strives to be inclusive.   Subscriptions via survivor@survivorspoetry.org.uk   Dick Stewart

Iota 61, 2003/1, quarterly, A5 perfect bound, 60 page booklet with a 2-colour cover; poems and reviews from numerous contributors,  Editors: Bob Mee and Janet Murch;  ISSN 0266-2922.  Price £2.50 or £10 year subscription.  Editorial address: Ragged Raven Press, 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Warwickshire, CV37 0LR.  E-mail: iotapoetry@ad.com  web: www.iotapoetry.co.uk

“Free Range Poetry” contains a good description of the contributions here:  Free range poetry struts the yard / picking here and scratching there / for seeds of ideas, grains of truth...   Free range poetry makes a nest,/ then lays a verse or two,/ and sings aloud in pleasure, pride.   Free range poetry likes wholesome food / juicy bits, good oats and grit, / not GM stuff that stultifies.  Free range poetry enjoys freedom / to be as it shall choose,/ to cackle, crow, or softly cheep.  

…. witty word-rhythms in the verse and some structure in the bird-like idea are not enough to relieve oxymoronic juxtaposition of questionable truth in verses three and four which leads to a downward-sinking tone of voice in conclusion that misses the heart of altruistic search found from classic study, real pleasure from sensuality, or simple truth found in higher level searches for wisdom.  It’s a mixed bag with quite a deal of GM (Genitally Modified) stuff in it.    Janie Thomas.

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Corporate Image, a second collection of poems by Michael Johns, presented as an A5 size, 32 page, stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover.  Published January 2003.  Available from the originator at: 16 Winton Crescent, Croxley Green, Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, WD3 3QX.  ISBN 1-903031-41-9, price £2.50.

It occurs to me that the trouble with collecting one’s poems into a slim volume is that whilst individual poems may glitter in a compendium of other work, they could appear dull and overly similar when placed with their siblings. In this oeuvre each poem has a hook into a personal observation that, yes works, but can appear overly simplistic, repetitive and banal as each page is turned. The poem “In Memphis” begins Nighttime in Huddersfield/ Rain falls unceasingly/ in Bradford East provides a link to the civil rights movement in America, but I found this and work like it un-engaging. I was irritated by poor spelling and basic errors in common names. It made me believe more strongly that poems should have a reason to “be here”. Still, a useful one to have on my shelf if I am ever tempted by late night thoughts of publishing my own work.  Lachlan Robertson.

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Into The Ruins, poems by Frederick Glaysher. A slightly larger than A5 size hardback book with a full colour sleeve and 73 pages.  Published during year 1999 by Earthrise Press, P.O. Box 81842, Rochester, MI 48380 – 1842, USA.  ISBN 0-9670421-2-7, price $19.95.  Also visit:  www.fglaysher.com

Glaysher’s book reads like a list of every conflict and atrocity in modern history:

Vignette

The ovens burned twenty four hours a day for so long the bricks glowed; more than smoke went up those chimneys

Hibakusha Nightmare

O image I cannot forget,

Scar-fried corpse in the midst of flight

Cradling a charred infant

From the horrible, hot light.

Into The Ruins

Smoke curls above the ruins of Lebanon

That smother the bodies of those

Who had hoped for peace. . .

Reading all forty seven of these rather artless, depressing poems left me wondering what point Glaysher is trying to make? Are we supposed to be shocked by this history lesson? If the message is that The World can be a dangerous place then he need not have bothered.  We know; it’s why our children are reluctant to venture past the front doors of our homes.   Dick Stewart 

The Bower of Nil, a narrative poem by Frederick Glaysher. Slightly larger than A5 size, 65 page, hardback book with a full colour sleeve.  Published in year 2002 by: Earthrise Press, P.O. Box 81842, Rochester, MI 48308-1842, USA.  Price $21.95, ISBN 0-9670421-7-8.

“O Guyon, break down this bower of nil, lead this enchantress away in chains,” says Glaysher in real and historic voices. The bower of nil is where we all live. “Both East and West worship materialism.” ” . . . philosophers and scholars . . . have no god but discourse.”  “Man is a contemptible insect.”  The narrator and academic, Peter would appear to hate academics but the 65 page poem is a masterfully executed academic exercise, using the history of western philosophical thought as a metaphorical tool. The invading enchantress – Peter’s wife for 30 years- (the reader may interpret), has been “. . . stripped of her shoes and socks, spine-sliced at the back of her neck and left on top of a garbage heap.”   Glaysher may have meant the enchantress to be more muse-like but anarchist, hedonist Mary Marsh as an idea, appears ever his foil. Peter’s children have had “. . . every advantage of the modern world . . . ,” but grew up with many human failings.  The narrator says one needs to learn “. . . to be content to dominate oneself, not others.” If all of the great minds in history were men, (as he quotes them), perhaps the “Five thousand years of recorded history, displaying the same barbarous qualities,” have something to do with men having exclusive power over the development of human civilization. A thought provoking read for these times!   Chezia Cager Thompson.

