On opening, Philip Gross’s book immediately engages with its fragmented poetry layout. ‘Nocturne: The Information’ gifts the reader stanzas which are chopped up, seemingly disjointed on the page. Structure supports content, the corrugated stanzas echoing the front cover’s Blade Runner-esque landscape of blinking lights:
London-born poet Denise Saul writes from the heart about her experience of being her mother’s carer in this tender debut collection of prose and free verse poetry.
One of the first pages provides a definition of the word ‘stroke’, which seems significant, acting as a bridge between the first two poems. Significant too in its placement in the collection – directly after the titular poem: ‘The Room Between Us’. This poem gives us an insight into Saul’s feeling finding her mother lying alone having fallen, with the lights out, behind a door at home:
Mark Pajak’s debut collection, Slide, is a brutal, captivating account of how survival and death manifest in contemporary life. The hidden pains, fear and connections held so tenuously in the everyday are laid bare, spoken into plain view with striking language that cuts to the heart of the blurred lines between people and the natural world. This collection combines a variety of minimalistic forms and styles, bringing tales of loss, urbanisation, and adolescence in a series of 38 poems split across five sections.
An engaging addition to her growing portfolio of pamphlet publications, Laura Jane Lee’s flinch & air is a distinctive and deft exploration of Asian female identity. Matrilineal relationships, resilience, and political tension interweave seamlessly throughout the collection, creating interconnectedness between gender, identity, and society at large. Tenderness and violence co-exist in stunning lyricism and observations, profoundly paradoxical, prompting uncomfortable questions about what it means to assert womanhood in a politically broken world.
In the poem prefacing Some Integrity, Padraig Regan’s first full collection, ’50 ml of India Ink’, commissioned by Belfast School of Art, shows how integral art is to nature and to language. The collection addresses how forms change, and how lived experiences are transmuted revealing their true value and essence:
Opaque, & black as gravity,
the ink […]
[…] performs its tiny fractal
creep through the paper’s
knitted capillaries[.]
iam Bell’s Man at Sea is a genre-defying delight that interrogates and reimagines the classic war novel. A domestic mystery set in Malta across the 1940s and 1960s, Man at Sea, follows the story of a former airman trying to reunite his old friend, Beth, with the son of her late wartime husband. The narrative is split between the airman, Stuart, and Beth’s stepson, with the former narrating the investigation alongside Beth during the 1960s. Beth’s Stepson acts as the second narrator, following his experience of the Siege of Malta through the 1940s. More than anything, this story is about the bonds people form through pain and fear and how complicated the love and relationships that arise from these shared experiences can be: ‘Could you not have left them a letter, huh? Just a word or two?’
I picked up this title initially because I still blanche whenever my daughter shows me her new tattoos; but I also heard Helen Mort’s very interesting exchange with Lou Hopper about ‘getting inked’ on Radio 4’s One to One in February last year. Mort is, of course, an award-winning poet that is based in Sheffield and whose interests take in an astonishing range–mountain climbing, trail running, northern cites, conflict and motherhood—all handled with a sure and delicate lyricism, and a poet’s ear for the cadence and fall of the line. So The Illustrated Woman promised much.
The Absent Therapist is a collection of narratives which defies straightforward definitions. It is composed of numerous fragments, with no singular story or plotline. Threads are returned to, picked up and re-spun, before being laid down again and the process repeated. This cyclical returning and exploration of numerous threads deposits the reader into the various perspectives displayed, engaging them in an honest portrayal of humanity: ‘Separate gates are a good idea, because ferrets tend to want to escape as a group.’
There are cracks running visibly through the poems in Cain Named the Animal. From reading reviews of American poet Shane McCrae’s earlier collections, National Book Award Finalist In the Language of My Captor and T S Eliot prize shortlisted Sometimes I Never Suffered, cracks persist throughout them too as well as no punctuation with space instead serving as a kind of punc- tuation coupled with stumbling repetitions stumbling and the odd / line break depicted odd as you would write it in an essay or review. it is an arresting device and one that initially to me, initially was a distraction seeming to get i n the way of me hearing the poems in my head.