Pulsar Book Reviews 2024 & 2025
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Pulsar Publication Review Panel:
David Pike, Andrew Barber, Eve Kimber, Will Daunt, Carla Scarano D'Antonio, Anthony Wade Please note, sadly, Carla passed away on 10th March 2023, RIP.
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If you have a newly printed poetry publication you would like to have reviewed then send your book / booklet or CD to: Pulsar Editor, 90 Beechwood Drive, Camelford, Cornwall, PL32 9NB, UK. It may take a while for a review to appear on this page; patience is required. Note: the editor may elect to refuse to review, depending on content. DP.
Note: all reviews contain the written personal thoughts of individual reviewers. Pulsar Poetry Webzine may not necessarily agree with statements made or personal opinions stated therein.
Most recent reviews are at the top, filter downwards for earlier reviews.
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Book & Booklet Reviews
Pulsar Poetry Webzine
Edition #62 (114) March 2025
Index of Reviewed Publications
Pulsar Poetry Webzine #62
(March 2025). Please see below.
Prelude, poems by Judith Priestman.
Dark Matter, poems by Mike McNamara
Precious and Impossible, poems by Anthony Joseph.
The Epic of Cader Idris, poems by Samatar Elmi.
I cannot be good until you say it, poems by Sanah Ahsan.
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Prelude, poems by Judith Priestman. An 8.75” x 5” paperback book with a full colour cover and 85 pages. Prelude: A Banbury Title published 30th September 2024 by Jayde Design. Honor Oak, London. JaydeDesign@CompuServe.com ISBN: 978-0-9575764-5-2 £14.00.
This is a very personal, and searching, view of Priestman’s life experiences, beginning with child’s eye views of her hometown and moving on to her family life, and her own development through childhood and teenage years. A note explains that “Prelude is the first part of a Banbury trilogy, an element in the project Testimony.” The opening poems are about Banbury, her hometown, building up in layers, like an onion, its place in the world, the waters of the canal mud brown, not blue like David Hockney’s California; its reputation, clinched by the phallic appearance of the church tower, as “the easy-going,
harshly-outcomed town of pregnancies at fourteen,
unemployment, two more children when you’re just nineteen.”
Priestman’s own feelings for the town are balanced between a sense of belonging; vivid moments, experiences, memories, dreams, touched by horror and shock; and at other moments an experience of transcendence, that promises “something great and kind and clean, untouched by all this muck.”
The sequence moves on through Priestman’s childhood and memories of family members, building a picture of a close-knit Methodist family, Sunday School, rows of jars of sweets in the family shop, football on the lawn with Granny in goal in her hat and apron. Long, miserable spells in hospital, fear of dying taking hold in the long lonely hours, as in those days visiting was very restricted, even for children. Then, her protective and understanding mother actually did die. Priestman’s grief bleeds through the lines, shattering and prolonged. “I have never held another body in a bed
since I held you. Dead. Death. My first, my last embrace.
The bed no longer – was it ever? – somewhere soft
and safe for sleep and sex, but from then on
the place of death, not abstract death, but you…”
Priestman chronicles her teenage life, experiences and discoveries, grief not withstanding. She conjures an intelligent dreamer, uneasy in her persona as a girl, becoming aware of other ways of being and of society’s disapproval of people who are different. She has courage and ambition. I would be interested to read Part 2.
Review by: Eve Kimber
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Dark Matter, poems by Mike McNamara. An 9.75” x 8.00” paperback book with a full colour cover and 46 pages. Published 2024 by Aji Press, Sabre Lake Publishing, Minnesota, USA. ISBN 978-1-953033-05-05 £5.00
I had to read this several times to be sure I liked it for the right reasons. I needed to be sure that I liked it because the poetry was good, and not because it reminded me so much of my own life and family.
I know the world Mike McNamara describes very well. As a child, feeling obliged to believe something but not having it in me. As a teenager, buying drugs on council estates. As a young man, moving to a new country. As a middle-aged man, watching my father die, and having to put my mum in a home. I well understand the family stories that feel like memories, because I’d heard the legends of my own family so many times, I felt like I was there. Maybe these experiences are universal, but I don’t usually read about them in books of poetry.
The poetry itself is very good, incidentally, and the author has a lovely turn of phrase. ‘In the kingdom of the fearful, the intrepid oaf is king,’ ‘cute middle-class face lift white as my working-class Irish arse,’ ‘a nurturing reality.’
This was clearly written by a curious and erudite man - the title is a scientific idea, and there are references scattered throughout to the likes of Cicero, Rimbaud, Cezanne and Louis MacNeice.
Like a lot of expat Irishmen, Mr McNamara has a strong yearning for his homeland. But that’s the only cliche in this collection. I found it to be a very original take on a life that, to me at least, felt very familiar.
I’ll close this with a snippet from Things That Are Difficult: Like Berbers of these urban ghettos, we pass, shadowless, a trail of Hansel and Gretel pistachio shells silently split and spilt, bitter confetti celebrating those vows and promises of the clueless dead. There is just too much that we do not know here.
Review by: Andrew Barber
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Precious and Impossible, selected poems by Anthony Joseph. Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022. A 5” x 7.75”paperback book with a full colour cover and 259 pages. Published by Bloomsbury Poetry on 26th September 2024. ISBN: 978-1-5266-5121-1 £9.99
This is a big book as befits a selection from thirty years of writing and showcasing poems from each of Joseph’s five collections, together with ten previously unpublished poems plus selected lyrics written as his own lyrics to songs heard, ‘song poems,’ and is delightfully illustrated with drawings and photo images. The excellent introduction by Professor Lauri Scheyer (A Critical Perspective) is of invaluable help.
