“'[…] Do you realise what’s going on? There is an epidemic of autism in Silicon Valley. Something terrible is happening to our children.’ Her words were chilling. Could they be true?” In reviewing this title, I must declare an immediate disclosure of interest, having being diagnosed at the age of three as occupying a place on Read More
Chris Powici is a champion of Scotland’s poetry scene, being a generous contributor to that community, not least through his free, and highly respected Northwords Now magazine. This Weight of Light is his latest work and second collection. Its concern for the natural world is not too dissimilar to that of a number of his Read More
The Weepers by Lindsay Macgregor, is a collection of poems which deals very eloquently with loss. Openly autobiographical if not always obviously confessional, these poems began to form in 2008 after Macgregor’s partner was diagnosed with terminal cancer. A short time after she was bereaved, the poet embarked on a creative writing course at the Read More
John Hemming is an explorer and writer especially interested in the Amazon region and its indigenous peoples. In Naturalists in Paradise, his focus falls upon the mid-19th century collecting exhibitions of three important British naturalists: Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates and Richard Spruce. Wallace is well-known to biologists, but is eclipsed in popular memory Read More
It becomes clear from the very first poem in this collection, that Crib is no light bedtime reading. This sub-sequence of forty poems is a selection from a larger collection of a hundred and eleven poems, written for the poet’s young son and completed on his first birthday. All of these one hundred and eleven Read More
Eleanor Rees’ latest collection, Blood Child, deals primarily with people and places, with Rees taking great care in establishing tone and atmosphere through skilfully painting romantic landscapes. To me, it seems that Rees’ poetry is much more concerned with creating images and aesthetic appeal rather than an exploration of subject matter or themes. Often the Read More
This intriguing collection by A B Jackson journeys through the fantastical and the mundane with a somewhat counter-intuitive outlook upon both. Jackson approaches his topics whole-heartedly, allowing his reader to wrestle with his ideas. In some (most notably in “Inexpressible Island” and “The Find”) there might be an apparently graphic and crude feel to his Read More
To capture the effects of war on a person, humour the reader and shed doubt upon our country’s health system are all brave undertakings. Nonetheless, Victoria Hendry has taken the plunge and succeeded in achieving these aspects in her novel The Last Tour of Archie Forbes. Against the backdrop of the city of Edinburgh, described Read More
The Girl in the Dog-Tooth Coat is the debut collection of emerging talent Zelda Chappel. This compilation of fifty-nine short free-verse poems confronts themes of loss and longing, grief and regret, anxiety and escapism. Chappel’s voice is delicate yet biting, like a crisp morning frost. She cuts to the core of a distinctly female experience, Read More
Janet Sutherland’s third collection, Bone Monkey, features a trickster of that name. Sutherland develops a whole mythology for him, from creation through to death, told in sonnets, ballads, prose poems and free verse. In the opening lines of the sonnet, “Prequel”, Out of the void of chaos came the Earth and then Bone Monkey sprang Read More