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On Baker’s Level.  Travels of Rocket Harbinger from the Chair of his Ancestors and Reports from the Cosmos: by Eric Ratcliffe.  An A5 sized stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover and 24 pages.  Published during year 2002 by Four Quarters Press, 7 The Towers, Stevenage, Hertfordshire, SG1 1HE.  ISBN 0-9535113-6-7, price £3.00.

There is mist here, floating in drifts and circling stars, trying to capture them before they explode.  Some words are fascinating, some concepts interesting, some rhythm comforting, often mis-matched.   This does not lessen the journey.  It questions the appropriateness of the vehicle for the route.  Sometimes fixing the engine is more interesting than walking or examining the landscape travelled through.  This is half science fiction, half poetry.  It covers astrological and Vedantic concepts and a personal problem-solving experience: trying to understand.  For me it is a wandering mind without proper scientific definition of terms, looking for the light in the rhythm of poetry and not quite finding it.   But then, I am not a Science Fiction freak.  Please forgive me.  Sometimes we can enjoy getting lost on the way more than the journey's path or purpose.  Fixing the engine, then, can be useful.  Janie Thomas.

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Touching on Love, poems by David Clarke.  A slightly larger than A5 size, 49 page, paperback perfect-bound, (or cloth-covered), book with a full colour cover.  Published during year 2002 by Hippopotamus Press, 22 Whitewell Road, Frome, Somerset, BA11 4EL.  Price: £6.95 paperback or £14.95 for the cloth covered version. Paperback ISBN 0-904179-67-2, cloth cover ISBN 0-904179-66-4.

David Clarke’s ‘Touching on Love��� is about marriage, the family, love and loss, and the struggle to find consolation.  We hear in the poetry a very human voice that cares for those close to him.  Many of the poems look back in time, remembering lost love and, through the poetry, keeping love alive.  His poems of loss are moving:  what parent could not be moved by ‘His Baby Girl’ leaving Only her name on a stone; or be jolted by the father finding in ‘Sarah, Travelling’ heroin’s persistent point staring back from a young girl’s eyes,.  The book is dedicated to his wife Susan and many of the poems touch on their life together.  In ‘Elegy’ the widower poet becomes her residue of pain, left alone in rooms with her laughter stilled, filled with unanswerable silence.  Poetry can be cathartic, and there is much here to help us understand and purge the pain of loss as those we love slowly edge into the dark.  John Plevin.

Poor Tom’s Revenge, poems by Brian Fewster.  An A5 size, 36 page, stapled booklet with a full colour cover.  Published in November of year 2002 by: Poor Tom’s Press, 89a Winchester Avenue, Leicester, LE3 1AY.  Price £3.00, ISBN 0-9543371-0-7.

tick..tick..tick. If you consider this booklet as an intricate pocket watch fashioned from meticulous metal you have the idea of it. Beautifully fashioned metre and rhythm encapsulates fine workmanship on the subjects of death, marriage, love, poverty, literary references and people watching. “The Committee” is a poem I laughed out loud to, recognising the people therein from my own experience; “It isn’t hard to eavesdrop/ on their deliberation/ where measured praise is condiment/ to overall damnation.”  tick..tick..tick. These are crafted poems but often surprising and not (as often rhyming poetry can be) at all contrived. Hold them to your ear for pleasure as sometimes old-fashioned pocket watches can be comforting and enjoyable just to listen to.  Lachlan Robertson.

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52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, or how reading modern poetry can change your life, by Ruth Padel.  A slightly larger than A5 size, perfect-bound book, with 272 pages and a full-colour cover.  Published during year 2002 by Chatto & Windus, London; ISBN 0-701-17318-1.  Price £12.99.  Available from high street book stores.

Ruth Padel’s newspaper column sets out to make poetry accessible to the people.  The present volume presents a historical overview of techniques and approaches, including the political dimension of modern British poetry with its obligatory reference to Thatcher.  She stresses that poetry is primarily there to be read, then presents a detailed analysis of themes, language, rhythms and structures.

Padel, herself an established poet, is never afraid to state her view of the meaning of a poem.  Some of the discussions of individual poems contain so much detail that readers might be overwhelmed and unable to formulate their own response.  The book is also an interesting anthology of modern poets, some well-known, some less so.  It is to be dipped into rather than to be read in one go, but taken over a period of months it will leave you better informed and better able to analyse new poems.  Ingrid Riley.