For readers unused to poetry in English that does not adhere fairly closely to the usual canon of forms and styles these poems can make for difficult reading as Joseph accesses the language sources of his childhood in Trinidad, where his Grandmother, who raised him when his parents divorced, often spoke a French Creole patois, for him a magical language, and the glossolalia experience witnessed in Baptist religious ceremonies that he attended as a child, together with his resistance to succumbing to the restraints of the colonising culture. This is particularly so with his earliest collections, the second of which, Teragaton, is surrealist and abstract and includes ‘europeisin myass,’ six pages of text in one undifferentiated block absent even one space between words, and yet is worth reading by allowing the mind to find its own path within the apparently impenetrable blackness of the text that soon reveals its sounds and sense.
Joseph moves to a more ‘accessible’ style in the later collections where he fully controls the inter play of his earlier language sources and the language of the colonising culture and produces poetry that is moving and often beautiful as he addresses issues carried from his childhood into adulthood, particularly his emotional and psychological relationship with his generally absent father, Albert, and his collection, Sonnets For Albert, is revealing and beautiful: “My father would be gone./ Months into mysteries./ … And while we waited/ the myth of him grew/“ (flack and hathaway); and on his death: “Your body lay in the sweet brown. The red church on the hill grew nervous in the noon./ …. We shall all be restored in this well of hours, eventually.” (the tumuli in Santa Cruz).
The section of Uncollected Poems also contains gems, such as: “a wife/ …. with/ the nape of a question for a neck.” (four shovels).
The final section is Selected Lyrics and the voices of the dispossessed and oppressed of all land are heard: “and the people call out for justice/ …. but we know guns are the teeth of democracy/ …. is so things does go in a money city/ when some people can’t touch the gold/“ (Kezi).
It is here also that the universal questioning voice of all migrants speaks: “He musta come here in black and white./ 1959, time longer than twine./ …. I was flung so far from any notion of nation./ How long do you have to live in a place/ before you can call it/ ‘Home’?” (Calling England Home).
Review by: Anthony Wade
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The Epic of Cader Idris, poems by Samatar Elmi. A 5” x 7.75” paperback book with a full colour cover and 99 pages. Published 2024 by Bloomsbury Poetry, www.bloomsbury.com
ISBN: 978-1-5266-7520-0 £9.99
THE EPIC OF CADER IDRIS is a collection of poems in which Samatar Elmi effortlessly combines seemingly disparate elements, such as the mythology of Britain with the rhythms of hip hop, or, as a Brit of Somali descent, the inbuilt tension between the anguish of diaspora and marginalization with an intimate relationship with and exploration of Britain’s landscape and past. The tone of his work is profoundly eclectic, with exquisite lyricism and musicality rubbing shoulders with philosophical thoughts and often acute observations of the minutiae and mundanity of life. Influences are varied, whether from Greek and Roman literature or Somali and British oral and bardic traditions, in particular the swirling mists of Celtic myths.
Elmi baldly refers to the racial prejudice he has experienced, and has indeed always fully expected to experience. STEP THIS WAY dispassionately states the resigned inevitability of such discrimination: “you look the part/black/brown, 5’4” to 6’6”, dreadlocks/to balding to bearded to bomb.” A bare, stunningly powerful image of this theme of marginalization and prejudice is provided in THE N WORD, which he sums up as “six black letters/on a white page.”
The harsh reality of diaspora, termed a “gift and curse” in THE SNAIL, echoes throughout this selection, and, using the image of the snail’s shell, Elmi describes “how our songs and laments resound/in our half-remembered houses/that we carry to forget, to carry on.”
Many of the poems are centred around the theme and image of home, and houses, what he calls “this hallowed, hollowed out home” in [ETYMOLOGIES]. HARGEISA explores the deprivation inherent within the marginalized experience of the diaspora, as epitomised by the condition of the houses lived in. On the other hand, ‘home’ is something more than the house, or even land, we inhabit; in SEED, Elmi writes that “home is the air we pass between us” and, later, “home is the air we keep within us.”
Quite a few poems dwell upon the theme of England, “this stitch of browning turf” (ALBION in [ETYMOLOGIES]), under this thematic umbrella of ‘home’, and his recognition that England is “the closest I will come/to finding my home.”
Elmi is enveloped by a multiplicity of heritage and roots, whether of marginalisation, being an object of prejudice or a love-hate relationship with England.
In THE EPIC OF CADAIR IDRIS, he addresses Idris, the giant figure of folklore, in a wonderful image where he blends the longevity of myth and a child’s awestruck observation of his/her father into an intimate and innate awareness of the individual’s role and expression within the annals of a land’s history and being: “Idris…we gazed up the never-ending bodies/of our fathers, to imagine you standing before us.”
If one poem illustrates the intense originality of Elmi’s work, for me it would be PORTRAIT OF COLOSSUS AS AN IMMIGRANT, which explores the exclusionary toxicity of the diaspora within terms of a Western heritage and history shared and embraced by both oppressor and victim. This is a collection of poems with a truly original and powerful voice.
Review by: Alan Hardy
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I cannot be good until you say it, poems by Sanah Ahsan. A 5” x 7.75” paperback book with a full colour cover and 100 pages. Published 2024 by Bloomsbury Poetry.
ISBN: 978-1-5266-6586-7 £9.99
There are many well-deserved plaudits for this book within www.sanahahsan.com. These give a far wider illumination than you will find here of the character and impact of Ahsan’s work.
Let’s concentrate on the diversity and wit of I cannot be good until you say it. Whether by default or design, the author’s anagrammatic name reflects their strikingly bold and often playful use of form and language.
Sometimes Ahsan’s work is disarmingly direct. A prose poem like ‘passport’ depicts all the awkwardness of an inter-generational, inter-racial encounter with a girlfriend’s grandmother whose prejudices are masked by idleness: “sorry I don’t understand why/ Muslims do that.”By contrast ‘shezada’ creates a touching picture of “my father” negotiating an alien and sometimes cruel culture as he: “…places bets on miracles: in Shangri-/London he buys a lottery ticket every day, my date of birth his//talisman.”
