Lesley Harrison(Shearsman Books, 2020); pbk £10.95 In her first full-length collection after multiple pamphlet publications, Lesley Harrison envisions a voyage towards healing humanity’s fractured bond with the natural world. Through archival documents, past voyages, and local myths deftly explored, Harrison ties the past and present together in the shared space of the North Sea. The Read More
Tim Allen’s A Democracy of Poisons, his third collection with Shearsman, possesses rich, surreal imagery—visions that float or collide with the reader, betraying his avant tendencies. However, his dreams aren’t pleasant—they’re anxious, tense.
Based on a thirteen-poem series, The Wilds is a powerful poetry comic – written by Russell Jones and illustrated by Aimee Lockwood – connects the themes of grief, the natural world, and survival. It explores the experience of a teenage girl coming to terms with the death of her mother, understanding that loss is never easy but can be survived.
Dead fridges, dragon-slaying horses and zombies welcome you to Holly Hopkins’ The English Summer, a wonderfully imaginative debut. Whilst remaining fantastical and playful, this collection dissects the roots of humanity and its relationship to our planet at large. Reimagining historical myths and traditions with an urbane sense of familiarity, Hopkins’ collection deracinates contemporary Englanders amidst a growing climate crisis. Reading these poems is like looking into an essential truth. Through both humour and accusation, storytelling from unique and unthinkable angles, Hopkins underscores the impending tragedy that is modern life.
In Transit explores Gordon Meade’s reflections of mortality. Informed by his varied and strange perspectives. Meade’s writing is poetic in subject more than form; his pieces are him in conversation with the reader, speaking of his life, his pains. The plainness of his words reinforces his perspective and reflections; neither flowery nor ethereal, it is bold, sharp, painful, and contains a hard, irrefutable hope of life beyond any one death.
Mexican-American spoken word artist David A. Romero’s most recent collection My Name Is Romero opens to a photograph of the poet with his siblings and grandparents to whom the collection is dedicated. In the introduction, he sets this photograph within the context of the America he grew up in: “My first memories of my last name stretch back to elementary school, and kids […] intentionally mispronouncing my name to make fun of me. However, I would notice over the years, that […] lots of people weren’t deliberately trying to ridicule my surname but mispronounced it regardless.”
None of the poems in this, Kim Moore’s more recent collection, have formal titles. Numbers, yes, and the contents’ list identifies them by their opening words. The acknowledgements credit sources as diverse as Hélène Cixous, Thomas Hardy, Adrienne Rich and Rainer Maria Rilke, but in the opening poem, ‘We are coming’, it’s impossible not to see a baton already being passed from Sylvia Plath; soon after it’s hard to avoid shades of Carol Ann Duffy’s Red Riding Hood, or to hear Hilaire Belloc’s ‘waterfall of doom’ building its inevitable force. The tributaries are indeed wide-ranging, which seems entirely in keeping with the complex and very painful issues Moore has the bravery to explore. Rarely has it been more important to read a poetry collection in the sequence the poet has ordered; there are no lines to be skimmed.
Striking and direct, How To Grow Matches is a powerful addition to S.A. Leavesley’s impressive collection of poetic works and novellas. Her poetry commands attention through carefully crafted rhythm and assonance, and evocative imagery. We are exposed to a raw anger against gender stereotyping and misogyny, but which is controlled and contained in a nuanced narrative. Leavesley creates a vision where women, threatened with fading into the background, are inspired them to reclaim their space and find their own voices.
This insightful collaborative project, funded by the Edwin Morgan Trust and facilitated by Ken Cockburn in 2019, creates a firm linguistic bridge between English and Hungarian and explores what can be achieved through the art of translation. Having the same poem in two languages side by side on double-page spreads creates a real, tangible sense of collaboration. Even though an English reader might only understand the language on one side, the mirroring of enjambment, spacing and general rhythm emphasizes that no matter where we come from or what language we speak, we experience similar concerns. The epigraph of ‘Bird Woman’, ‘nothing is yet in its true form’, gives the sense that these poems are not yet at rest; this collection thrums with the anticipation of change and readjustment—with the potential to be reinterpreted and reimagined even further—thereby exploring the beautiful complexity and flexibility of language.
From the pages of Harry Guest’s collection of poetry emerge forests, fields of grass, Norwegian fjords, and nature-dwelling creatures. The title is poignant for it reflects on relationships, the passage of time, and a sense of place. Adding to a substantial oeuvre (poetry publications, several novels, and translations from French, German, and Japanese) Last Harvest presents a retrospective view of Guest’s life as it nears its completion.