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That Time of Life, poems by Tom Kelly with illustrations by Jack Rickard.  An A5 size, 34 page, perfect-bound book with a 2-colour cover.  Published during August year 2002 by K.T. Publications, 16 Fane Close, Stamford, Lincolnshire, PE9 1HG.  ISBN 0-907759-63-7.  Price £1.75, (£2 by post; overseas £3).  Part of the Kite Modern Poetry series.

Tom Kelly paints a bleak picture of Tyneside life in this hard-hitting, gritty collection. His poems are brutally short and sparing in their imagery. You have to turn up your collar as the wind whips around the verses, straight off the North Sea. There is a large dose of 1950’s Sillitoe in Kelly’s work. Debt collectors, alcohol abuse, domestic violence and redundancy partner recurring thoughts of suicide. Cheery stuff, but, before we ring Tyneside Social Services, there is something more subtle here, a bitterness tinged with love for his stage and players. The writing is solid and good and as a social history it works very well but one has to query whether this is a contemporary view of life in The North East?

When I last visited Newcastle, the placing of tables and chairs on the sunlit pavements signalled Champagne lunches, not evictions. Dick Stewart.      

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The Bedsit, poems by Pat Jourdan.  An A5 size, 35 page, stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover: ISBN 0-9542399-0-3 . Published during year 2002 by Motet Press, 17 Sea Road, Galway, Ireland.  Price £3 / €3.

With Pat Jourdan’s poetry we are back in the sixties living in Bedsitland with the ‘nothing people’ – mixed memories for this reviewer.   Life in the margins, living ‘hand to mouth’ come into focus in her terse, sharply observed poetry.  Although many of the poems are set in the sixties, I suspect not much has changed, her bedsitters may have moved to the suburbs but only to make room for newcomers desperate in turn to make their mark.  For a moment we can share their life, join them at the Greek Café for ‘a slice of grease and steam’, observe the Hampstead laundry girls with their hands deep in the ‘discarded signs of peoples’ lives’, or ‘wander off in fancy dress’ from the local Oxfam Shop.  If you still look back with longing to the sixties, if you like poetry that is about people, the tos and fros of relationships, spiced with a little self-mocking irony, then ‘The Bedsit’ is worth a visit.  John Plevin.

In The Spirit of Wilfred Owen, a new anthology of poems from The Wilfred Owen Association, 2002.  An A5 size, 76 page, perfect-bound book with a full colour cover, ISBN 0-9542302-0-5, edited by Merryn Williams, production by Michael Grayer. Price ?  Further information may be obtained from: Michael Grayer, Wilfred Owen Association, c/o 17 Belmont, Shrewsbury, SY1 1TE.  www.1914-18.co.uk/owen

Published by The Wilfred Owen Association to coincide with the anniversary of the birth of Wilfred Owen, 18^th March 1893, this collection of poems contains works of quality from many poets: famous, known, and anonymous.  It reminded me to look again at the works of Wilfred Owen and recapture the humility of comparison –

“Courage was mine and I had mystery,

Wisdom was mine and I had mastery;

To miss the march of this retreating world

Into vain citadels that are not walled.”

These forty six poets each remember, and recall something of their own, by comparison.  Each gives something of worth, valid to the remembrance of Wilfred Owen’s experience of compassion and sacrifice.   They touch depths, some of them; others re-live places or pieces of life or time, but all sing a song of meaning, unique to poetry.  The book is a widening of experience, and relevant in many ways.   Janie Thomas.

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Quiggins At The Conference, poems by Colin Robinson.  An A5 size, 37 page booklet with a stapled 2-colour cover, ISBN 0-903610-29-9. Published during year 2002 by New Hope International, 20 Werneth Avenue, Gee Cross, Hyde, Cheshire, SK14 5NL. Price £6; €10; US $9

I confess that I didn’t take to this collection. Perhaps there were too many poems that had no hidden depths. I liked the cleverness of the rhyme as in “One-Way System” (just count the number of –ack endings), the structure of  “Con-Man” or the humour of;  “An Empiricist Speaks” (The world, in short, is awash with epistemological – Hoo-hah in which phenomena flutter away). And yet, I found many of the poems trite and sometimes clunky as if he had expelled his inspiration at the beginning of the poem but couldn’t sustain either our interest or his to the end. Good ideas have been beaten to death and by the time you reach pages 16 to 19, the long lines of dense text require a gritting of the teeth and a determination to finish not normally associated with pleasure. Undoubtedly the writing is assured and confident. However, the work left me cold and untroubled by the need to read it again.   Lachlan Robertson.