Despite its implied traumas, ‘disclosures’ plays upon the thrill of youthful misadventures where you: “… didn’t need a solicitor …sharpened god’s fingernail: scratched the dates/ off bus passes …/…tore dead tags from our tees in JD’s fitting rooms.” Those struck through words, like the largely-redacted page 63 or the QR code for an accompanying ‘listening room’ give off through their driven invention something of the visual energy of Tristram Shandy. This impression is developed through the addition of quirky photos and occasionally inserted snatches of Arabic text.
Ashan’s use of form reflects their extraordinary creative energy. Punctuation is largely replaced by (for example) supplely-varied indentations. Imagine these lines in ‘for those who could not’ as they step from left to right across the page, stretching the poem’s developed sense of pulsating inertia:
we wanted to love
the pissy rain or at least
ourselves forget to notice
we’re already drenched.
Or there is the content of the two-line stanzas of ‘ramadan’s greeting’ with their disjointed typographical devices that conjure the polarities of a fasting mindset:
in the vacant gut /we greet the god that is /
more god/ than the god we greet/ the wanting.
With its buoyant anger, untrammelled tenderness and animated craft, this book contains much more than the above, its imagery often reshaping subject matter as cubist paintings do. And it’s that rare kind of contemporary poetry that says something revelationary about faith.
Review by: Will Daunt
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Book & Booklet Reviews
Pulsar Poetry Webzine
Edition #61 (113) December 2024
Index of Reviewed Publications
Pulsar Poetry Webzine #61
(December 2024). Please see below.
Velvet, poems by William Fargason.
Selected Poems, by Geoff Cochrane.
John McAuliffe, selected poems.
Hatch, poems by Jenny Irish.
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Velvet, poems by William Fargason. A 9” x 6” paperback book with a full colour cover and 90 pages. Published 2024 by Curbstone Books / Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois. www.nupress.northwestern.edu ISBN 978-0-8101-4723-2 US $18.00
This emotive collection of fifty poems rises from a bedrock of male violence, and charts the poet’s journey in a culture where to be male was to embrace violence, to enjoy harm, where men routinely beat their wives and children, a great grandfather for whom a hanging was a social event where “beneath the branches his smile lit like a torch not even dressed in his white robes,” and a father ever ready to lift his fists and belt to vent his angers on his children, a father who would wash his son’s back in the bath and at bedtime apologise for getting soap again in his “small eyes” but never for using his belt on him “like he was driving a nail into the wall.”
In an Alabama where his whiteness was “an instrument of death” to anyone not white, this was a small boy who wanted to yell to save the deer trapped in the gunsight but couldn’t, its blood then smeared on his face, a boy given his first rifle aged six, who killed his first deer, a roe, aged ten, but who could see the beauty in the softness and colour of the velvet enfolding the antlers, ironically later harvested as treatment for the ankylosing spondylitis inherited from his abusive father, causing pain like each spinal bone “trying to join like a train fusing into one boxcar.” As he ages he conducts uneasy dialogues with his God, and the earlier violence of his life silently echoes in his intimate relationships with women. Finally, peace is found in love with a woman, but there is no peace with his father, a relationship slowly separating into silence and platitudes, a father who mellows with age but remains a dormant volcano still smelling of sulphur, where the sheen of its cooled black lava is almost “as beautiful as a smile,” while covering “what it has burned.”
This is a revealing recital movingly told in varying poetic forms that quietly damns male violence, condemns racist violence and the views and cultural corruption that promote both, exposes the lifelong harm that abuse engenders yet rings with the courage of a man who spent years unlearning the lesson that he had to become his father, for whom there is no place he can “run from my own prejudice” yet battles the lifelong siren song of “my Alabama” that keeps calling, a man striving to become whole, “as whole as sand together can be.” This poetry engendered sadness deeper than anger.
Review by: Anthony Wade
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Selected Poems by Geoff Cochrane. An 8.5” x 5.75” hardback book with a full colour cover and 239 pages. Published 31st July 2024 by Te Herenga Waka, University Press
Victoria University of Wellington. teherengawakapress.co.nz. Foreword by: Fergus Barrowman. ISBN 978-1-776-92120-1 £25.95
Geoff Cochrane was a writer moored to his New Zealand home city and hailed on national radio as ‘definitely the Wellington poet’. This substantial and attractively-presented volume demonstrates the wide scope and supple voice that he brought to an extensive body of work.
The book contextualises Cochrane’s achievements generously, with an editor’s foreword and the text of a 2003 interview with Damien Wilkins. Nevertheless, compared with this extensive, warm and humorous dialogue the poems look like a film alongside these introductory snapshots.
Cochrane’s persona is at the heart of the poems as it tracks and recaptures his world and– sometimes – its demons. As a young man, he rejected a Catholic upbringing and departed from his alcoholism. Scars remained, and yet their impact was complex. For example, in ‘The Rooming-House:’
Yes. And what I was after …
was the gorgeous condition of being
addicted to addiction.
In ‘Whispers’ the death of Cochrane’s father is described with intimacy and integrity. The last section reflects on his disappearing faith-heritage, characteristically capturing how the profound can be defined by the mundane:
I happen to know that the undertaker
is a piper in a pipe band.
This very afternoon I’ll see the priest
eating an ice-cream in a cinema complex.
Within these provocations Cochrane re-shapes and recolours his solitary yet gregarious, Spartan yet indulgent journey through life. An enticing lyricism underwrites everything, as in the spontaneity of ‘Postcard:’
Night snaps itself together.
Your visit is a postcard
from a distant, brilliant room
overlooking musical lawns.
And Cochrane is often speculative or playful. ‘Seven Pieces I’d Like to Have Written’ combines its wry title with the most concentrated of vignettes. In no. 5:
Couples do tennis. Tourist disembark
to photograph the roses.
A grief is an echo of a grief.
There are poems which imagine how the poet Bashō might travel through and respond to Cochrane’s world. ‘Bashō In The Bath’ has the master “in a ditch/ with tyres and shopping trolleys/ [where he] longs for mist and rain.”
