Hannah Lavery(Polygon, Birlinn, 2022); pbk. £10.99 As the title suggests, Hannah Lavery’s collection is a triptych possessing multiplicities. The reader is brought along through scenes and sights that could be from the author themselves, or could be anyone, yet which all share in the difficulties, tragedies, and memories that are embroiled in race, class, sexuality Read More
Kit Fan’s new collection is one that delves into the power of writing, on both the individual and collective level. Its conversation between suffering and healing is made ever more brilliant by Fan’s eloquence and linguistic dexterity. Drawing from life and lived history, the poems shift and change, touch upon love and suffering, running like the ink he so eloquently describes…
Bryony Littlefair’s reflective collection Escape Room displays her resolve for happiness despite suffering from systemic pressures. She captures what it means to be human under capitalism and other oppressive structures, her work shaping, entangling memories and real events in her writing.
Robin Fulton Macpherson (Shearsman Books, 2020); pbk, £10.95 Robin Fulton Macpherson’s collection opens with the observation of birds in the natural world. The perspective of the viewer observing crows watching a heron seem to merge with that of the corvids: From the black lace of a leafless birchseven crows seem to be watching one heron rowing air Read More
Eric Ngalle Charles’ work covers his life and experiences as an individual with an identity that has been pushed, and stretched over and around the world. As the blurb describes, his life is one of displacement and trafficking, being taken from his home in Cameroon to Russia, before finally settling in Wales, from where he now describes his story.
Adam Wyeth’s collection is poetic and dynamic, about:blank tentatively explores the nature of writing itself, and where it emerges from.
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:
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.
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.
Wedding Grief is an astutely chosen title; it encapsulates the fraught, traumatic relationship between Paul Éluard and his wife, Gala Diakonova, from meeting in a TB Sanatorium during World War 1 to the eventual ménage à trois with Max Ernst, and their eventual divorce. AC Clarke’s award-winning hand works fully within this collection. Her work of three years wraps within itself inversions and extrapolations of grief and trauma, shifting between perceptions, tones, and meanings.