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Poetry Today, the literary quarterly of Poets Foundation, Vol. V No. 3, July – September 2001.  A 61 page, A5 size booklet with a 2-colour cover. Reg. No. S/85496 of 1996-97, RNI Reg. No. 66106/96.  Editor: Pradipkumar Chaudhuri.  Editorial address: 8/20 Fern Road, Kolkata 700 019, India.  E-mail: poets_foundation@yahoo.co.in. Publication purchase price, Rs 25.00, US $3.00.

This Indian based English language quarterly is the voice of the Poets Foundation and contains poems, essays and letters from around the globe but mainly from the Indian sub continent. From a cynical English perspective these rather formally written poems come across as incurably romantic, full of colour, life, high ideals and beautiful abstract thoughts. I loved them all. Narsingh Dev Jamwal’s Brainwash speaks literally of life and death.  ��When he saw his innocent family’s/ Dead bodies /Soaked in blood / He sank in fear but mustered /All his courage to ask /Are you a man or a Satan? / And prompt came another bullet / That pierced the inquirer’s breast.” Kederath Singh Words Do Not Die Of Cold… “By and by/I started enjoying/This game/One day/For no reason/I stoned/A beautiful word.” Special mention goes to Braja Chattopadhyay’s essay The Uprooted, a devastating and thought provoking account of life after partition.

A revelation, highly recommended .     Dick Stewart.

John Fuller, collected poems, slightly larger than A5 size perfect-bound book, with 469 pages and full colour cover. Published by Chatto & Windus, London on 4^th July 2002, ISBN 0-701-16328-3, price £15.00, available from high street booksellers. 

John Fuller has published 14 volumes of poetry.  His 1996 collection ‘Stones and Fires’ won the Forward Poetry Prize.  The 480 pages of his ����Collected Poems’ map the output and development of a master craftsman over a period of some 50 years.  His poetry embraces an impressive width of form and subject, showing a lasting affection for sonnets which are often the stanzas in his longer poems.  Through his poetry we come to recognise a learned man concerned with morality and truth, but also a man of humour not averse to mocking the pompous.

Look at this: after one glance,

A guarded pair standing akimbo

Are just about to dance!

Here indeed is an invitation.  This opening stanza from his dedication poem could also apply to us, the guarded readers.  All those with a love of poetry should accept.  But make it a slow dance, there is much here to be savoured.   John Plevin.

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Now and for a Time, poems by John Fuller, A5 size, perfect-bound 65 page book, with full colour cover.  Published by Chatto & Windus, London on 4^th July 2002, ISBN 0-701-17351-3, price £8.99, available from high street booksellers.

A well-known academic poet weaves music, dreams and dancing into this new collection. It begins with “Birth Bells for Louisa” in a well-crafted style: an incantation as well as a dance of the circle of life.  The poems are about permanence contrasting with the rightness of change. There are wonderful metaphors; “strokes of tennis like chalk breaking” and formal dance like poems. Some to me are the closest a poem has come to the making of musical sounds. There are personal poems of the physical inevitability of aging and observations of how newborns see with no preconceptions. Poems about universal music that grounds us at our own beginnings and the mixing of senses as in a dream.  Sometimes I am lost in the personal reminisces and often too many literary references for my taste. However, it is a book that I will spend more time on in a determination to squeeze out every clever structure, rhyme and reference that I can. Lachlan Robertson

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We Do Not Want Your Civilization, poems by Con McCloskey, A5 size, perfect-bound, 66 page book with a two colour cover.  Published in year 2001 by Dog Day Books, P.O. Box 4, Hounslow, TW3 1DX, ISBN number 0-9540837-0-9, price £4.99.

I think I must have skipped over the negativity of the title to this book initially, and been more impressed by Walt Whitman's introductory quotation to the author's intention in his poetry:

This is what you shall do.  Love the earth and the sun and the animals. Despise riches. Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book and dismiss whatever insults your soul.

Then e e cummins came to mind because of the small i denoting one person's example in re-examining his inherited linguistic authority.  This book is another person's attempt to follow that crusade, and the poetry describes the pains and penalties of his progress. But it does so on a rather shallow subject level. Con McCloskey spends more time despising riches than in exploring, first, what he is despising; for there are riches on many levels.  It's too much to say that his poetry insults my soul, but I feel that the contradiction between the negativity of the title and the humility of the diminished ego suggested by lower case "I" is never resolved in his words. . .    Janie Thomas.