Fergus Barrowman marshals the poems with care, via pages for Contents, Titles and First Lines. Yet the works’ chronology and provenance are left unclear, perhaps assuming that we know we’re following Cochrane’s sequence of writing. So be it. This is a fine retrospective, astutely assembled.
Review by: Will Daunt
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John McAuliffe, selected poems. A 9”x 6” paperback book with a full colour cover and 165 pages. First published in Ireland 2021 by The Gallery Press and edited by Peter Fallon 2022. Wake Forest University Press, Winston-Salem, NC 27109. WFUPRESS.WFU.EDU
ISBN 978-1-943667-04-8 (paperback). US $18.95
The first thing that strikes the reader about this book is how long it is. It’s not really a single book, but more a greatest hits collection from previous books - there are five included, published from 2002 to 2020, plus some that weren’t part of the original books, so it’s really a retrospective of a career in poetry.
Mr McAuliffe certainly has an ear for some marvellously memorable turns of phrase. ‘The fridge of what might have been.’ ‘Dustily numb.’ ‘The sound of ink.’ ‘A celloish withdrawal.’ Almost every poem has at least one such phrase, and some are full of them.
There are some really innovative ways of writing poems herein. ‘The Middle Kingdom: A Directory’ is written as a mock telephone directory, where searching for ‘receptions’ takes the reader on a complex and ultimately futile journey through a (hopefully) fictional Yellow Pages, as the journey ends at a local Conservative club, which specifically excludes receptions. This sort of wit and invention is present and correct throughout.
I think what makes this collection so interesting is the way that it showcases the author’s long career as a poet, and how time and travel have changed the way he writes. The early pieces, written when he was a young man in Ireland, are more personal and rooted in the detail of life. By the book 5, when he had moved to Manchester, they have taken on a different cast. I think ‘Horace, Naming the Days,’ almost at the end of the book, makes this clear. The 31st, and I’m at liberty, almost idle, paid in full and logged off, sending smoke across the real, burning for connection - Call over.
I think if there is one theme here, it’s that connection, that sense of belonging - how much had come from the past, and how much could come from the future.
Review by: Andrew Barber
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Hatch, poems by Jenny Irish. A 9”x 6” paperback book with a full colour cover and 74 pages. Published 2024 by Curbstone Books / Northwestern University Press. www.nupress.northwestern.edu ISBN 978-0-8101-4696-9 (paperback) and ISBN 978-0-8101-4697-6 (eBook). US $18.00.
Maintaining a quiet, informative tone throughout, at some points lyrical but always insistent, Jenny Irish leads her readers into an apocalyptic near future. The central figure is a metal womb, built as a machine to take over the function of incubating human infants through to birth, in a world where humans – and all living organisms – are becoming incapable of reproducing their species. The metal womb’s growing self-consciousness and urge to escape its predestined fate echo that of its human makers, and the sequence of prose poems switch between the experiences of the metal womb, the grim developments in the dying world of the future, and deep analysis of our present reality. Irish holds up a mirror to much that we take for granted – birth, motherhood, tiresome creatures such as bluebottles and silverfish, the history of midwifery, the tendency of many to cling to conspiracy theories in troubling times. She questions, sometimes directly but more often by implication, whether human kindness is dying out and why danger signs are repeatedly ignored. The metal womb listens to a group of men talking.
“She listens to them for a long, long time, because they stay, sunning their testicles, talking loudly for as long as there is light, and the metal womb wonders, truly, she wonders, why it is easier for these men to imagine vampires and tortured babies than it is to accept science, to admit their own complicity.”
The narrative that follows the metal womb rebounds with a delicate touch between other themes: Nicholas Culpeper the sensitive scientist and his involvement in the evolution of midwifery, fireflies in long grass, which fade and die if you collect them in jars, submarines and the history of evolution. Irish holds them all within an overarching feminist perspective, dissecting the actions and motivations of her characters with a spirit of acute, unsparing curiosity. The metal womb is kind in her hopes and intentions, but her actions lead to unintended disaster as surely as the acts of her human creators. This is a finely crafted and intelligent book, but only read it if you are feeling strong and able to respond to a call to action.
Review by: Eve Kimber
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Book & Booklet Reviews
Pulsar Poetry Webzine
Edition #60 (112) September 2024
Index of Reviewed Publications
Pulsar Poetry Webzine #60
(September 2024). Please see below.
In Ghostlight, poems by Ryan Wilson.
How To Drown A Boy, poems by J. Bruce Fuller,
Ancient Light, poems by Kimberly Blaeser .
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In Ghostlight, poems by Ryan Wilson. 6” x 9” paperback book with a full colour cover and 55 pages. Published 2024 by Louisiana State University Press, LSU Press paperback original, Isupress.org ISBN 978-0-8071-8129-4 £17.95
One of the interesting questions in poetry concerns rhyme. I’ve known a number of poets who said that nothing that rhymed could be serious poetry, and a number of poetry fans who said that nothing that didn’t rhyme could be any kind of poetry at all. Ryan Wilson is very much in Camp Rhyme.
There is something about this collection that reminds me of Douglas Adams - not the subject matter or the style, but the willingness to experiment with form. ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ is technically a sonnet - it has 14 lines that rhyme as they should, but the lines themselves differ wildly in length, metre, etc. This had the same flexibility as something like ‘the spaceships hung in the air in the way that bricks don’t.’
Heorot used a form I don’t think I’ve seen before. The poem is told in two columns, but the reader chooses how they read it. Column A, column B, or both combined. E.g,
The balefires burn.
Others are butchered.
Groped by our grief,
In the grizzled air
We have shrieked lamentations
Longing for a law
To punish the predator
Mr Wilson has a keen eye for absurdity as well, and is not afraid to take aim at sacred calves. I especially enjoyed The Feast of the Epiphany, about the three wise men and their trip to the nativity. So wise, as Jasper Carrott said, that someone said ‘oi, you three! Go follow that star.’ And so they did.
