All the Men I Never Married (Shortlisted, 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection)

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.

A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story

Polly Morland’s book builds on the irony of first finding a copy of The Fortunate Man (1967) hanging ‘in suspended animation’ while clearing out her mother’s house, John Berger’s witness account of the vicissitudes of a country doctor’s life in the same Gloucestershire valley in which the author now resides. This find sets in motion a series of emotionally charged events pinning memory, persons, place to what it is to be a woman GP in a country practice in the last two years of Covid.

How to Grow Matches

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.

HOMELANDS: The History of a Friendship

Chitra Ramaswamy’s second book explores what home means in an individual life and the role family and language play as fundamental elements in its evolution, as much as the physical place we find ourselves living. She opens up the shifting relationships between homeland and motherland, between the actual place we are situated and an elusive sense of origin, of connection with an elsewhere which is indirect—imaginal even—tugging at the mind and heart.

The Mission House

Carys Davies is a novelist and writer of short stories with an impressive array of accolades. I approached her latest novel The Mission House with curiosity and found myself completely immersed in the wistful, gently paced narrative. That is not to say that the novel is lacking; Davies weaves the plot in a temporal structure that comfortably outpaces the reader, and while the lyricism and imagery in the tightly pruned chapters project a magical aura of India, the allegory is a backdrop of post-colonialism and modern political rumblings which hang in the air like humidity; not quite visible yet distinctly discomforting.

Hunger Like Starlings

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.

Wanting: Essay Fragments (Winner of the 2022 PNR prize for Creative Essaying at the University of Dundee)

Burden Goldilocks produces prophesied curls, Snow White becomes a pearly corpse, Thumbelina never grows beyond her moniker. “What’s my name?” The Queen speaks the legendary word and Rumpelstiltskin, crooked imp, boils. Hops on stilt-thin legs, hide splitting. Repel-stilt-skin. I gobble fairy-tales like chocolates, plump with self-appointed expertise. Evil girls pretend to be princesses, masquerade as Read More

Last Harvest

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.

Then

Linda Black’s fourth poetry collection, Then, is a twisting and turning thread that is pulled through the layers of emotion and experience that form the fabric of life. In a stylised and sophisticated manner, yet also playful and childlike, Black manages to weave multiple incarnations of herself throughout her writing.

We Have to Leave the Earth

When a poet opens a collection quoting fellow-poet Ada Limón’s question, ‘Will you tell us the stories that make/ us uncomfortable, but not complicit?’ then already a great deal is being demanded of both the reader and of the writer.

Originally from Belfast, Carolyn Jess-Cooke now is very much part of Glasgow’s vibrant literary scene; she comes to We Have to Leave the Earth with a considerable backdrop of lived, researched and written experience. Pleasingly, her website describes her as being ‘not really bothered about genre’. That’s useful as the evidence of her ability to work beyond boundaries is clear.