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Poetry Express, a quarterly newsletter from Survivor’s Poetry, Summer 2002, Number 14, an A4 size, 15 page stapled booklet with a 3-colour cover; editor(s) Joanna Cupano, James Ferguson, Roy Holland.    Alison Combes is the director of  Survivors’ Poetry.  Poetry Express is distributed free around the UK and is sponsored by London Arts, Lloyds TSB Foundations and The Arts Council of England. Registered charity number 1040177. Editorial address: Survivors’ Poetry, Diorama Arts Centre, 34 Osnaburgh Street, London, NW1 3ND.   E-mail address: survivor@survivorspoetry.org.uk  On joining the mailing list you receive Poetry Express free of charge.

The blurb on the on cover states, “Survivors’ Poetry is a national literature and performance organisation dedicated to promoting poetry by survivors of mental distress through workshops, performances, readings and publications to audiences all over the UK . . .”  

I found this publication to be non-pretentious, approachable, readable, and crammed with worthwhile poems, reviews, and information about forthcoming Survivors’ live-mic events.  John Horder’s ‘Ten Days With Stevie Smith,’ was a particularly interesting feature.  JH befriended, (and interviewed), Stevie Smith during the sixties. He states, “Why Survivors? One of Stevie’s main themes, highlighted in her best known poem, ‘Not Waving But Drowning,’ was her madness.   This seemed caused by . . .” The underlying, (obvious), feeling that emanates from JH’s article, is that he is a Stevie Smith fan and through knowing her personally gained a deeper appreciation of the poet than most.  I was amused to read about Stevie’s views regarding Oxbridge dons!

To summarise: stimulating, useful, free.    David Pike

The Impact of Steel, poems from a lifetime by Ken Kirk, A5, 28 page stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover, ISBN 0 903610 28 0.  Published during year 2001 by New Hope International, 20 Werneth Avenue, Gee Cross, Hyde, Cheshire, SK14 5NL.  Price £4.00, or £5.00 (ex-UK).

 Denis Healey said: “This moving collection shows how a sensitive man can use poetry to share in the feelings of others at home and abroad,” and I don’t think I can better that as an appreciation of this poetry.  Ken Kirk writes with passion about political subjects.  The actual subjects might not be political, (in fact they cover a crippled musician, an African student, a radio broadcast on Angola, and his personal reaction to music on February 6^th / 7^th 1998, as well as the impact of steel, and night shift), but he writes to champion the underclass universally, from Scotland, with fire in his belly. 

It is characterful writing, in a traditional mode, in historic perspective - casting a cynical eye on hypocrisy; and good, for it meets its purpose.   Janie Thomas

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Life Principles: Meanderings of a Dragon, sixteen life principles as viewed by Hank Sohata, A5 ring-bound book with three-colour cover, 33 card pages, some pages have colour illustrations / colour fonts, ISBN number 0-9538321-0-4. Published during year 2002 by Vibe Publications, P.O. Box 187, Ashford Middlesex, TW15 3ZA.  Price UK £10, (US $14).

Hank Sohata has distilled his life's learning into these well-chosen words.  He has arranged sixteen Life Principles – his own clarity distilled from life’s chaos - into beautiful poetry, and graceful calligraphy.  Each principle is thrice illustrated – symbolically visually, philosophically in poetry, and explained simply, linking ideas by footnotes.   The choice is apt, as steps on a ladder - though they are not linear - and he has explained them meaningfully. Somewhere here you will find where you are; the place you have reached on your journey.  For anyone on his own meandering path, whether that of a dragon, a dog or a monkey, Chinese or Cosmic, these principles are practical and the words are wise.  They will be comfort for some; companion friendship for others, poetry and inspiration for more seekers. It is a worthy addition to any literary library, philosopher’s mind or poet’s bookshelf.   Janie Thomas

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Poetry Today, A Literary Quarterly of Poets Foundation, A5 size, 61 page booklet with a glued spine and 3-colour cover, Vol. V. No. 2, April - June 2001.  Editor and editorial address: Pradipkumar Chaudhuri, 8/20 Fern Road, Kolkata 700 019, India.  Subscription price 80 rupees, or $10 US dollars.

Poetry Today is published to under-gird and nurture creative writers in India, (writing within the English tradition).  The journal contains samples of both the vernacular and mainstream traditions in English poetry and critical errors in title and name spellings. 