The version here is also humorous. This is the conclusion:
We lumbered day and night through desert places,
Incarcerated by pain, hunger, thirst,
Our one hope that hope held, in fact, no basis.
What doesn’t kill us only makes us stranger.
Among the oxen, sheep and pigs, we cursed
Our charts, and stared, lost, starving, in the manger.
This is a clever collection of poems, well chosen, with much to offer a student of form in poetry, or a general reader who enjoys a wry view of the world. I was impressed, and may be well be experimenting myself with some of the forms I found in this book.
Review by: Andrew Barber
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How To Drown A Boy, poems by J. Bruce Fuller. 6” x 8.5” paperback book with a full colour cover and 73 pages. Published 2024 by Louisiana State University Press, LSU paperback original, Isupress.org ISBN 978-0-8071-8128-7 $17.95
Stateside university presses continue to publish fine poetry, accessible but mature, intimate but compelling. Another exemplar is this raw but crafted reflection on a Louisiana upbringing and what it means to be a father, or a son.
The opening and title poem immerses the reader in the memories of a childhood full of often secret initiations. These are elemental and frightening and make the son:
… drink from your hands,
make him drink until he swells, make
him taste the salt and split nails,
cracked knuckles, bone, and blood.
Deftly Fuller uses a real memory to work as a metaphor for his own role as a son, to apply equally to behaviours as a dad, towards his own.
This is a book about the male condition. Where cruelty travelled with love through your upbringing, how do you acknowledge and reshape that for the better?
The poems’ father figure is both an arresting presence and a long-term absentee. He taught the narrator to ‘crunch’ and ‘crack’ the skulls of snakes and squirrels, or fish for the mysterious gar. But in ‘Remembering My Father Who Went Off To Work’ those vast gaps of childhood are captured through an adult imagining the time their parent spent away where:
…you pray for a flat,
clear horizon to show you
the way home, the faces
of your sons you’ve forgotten.
Fuller’s primary voice is assured and lucid. He slips skilfully into dialect too. The frequent use of Cajun/ Louisiana French embellishes the expansive sense of that state’s landscape, its levees, channels and floods. Most of the sections end with a piece called ‘….they said.’ These are largely unpunctuated memories of the colloquial aggressions heard in youth, some of them framing frights of passage. Of the father the fourth part says:
…they said he killed a man and that’s why he run off
and i remember the night and the kitchen sink and maman yelling
and the blood running down his face and i know it’s true.
Fuller challenges the reader to travel through captivating landscapes of childhood, expecting you to bring your own moral compass: to read and reflect upon where and who we come from.
Review by: Will Daunt
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Ancient Light, poems by Kimberly Blaeser. 7” x 9” paperback book with a full colour cover and 101 pages. Published 2024 by The University of Arizona Press. www.uapress.Arizona.edu ISBN 978-0-8165-5217-7 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8165-5218-4 (ebook), $17.95
Blaeser writes as an Indigenous poet in twenty-first century America. Her vision as an Anishinaabe woman, inheritor and living exponent of her people’s world view, history, traditions and knowledge, is her subject in this collection. Blaeser opens with the bleak history, desecrated burial mounds, massacre, enforced boarding school, the adjustments made by the survivors, seen even in something as simple and intimate as her mother brushing the child’s hair: “my silent promise not to flinch,
her huff of breath like squelched anger.
Neither wants to show the slippery trying –
how we two must entwine to balance
on one dark tendril of loss.”
She makes vivid creative use of images embedded in her work and concrete poems, using the forms of the child’s game “Hangman” in one poem to infuse a sense of corrupted innocence and horror. And she points out the irony of destroying the people who lived in harmony with the land, only to risk destroying the land itself through industrialisation and climate change. But then the poems turn, with “When we have lost enough,” towards the possibility that the survivors could “lift loss like a sail……half-mast and learn to steer.” Gradually the emphasis on living according to inherited wisdom gathers; more and more, animals, people and customs that figure in the work are named by their traditional names, as in “A Catalogue of Migration”: “….. mighty wingspan of owl – gookooo’oo,
everywhere mallard, oriole, checker-backed loons,
soon air fills with echo of sandhill crane calls –
fluted and eternal like doodem dreamsongs.
Where every flap follows ancient flight paths,
bineshiinyag mark autumn sky, mark me.“
Blaeser discusses how her grandmother taught her to hunt and cook, how observation of animals in the wild taught her hope, acceptance and, in the case of a swimming squirrel:
“We are never done, it says, with a body tiny enough to know.
The world is large, it says, with a courage I am eager to learn.”
She writes of healing ceremonies, the dignity of gestures, community and “honeyed wisdom.” “Across the silence – send songs.”
Review by: Eve Kimber
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Book & Booklet Reviews
Pulsar Poetry Webzine
Edition #59 (111) June 2024
Index of Reviewed Publications
Pulsar Poetry Webzine #59
(June 2024). Please see below.
Girls That Never Die, poems by Safia Elhillo.
A Ribbon The Most Perfect Blue, poems by Christine Kwon.
Dreaming of endangered Species, poems by Anand Prahlad.
Pickers & Poets. The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas. Various contributors. Edited by: Gary Hartman, Craig Clifford and Craig D. Hills.
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Girls That Never Die, poems by Safia Elhillo. Paperback book with a full colour cover and 101 pages. Size 5.25” x 7.75.” Published February 2024 by Bloomsbury Poetry
ISBN 978-1-5266-6554-6 £9.99.