There are differing styles of poetry from poets of many cultures including, ‘The Black Boy From Brooklyn’ by Krishna Dhar, “. . . my unwed mother has gone to Manhattan to work . . .” or Amrita Ganguly’s, ‘Of Mice and Men,’ . . . “I wonder if his mother/Eventually made it to the warfront -/She would have been a terrorist/par excellence,” to the romantic clichés of ‘Oh Night, My Love! by Pernendu Moitra, “do not take way the life and sun . . .” or K.M Kale’s, ‘The Song of Silence;’ the poem suggests a real attempt to enfold a more classical ontological view into an Indian syntax.  There are western exceptions to this, namely from poets such as Blair Ewing (USA) and Kevin Bailey (UK).  In ‘WASP’,’ Kevin Bailey’s turn of phrase is taunting.

N. Murugaiyan’s article on “Indian English As A Medium Of Creative Expression,” is a brief review of arguments for and against being multi-lingual in developing literature and cultural identity.  The article elucidates the poetry / language context but it does not deter me from seeing the beauty of literature in transition, with fantastic worlds from which to draw new innovation.   Chezia Thompson Cager.

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And To The Republic, poems by Blair Ewing, A5 size, 111 page, perfect-bound book with a three colour cover.  Published during year 2002 by

The Argonne House Press, P.O. Box 21069, Washington DC 20009, USA.  ISBN 1-887641-58-0, price $14.95 USA, $19.95 Canada, UK?

American poet Blair Ewing was a student of ‘Government and Politics’ in the Eighties so it should come as no surprise that the recurring themes in this book are of Politics, The Constitution, Law, Religion and Money. All forbidden territory at the English tea table.  I was more interested in the rather less intellectual poems that lay outside these areas, for example ‘Call It In The Air’ “I once had a notion that I was an ocean and the clouds were merely my fish…” and ‘A Thousand Years From Now. “When the air is weak / trees unknown / nothing remains /but the will of the strong.”

Blair Ewing is a stylish writer and quite capable of ��stirring the soul’ but I found I was frequently neither entertained, moved or inspired by this worthy but rather dry collection.  Dick Stewart.

Iota, edition #57, poetry quarterly, poems from contributors; published during year 2002, ISSN 0266-2922, A5, 48 page, stapled booklet with a 2-colour cover, annual subscription £10 or £2.50 each. Editor:  David Holliday, 67 Hady Crescent, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, S41 0EB.   Note: there will be a new editor with effect from edition #59?

Announcing the editors’ retirement (and the new editors arriving)  in this issue causes me to reflect on the passing of the old order and the burgeoning of the new. The booklet is packed full of clear verse with often simple points to make, mythic, timeless, of emperors more forbade than forbidding and modernity driving away the ancient. The presentation is traditional, the content pleasing and the whole package feels at once tired or perhaps comforting, depending on the mood of the reader. Poetry is changing fast. It is now mainstream. Poets become film makers, the internet is the new source of a tidal wave of writing, throwing both the flotsam and the exhilarating onto our mental shores. I can’t help feeling that small pamphlets such as this need to be refreshed from time to time and become more relevant, more integrated with the changes in the world of poetry and more challenging. We should all be grateful that there are still dedicated people out there willing to keep pamphlets such as Iota alive and definitely kicking when the old order passes on the torch

P.S. In that spirit, lets give our own David Pike a big round of applause and encourage more of you to come along to the quarterly get-togethers he organises here in Wiltshire and we’ll keep the fire of versifiers aflame.  Lachlan Robertson.                  (Blushing deeply - Ed)

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Prosodeas, a collection of contemporary poetry that rhymes, by Keith Morton; an A5, 82 page, perfect-bound book with 3-colour cover,

ISBN 0-9540628-0-9, £6.00.   Published during year 2001 by Linear B Publishing, P.O. Box 17162, Edinburgh, EH11 2WT.

Keith Morton is a novelist and a poet.  Prosodeas, his second book of poems, is packed with energetic rhyming poetry that calls out to be read aloud in a smoky cellar where you are sitting pretty with the sounds of the city filtering in from the pavement above.  The opening lines of his ‘Leave her alone to groove’ give us the flavour:

‘The milk of human kindness turned slowly to hate…

… soured by being bought, again and again,

then kept on the shelf, well past her sell-by date:

mollycoddled by a man who couldn’t say when.’

 The poems track with effortless ease modern urban life:  lost loves, consumerism, loutish behaviour (union jackass lads), dot.com technology (hackers with backers) -  all themes to remind us of our desires and frailties.  Much of the poetry written today seems all colour and no content.  Keith Morton’s poems aren’t like this – they bite.  My recommendation – buy it.   John Plevin

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Slow Air, poems by Robin Robertson.  A5 size, 62 page, hardback book with a full colour cover, ISBN 0-330-49112-1, £7.99.  Published in February 2002.  Publisher:  Picador / Pan Macmillan Ltd., 20 New Wharf Road, London, N1 9RR, www.picador.com .   Available from high street booksellers.