This book is a revelation, both in the power and intensity of the poetry and the close focus and immediacy with which it presents experiences most of us will never face – in their richness and in their terror. On the one hand Elhillo gives us herself as a child in a crowd of cousins exiled to Cairo,
“i place inside me figs and nectarines, gnarled tomatoes
of the season, limes split and salted to eat like we did
in childhood, collected as cousins, faces always sticky
with fruit”
while on the other, she asks hard questions about infibulation, FGM, “cutting.” Counterpointing the language of trauma with the words of euphemism, expectations of purity and silence, she challenges and at the same time draws in the reader to follow her on a path of exploration and protest which feels palpably dangerous. Dangerous to Elhillo, that is, and the girls burdened with purity and silence while carrying their family honour. Elhillo shows us a girl coming of age with knowledge of both English and Arabic, traditional Sudanese culture and modern American life:
“…..rather the overeager mosaic
i hoard i steal i borrow
from pop songs & mine
from childhood fluency i guard
my few swearwords like tinkling
silver anklets spare and precious”
Elhillo’s evocative vocabulary and delight in using varied poetic forms to structure her meanings show exceptional skill. She often layers meanings in a single line, playing on the sounds of words, parts of speech, words speaking of tradition and of trauma:
“though i read that family honor is in the body of the girl, i spilled it
i overflowed and was called a flower
i grew up mapless and was pointed to a maple tree
i shrank my own body until the blood stopped coming
until i dropped my every suffix & woke up to the sheets still white”
There are poems written in couplets, prose poems and particularly effective contrapuntal poems. The collection has a strong thematic unity, progressing through fear and questioning, danger and loss, to a sense of discovery and empowerment together with her community of friends.
Review by: Eve Kimber
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A Ribbon The Most Perfect Blue, poems by Christine Kwon. A 6” x 9” paperback book with a full colour cover and 73 pages. Published 2023 by Southeast Missouri State University Press. ISBN 979-8-9868593-0-9 $16.00 £15.95.
Christine Kwon hints that her first book’s gestation may have been arduous, but it has emerged with a fully-formed poetic charisma and voice. The diction is supple, releasing its subject matter with an ease that belies the complexity and cultured ambiguity of what’s happening in the poems.
This is a work of crafted exploration, as shown by the opening poem, ‘The River (1963- 2019)’. A father’s death is imagined as both a vivid conversation on the River Styx and a suicide in another river, the Hudson. We’re brought to consider the separation of death as a speculative dialogue:
I heard father say
close in my ear,
‘Oh, I don’t want to go to hell.’
Fear had filled his voice
like a girl’s choir.
‘It’s not that I want you to,’
I said.
Repeatedly, Kwon’s poems are portals into memory and imagination, and they take us where we are not expecting to go. In the wit of ‘Little Mother’ for example, the personification of poetry as a series of mainly female character s develops each of these creations within their own worlds, like seeing through a window into a cupboard:
…one poem gave birth to me,
another sewed a dress,
a burning document I could not take off,
and in one poem I went to H Mart,
I pushed the shopping cart.
The variety of form in Kwon’s work is pleasing and wide. The concrete poem ‘Monday In City Park’ is skilfully minimal, while there are surreal analogies in pieces like ‘Lazy Boy’ or ‘One Arm’: “Father” as a chair; arms and a tongue as players in a nightmarish distortion of domestic life. Much humour comes from other re- shapings of the mundane: poetic one and three line poems which work like jokes, or the colourful examples of the “chaos people” the narrator does not “do well with” in ‘A Chambéry Stroll.
’In the collection’s second section the poems are stalked sporadically by “the colonel”, a kind of anti- muse/mentor but, in ‘A Little Drop Of Blue’ a soldier too, who:
… thinks of the weeds that sprouted
From the young men
From their pink mouths …
And the final, title poem achieves that tricky feat, an open ending:
now you see
where I live
in some
spotless
and
Kwon’s work is a study in unanswered questions and enlightening the mind's eye. This is tricky to deliver. But here’s poetry that does.
Review by: Will Daunt
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Dreaming of endangered species, poems by Anand Prahlad. A 6” x 9” paperback book with a full colour cover and 93 pages. Published 2022 by Stephen F. Austin State University Press. sfapress@sfasu.edu. ISBN 978-1-62288-928-0 £17.95.
At first we meet with the poet embraced on a bed of pain, on the cusp of consciousness, articulating a sarcoma which he finds, at times, articulating him. Prahlad’s acutely worded
dream-states strike the reader as risen images still directed to their source; in memory, or the memories of ancestors, the prophets and ‘hostile/ tribes / roaming jungles / of my marrow.’
As Lucifer appears in ‘My Bladder’s Dementia:’
You must be
the orchid
lipped one,
mad man lunatic
once favorite
prodigal cast out
you must be
the nimbus
cloud steam
in the kitchen
a kiss, a clap
of thunder,
the wronged witness
the desperate one
my heart
warned me about
so far away
from home.
The verse bristles with insight and turmoils of the ‘flesh.’ Cocoon finishes:
…Am I still
here for real, am I dreaming,
are those wings I hear, an engine
turning, a drill, a door, is this sand
in the dry roof of my mouth, a hand
brushing against my arm, warmth?
At the halfway ‘Bridge,’ there is surgery, the amusing conceit of ‘My Life as a Banned Book’ then we surface in the world. Prahlad’s essentially generous disposition introduces a child’s beating, slave ghosts, the malicious, awful crime of ‘The Platoon’ ‘with whispers in my ears / of freckled boys / in bathroom stalls.’ Here are no vested rights, only realities of experience: sex, death, life in terms of wolves and junkyard, of diagnosis.
No hurry of direction in ‘dreaming of endangered species. If a
restlessness emerges in the second half – the first so out of time one wouldn’t notice – perhaps it reflects speed of thought, a symptom of living which only makes the verse more human than sublime. The appetites and food on the kitchen table are universally share able. It’s very fine work.
‘in the shadows / of my hand / a leaf / on bark / on your thigh / i see myself / in a dream / paralyzed / but i think / i can get
up / and then / i think I am up. / i think i’m walking…’
Review by: Dominic James
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Pickers & Poets, The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas. John and Robin Dickson Series in Texas Music History. Editors: Gary Hartman, Craig Clifford and Craig D. Hills. A 6” x 9” paperback book with 27 pages and a full colour cover. Third printing in 2023, Texas A&M University Press. ISBN: 978-1-64843-211-8. £32.95.
Pickers and Poets This book is quite unlike any of the other books I’ve reviewed here, because it’s not a book of poetry. It’s a book about poetry, specifically that represented by the songs of the ‘ruthlessly poetic’ singer / songwriters of Texas. It’s a book of essays.
I found it absolutely fascinating. I’m a songwriter myself, and one who knew almost nothing about country, except that I didn’t like much of it. I knew that country and western were actually different kinds of music - it wasn’t just a blues Brothers punchline - but little else. It was genuinely educational. I see country songs with a new respect now. Some of the lyrics are extraordinary.
Townes Van Zandt is one such writer. His songs are probably older than Nick Cave, but are similarly apocalyptic. I loved this, from My Mother The Mountain: I reached for her hand, and her eyes turn to poison. Her hair turned to splinters and her flesh turned to brine. She leapt cross the room, she stood in the window, And she screamed that my firstborn would surely be blind.
That is a long way from Rhinestone Cowboy (which was western, not country. Western was the country that went to Vegas).
There are sone fantastic chapter titles, e.g, The Great Progressive Country Scare of the 1970s. Some essays are analytical, and discuss the songs. Others are vignettes, character portraits, of noteworthy writers. The one on Kinky Friedman, ‘the Mel Brooks of country music,’ who I knew from his detective novels is especially good, as is the one on female country songwriters and the challenges they face. Some of the lyrics are really thought provoking. I enjoyed this one, from Marcia Ball: She holds the world in the palm of her hand; She’s just a girl in the arms of a man, And when she’s hurt, she folds like a fan.
That says so much about the character. It reminds me of Helena, in Midsummer Night’s Dream, although that is probably because I’m currently rehearsing for it. But it’s a classic archetype - the powerful woman who’s used to being in control but is a fool for love - and it’s beautifully crafted.
I could have said so much about this book, which covers a very broad range of subjects, and is 300 pages long, but I have a word limit! I can’t recommend it as a book of poetry, because it’s not a book of poetry. But if you’re someone with even a passing interest in Texas country music, a songwriter, or interested in Texas generally, you will probably love it. Texas is a character in this book. I have no inclination to visit Texas, but I know it much better than I did before reading Poets and Pickers.
I had wondered why it mentioned ‘ruthlessly poetic’ songwriters, as I’d never thought of poetry in these terms. Then I read this, and never felt more like a cowboy - ‘on the frontier, there’s always plenty to do, because it’s an exacting place, requiring both energy and attention just to stay alive…’ So when there’s plenty else to do, to choose to write songs over all the other things that can, and probably should, be done just to stay alive is to say that poetry is the most important thing, a thing worthy of an everyday ruthlessness in its pursuit. Ruthlessly poetic - I think I’m beginning to understand it now.’ Because of this book, so am I.
Review by: Andrew Barber
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Book & Booklet Reviews
Pulsar Poetry Webzine
Edition #58 (110) March 2024
Index of Reviewed Publications
Pulsar Poetry Webzine #58
(March 2024). Please see below.
Panzer Herz, poems by Kyle Dargan.
Owed, poems by Joshua Bennett.
Once This Forest Belonged To A Storm, poems by
Austen Leah Rose.
Below Zero, poems by Carol V. Davis.
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Panzer Herz, A Live Dissection, poems by Kyle Dargan. A 6” x 9” paperback book with a full colour cover and 98 pages. Published 2023 by TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern University Press. ISBN (paper) 978-0-8101-4568-9 - eBook 978-0-8101-4569-6. US $18.00 UK £17.95.
This is a remarkable collection by a highly-skilled writer whose bold usage of form and content is justified by the tenacious vision that underpins it. The blurb tells us that the “Panzer Herz” of the title is the “armored heart – a site where desire, violence, family, politics, blackness, and capitalism all intertwine with gender”. That reading is exemplified by the brilliant cover photograph of a “presumed suit of bear-baiting armor”.
Here is a largely figurative exploration of the male heart: what drives, excites, infects and stalls male impulses and behaviours. The book is shaped by cardially-constructed sections - ‘Diastole’ and ‘Systole’ - introduced and separated by two poems, both called ‘Pericardiectomy’. These draw us abruptly into a perspective which (in the first) links what to “manhood... [may be] just a sack” with the urge for that sack:
… to be filled. How tough a never-
stretched sack can become. How hard.
That nod to the sexual imperative prepares us for more, elsewhere.
The second eponymous poem brilliantly develops further abstracted images of the empty, even diseased heart, its “pericardium … a corset of calcified or billowing tissue”. Then, with an arresting shift, a ‘Brother’ is addressed in an illustration of how male relationships warm sometimes through sharing the simplest of tasks (here, preparing to bake biscuits):
You press the curved
metal along the seams of the packing. Until it bursts
(I know you love that part) and the dough releases into forms that the can could never imagine.
Dargan explores his stated themes with formal dexterity. ‘Man of the Family II’ is a wry depiction of paternal fury, fantastically drawn yet disturbingly grounded. There are many other honed and memorable vignettes of the ironies and embarrassments of the male journey through life. ‘Her’ follows to adulthood the slow kindling of an adolescent relationship:
I remember feeling hollow…
I remember believing
I had crossed some threshold,
but it would be a slow march of years
before she kissed me.
Dargan is an astute satirist. ‘A Man with Nothing to Lose’ enumerates an exhaustive and sometimes amusing catalogue of indispensable ‘male essentials’, culminating in “ownership/ of this wallet-sized tomb -/ these six crisp walls”. Alternately. ‘The Type of Wife I Have Made’, plays beautifully on the provocations of a ‘wife’ narrator describing the flaws in themselves which men uncover too late:
I would have done well as a modern woman’s Wife.