Robertson’s collection offers a wide range of themes, rare in their variety and complexity.  Most poems show a rich and dense interplay of simile, almost always original and effective, ‘. . . the cough of an axe and the lowing roar of distant chainsaws.’  Less frequently he uses metaphor to a similar purpose, ‘The firewood’s sap buzzing like a trapped fly.’

Adaptations from Rilke and Dante also feature, for example, The Panther,’ where the most arresting image, ‘like whisky swilled to the neck of the bottle then back on itself,’ is not adapted from Rilke but original to Robertson.  In the same way he uses Rilke’s ‘Flamingos’ as no more than a springboard, soon developing his own images and ideas.  Here, as elsewhere, the poet uses animals to reflect human experience and emotions.  ‘Anxiety 2, 3 and 5’ are not so much poems as records of dreams, but again, full of the poet’s characteristic dense imagery.

This is a selection to return to regularly.  Each examination reveals new layers of meaning.    Ingrid Riley.

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Thistle & Transformation, a collection of poems by Dr Radhamani Sarma, A5 book with colour cover, 43 pages, ISBN 81 86056 25 4, published during 1998 by Writers’ Forum, The Quest C1, Harmu Housing Colony, Ranchi 834012, India. Price: Rs 80/-

An Indian academic, Dr. Radhamani has produced a book of intriguing verse. Somehow the formality of her English and the cadences of speech (perhaps where English is not a first language) are used (or is this by chance a happy accident) to keep you alert and aware of the otherness of the experience? It is charmingly archaic in places as in; "Whither goest thou independence!" and downright funny in others as in; "On the viewless wings of poesy . . ." and "Day and night vie with each other –– like kids kiddying in the bus over the window seat." I enjoyed this collection. And oddly enough, I also enjoyed its smell, oily and old-fashioned. So two sensory experiences for the price of one.  Lachlan Robertson

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AABYE, issue C, NHI Vol. 21 #6, poems from contributors, A5 stapled two-colour booklet with 48 pages, ISSN 1461-6033, published during year 2002 by New Hope International, 20 Werneth Avenue, Hyde, Cheshire, SK14 5NL. Price £4.50 (UK) £6 (ex-UK). Edited by Gerald England. Cover design by Steve Leighton, additional artwork by Charlotta Bergkvist.

If you have a working knowledge of The Classics or blitz The Times Crossword you may enjoy unlocking the highbrow element of this final edition of AABYE . Check out "You Were To Write Than Just Talk" TN Muthee. Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, (it’s life Jim, but not as we know it . . . ), there are some poems of great quality including Dock Street by Deborah Tyler–Bennett . . . "Waiting was conversation’s pause for breath or stranger’s wrist mistakenly brushed …" This poem reminded me of Wole Soyinka’s "Telephone Conversation," great stuff . I was also impressed by "If You Could Take Me There" by Clare Shaw, stunning in its imagery, beautiful and simple. "If you could take me there now , I would be clear to you as bright water…" A mixed bag, some real gems and a fitting Last Hurrah for AABYE.  Dick Stewart

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Pendlesong, a collection of poems by John H. Hope.  An A5, 44 page stapled booklet with full colour cover, price £3.99, ISBN 1-903783-02-X, published and printed during year 2001 by Hudson History, Procter House, Kirkgate, Settle, North Yorkshire, BD24 9DZ.

A first collection in which the poet invites the reader to share his feelings for that area in Lancashire ‘twixt Burnley and Clitheroe’ known as Pendle. Readers should come armed with a map and a dictionary - hands up those who have heard of ‘shawm and ‘krumshorn’. And what are we to make of ‘Tha can’t Put Pockets I’ Shrahds’? Odd words aside what comes through these Pendle poems is a harsh landscape and a dark history. The cut-purse in ‘Annel’s Cross’ hanging rags on bird-picked limbs; the half wit ‘Billy’ with his simian slouch of gantry shoulders, are not sights for the faint hearted. I for one would be scurrying to the other side of the road where no doubt I would be washed away as ‘Pendle Water’ tumbles cars and casks like beer cans.

John Hope’s poetry is sprinkled with striking local images but this is not enough to give the poetry a wider appeal. Although I am tempted to sidle up to a Pendle pub landlord and ask if he has any pockets for my ‘shrahds,’ just to find out what would happen.

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Song Cycle, poems by Jim Mangnall, A5 stapled booklet with full colour cover, 26 pages.  Published during year 2001, ISBN 0-9539217-1-9, £3.00. Published by Driftwood Publications, 5 Timms Lane, Formby, Merseyside, L37 7DW.  Supported by North West Arts Board. 

This collection is original and interesting.  Most of the booklet is taken up by the title work, ‘Song Cycle,’ which consists of 14 poems, varying widely from the amusing and slightly inconsequential to the heartbreaking, in which Mangnall uses clichés, and in each case at least one of the titles of popular songs from the forties and fifties, while subtly changing and adapting them to create something original.  ‘And a song went out of my heart and hit that old wilderness right where it hurts.

This approach of taking something familiar as a basis for something new is also apparent in the ironically titled, ‘Conquistador,’ where the sound of the bottle touching the rim of the glass is enough in the poet's mind to shift the Mexican waitress back into the past of her own culture and its cruel rituals.  In ‘Icarus,’ too, the familiar is given a new slant in the last lines: ‘so many strange, illusive things to find and having found them fall.'

All in all, a collection which is subtler than a first read might suggest.  One to return to and find new gems each time.  Ingrid Riley

Even The Beggars Have Pearls, poems by Peter Wyton, foreword by Wincey Willis.  Slightly larger than A5, perfect-bound book with full colour cover, 63 pages, ISBN 0-7524-1921-8, £6.99 UK, published during year 2001 by Tempus Publishing Ltd., The Mill, Brimscombe Port, Stroud, Glos., GL5 2QD.

Peter Wyton, retired from the Air Force and living in the Cotswolds, is no stranger to the pages of Pulsar. In this bumper collection of diverse, sometimes bizarre poems we are transported from anecdotes of Paul McCartney and a “local beauty” in Stroud – 1962, to caravan watching in the Middle East - Regular as Clockwork. Wyton fronts as a man deeply interested in history and the natural world.  Catching the eye:-  Duskfall - “The day lies derelict. Low wattage light of evening permeates flat farming land…” Night Roost - comparing his parent care with guillemots… “Tiredness and teething gel combine to pacify at length, my fledgling boy.”   There are several intriguing poems inspired from his military service including the nostalgic and reflective -Taking The Shine Off and - The Unkindest Defence Cut Of All  …“I’m the last man left in the Air Force…”  Relax and enjoy.  Dick Stewart.

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The Lust For Blueprints, a collection of poems by Jody Azzouni, A5 perfect-bound book with a three colour cover, ninety-six pages, contains two full-colour illustrations by Catherine Weaver, ISBN 0-922558-07-8, originally published during 1999 by The Poet’s Press, 95 Hope Street #6, Providence, RI02906, USA. This edition was re-printed during year 2001.  Price $12.95.

                It's an energetic title: "The Lust for Blueprints".  In a poem called "Meditation"  -

Sex, the helpful grope, the lust for blueprints

exchanged in the heat of the moment.

Then a cigarette, leg dangling over the edge,

something new deep inside

whispering divide and conquer. 

It shows the dichotomy in the phrase itself, and between it and the title: a shallow cynicism symptomatic of a searching, frustrated because of looking, perhaps for the wrong thing in the wrong place.  That doesn't spoil the pleasure found in the poems, which was, for me, a delight in words and phrases and an energetic comment on life through "dark imagery and playful erudition".  But I find in this, and her other poems, an American naivety: a search for deep sea treasure in four foot, rather than full fathom five, of spiritual, emotional and psychological waters.  Janie Thomas.

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Quiet Myth, poems by Susan Hamlyn, A5 stapled booklet with two colour cover, cover design by Olivia Hamlyn, 16 pages, ISBN 1-871397-19-7, published during year 2000 by Mattock Press, 12 Mattock Lane, London, W5 5BQ.  Price £2.50.

Eleven poems from Greece; snippets of memory, the places, people, and the ever present intrusive tourist, make up the poems in ‘Quiet Myth,’ and permeating throughout, albeit with the occasional sour note, the ‘voice’ of the poet.  Susan Hamlyn stands back and observes the life around her.  She is sympathetic to the Greeks, we see this in: Panayotis, a gardener  in ‘Weeding’ at the theatre of Delphi, surrounded by babbling barbarians, with their offerings of an empty can of coke left in the nearest convenient votive shrine; and, Evangelia in ‘Hubris,’ hiding her eyes from a sea that had taken her silent fisherman husband.  The only tourist that gains her admiration is the long lost Englishwoman in ‘Lady with Tomatoes’ who straying from wisdom fell down a ravine and melted into layered leaves and tangling stems, a useful contribution to the local ecology, but a hard act to follow.  Susan Hamlyn’s poems are rooted in the past, the present seems an intrusive visitor.  If you have little time for today these poems will give you solace.  John Plevin.