Instead I spend the mending hours pondering why
so many women took me
but never took me in.
Panzer Herz surgically examines and develops the many significances of the human heart and Dargan depicts the human condition from an intimate distance: close enough to dissect, objectively enough to engage.
Review by: Will Daunt
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Owed, poems by Joshua Bennett. A 5” x 7.75” paperback book with a full colour cover and 97 pages. Published 9th November 2023 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.
ISBN paperback: 9781526665270, eBook: 9781526665263. £9.99.
In this book of accomplished and often beautiful poems, Bennett explores and reflects on the multitude of experiences and relationships that make up a life, an African-American life in particular. His vision is unflinching, analytical, but lyrical too; he celebrates the huge place and influence that everyday things have in a person’s experience of life, notably in the “Owed” series of poems on hairstyles and fashions, sport and the social life of kids on the school bus. In other poems he mourns powerfully over shining lives cut short, institutional injustices and brokenness, and just how damn difficult modern life can be. I suspect most of us can relate to the wry honesty of the opening lines of “Reparation:”
“How are you feeling? is always your opening question
& you know me. I invariably take it the wrong way
when you say it like that.”
Although most of the experiences explored with such attention are specifically African-American, Bennett’s analysis of how everyday fashions, objects and relationships shape a life is universal. Nothing is insignificant or unworthy of consideration, as effects can ripple down the years. He shows, for instance, how his father’s psyche was affected by being sent to Vietnam and wounded there, but also by having to eat lunch alone at school; and yet he dared to dance and find love, to harbour the “quiet
power of Sam Cooke singing,” and
“….still votes still prays that his children might
make a life unlike any he has ever seen. He looks
at me like the promise of another cosmos & I never
know what to tell him. All of the books in my head
have made me cynical & distant, but there’s a choir
in him that calls me forward…”
Bennett’s poetry is complex and multifaceted, making use of a range of poetic forms to express his reflections, from elegies on lost friends to the tight tercets of “owed to the 99 cent store,” celebrating item by item “Your tenacious meditation
on excess….” He shows how, in spite of being shaped at every point by this history, the human spirit harbours a capacity to break free and reach for new possibilities.
Review by: Eve Kimber
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Once This Forest Belonged To A Storm, poems by Austen Leah Rose. A 6” x 9” paperback book with a full colour cover and 95 pages. Winner of the Juniper Prize for poetry. Published 2023 by University of Massachusetts Press. www.umasspress.com
ISBN: (paper) 978-1-62534-727-5 £14.95.
The poems of Austen Leah Rose’s first collection are eery and compelling. In the immersive fall line of modern style, where half-rhymes avoid old tendencies of form, whether spare or expansive her writing richly deserves our close attention.
The work is laid out in sections interleaved with prose passages that set the tone and mental area of the verse. They are useful introductions to such personal poems: as wide-embracing and articulate as they are intimate and revealing. It seems a privilege to watch the narrative unfold.
In the acknowledgements, Rose credits Mark Strand, his voice: ‘indelible in her mind’. Rose’s poems too are conversational. There are conversations with her sister, a husband perhaps, certainly herself with images returned from her past in mirrors or window glass, a medium in view from the start.
Introducing Memory: “Always this divide, this sheet of glass convincing me that what is is only in my mind.”
One recognises the poet following her sister when, ‘inviting a boy over’ in A Difficult Situation she conjures up:
… I am often shocked to look in the mirror
and see a beautiful woman.
I am frightened by enlightenment.
I don’t want to forget what unknowing is like.
Then, in one of several addresses to her husband:
…yesterday, I unzipped the translucent skin of my tent to
watch the mountains glow pink somewhere
in Arizona. I swear
I saw a spark
ignite between two mirrors that faced each other in a field.
Separation looms over the work as it draws from childhood
and early marriage, sometimes reminiscent of Sylvia Path, behind The Bell Jar or Ted Hughes’s Crow in the tall grass of its catechisms. Introducing Conversations with Angels: “… she wanted to name
the child Lavender. Is naming an act of tenderness or aggression?
Would it make you uncomfortable if the answer was both?
Yes.”
Every poem in Once, This Forest Belonged to a Storm is carefully composed, combed-through for meaning, complete in itself and part of the whole. In acknowledgements, Rose gives much credit to her mentors; all can take pride in this first rate debut.
Review by: Dominic James
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Below Zero, poems by Carol V. Davis. A 6” x 9” paperback book with a full colour cover and 83 pages. Published 2023 by Stephen F. Austin State University Press. sfapress@sfasu.edu www.sfasu.edu/sfapress ISBN: 978-1-92288-946-4 £17.95
This collection would best be read in the warmer months, when the sun is shining. It’s very evocative, and a reader may find themselves shivering involuntarily and empathetically.
In essence, this is a book of travel poetry, the author documenting her experiences of exploring Russia, during winter. It gets cold there. One poem, ‘It Is Even Colder In Irkutsk,’ makes this clear from the start. ‘I no longer understand numbers. / -22 °C, -33 °C, what’s the difference?’
The fact that Ms Davis is American gives this collection the ‘fish out of water’ perspective I enjoy in writers such as Bill Bryson. It’s only really an outsider that can see the full picture. Perspective comes with distance.
Another poem that brought this across talked of how an official could tell Ms Davis was not Russian because ‘her face was too open,’ even when dressed in Russian clothing. It’s observations like this that give the collection the stamp of authenticity. It really feels like a glimpse into someone’s lived experience.
This book tells a story of nature at its most extreme, but it still tells a story of hope. ‘I cannot imagine such temperatures,’ says the author in ‘Below Zero, The Temperature Falling,’ after reeling off an increasingly disturbing list of negative numbers, and yet she survived them. It’s a testament to the indomitable human spirit, and our capacity to adapt. As another poem suggests, it’s not that Siberians don’t feel the cold, it’s that they know how to dress.
Review by: Andrew Barber
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