Poetry review – Battery Rocks by Katrina Naomi

In this impressively immersive collection, the sea is a force to be reckoned with like a tempestuous lover who will as soon cradle you in her arms as dash you against the closest rocks. Poet Katrina Naomi sets this theme from the first line of Fickle Lover: “Ours is not a relationship of equals.” and later: “You are always on display.” Not only a lover, then, but an unpredictable, narcissistic lover who will always, always put their own needs before yours, because yours barely surface in their awareness, if at all.

And yet, in Naomi’s language, this is not only acceptable, but alluring.

Plaiting in Cornish terms such as ‘An mor’ – the sea – and ‘byrla’ – embrace – Naomi Makes us revel in the otherworldliness of this element that brings us deadly hydrozans as gifts and washes us in “her shouty body.”

In I know you as, she asks the sea “Tell me/ what is your safe word?/ You never listen to mine.”

The beauty of feeling at home in the water, even as it threatens our steadiness, is palpable, not least in Thoughts Over Hot Chocolate: “some say we were once all fish/ beyond the land a sense of belonging”.

Throughout the visceral poems, the sea has personality and moods that pay into her unpredictability, with the poet alternatively being caressed by calm silky water and battling with waves. Human variance that shows up on the lines is far darker, however, in the poems i.m. of Sarah Everard (“With each stroke I strike the water / thankful for my strength that night”) and Tattoo: for Kim Moore.

Several of the poems play with form, jostling in landscape rather than portrait format to take up the length of the page and cajoling you to turn the book on its side. It’s a practical move that jolts you out of passive reading and requires you to act, while bringing to mind tipping and spilling.

The poem The Sea Speaks, written from the viewpoint of the sea, is utterly entrancing. This is the ocean as colluder, but only in the sense a cat welcomes belly rubs, until the moment it bores of attention and bites.

But the true threats, Katrina suggests, are those on land where we feel safe and therefore less guarded. In Cormorant, the poet mentions risks taken and luck that prevailed – a train crossing where “I moseyed across/ the metal lines” and narrowly missed becoming mincemeat, “the drink I left on the bar, (…) the knife my attacker forgot to carry.”

The whole world, she warns, is full of danger – at least the sea is honest.

Even in these dire musings, Katrina reminds us of beauty, telling us of the cormorant’s “dark whoosh of feathers” and how “The fleet of its wings has me shiver”.

There’s humour in the collection too, as in Mordrik (a gorgeous Cornish word meaning low tide), where “Starfish strand/ before/ dangling/ from a gull’s beak/ a late breakfast/ of legs.”

This poem’s stanzas are scattered across the page in a visual representation of a sea-shorn shore.

Morning, Far West is a prose poem worth murmuring aloud to yourself to bolster yourself full of promise and hope.

Naomi chooses not to use full stops in her more traditional poems, as though reminding us no thought can ever be complete, while we breathe.

In all, this collection is a marvel and a solace, bearing memories of sea and evocations of the sense of peace that comes with embracing the wild. It’s a wonder to dip into daily and savour before setting aside, still licking the salt from your lips.

This book was given to me in exchange for a fair review.

Battery Rocks by Katrina Naomi is published by Seren Books and available to buy here.

Poetry review – Grief’s Alphabet by Carrie Etter

Griefs-Alphabet-72dpi-rgbPinning the memories of several lifetimes to the page and shining up the gut-punch moments that really sum up key relationships is no mean feat, but poet Carrie Etter achieves it with apparent ease. From Birthday as Adoption Day to the soaring hopefulness of Reincarnation as Seed, the poems tug and pull at you like rough weather or the tumble of a hectic family. It makes the passages of stillness even more powerful, as Etter pulls back her arrow and lets it fly to strike with exquisite accuracy into your heart.

In part I. Origin Story, and especially in The Lauras, we taste the hope of belonging with the pleasure of being mis-called her sister Laura’s name (“Which did I covet more, the lyrical Laura/ or her blood and with it/ the unspoken moniker real daughter?”), while in American Dream, the panic of redundancy is played out on the precarious stage of a staircase: “She stares at him, grimaces, does not yet know./ He holds his head in his hands. He counts up his dependents.”

The duality of this time is caught in The House of Two Weathers or the Years after the Layoff, where couplets showcase doubled up possibilities suggesting the variable weight of moods on the family home: “The potted African violet on the kitchen windowsill/raised its richest purple or drooped/ The mother bustled over the stove/ or at the sink stood, staring out.”

The thin line walked throughout childhood and beyond shimmers like a fairytale where things breathe in shadows, an image given solidity in Graduation: “I put my neck in the bear’s jaws / to make a true picture / of how I / how we got here.”

This poem, like several others, sits in a dense paragraph on the page, so that reading it is a headlong rush that makes you want to go back and read once more, slowly, so you don’t risk missing a word.

In part II. The Brink, we face the worst, with a loss so great this entire collection is dedicated to it. Scenes unfold over a borrowed coffin, in a church where “hazel-haired Laura sways as she weeps’, and in the dispersal of a household and lifetime’s possessions, with laments and wonder echoing through titles such as Why didn’t I Save One of “Her Lighthouses for Myself.

In part III: Orphan Age, healing begins through an act of remembering, and noticing, from lists like the gorgeous The Modie Box, to the sudden delight of Wintering, where the poet watches a flock of small birds in a maple tree. “The day would be short, and they would have all of it.”

That line to me shouts out the emotion at the heart of Grief’s Alphabet. Life is short, and like small birds on a winter’s day, we should demand every scrap of it.

This is a collection of love stories to families and our younger selves, of forgiveness, acceptance and an appetite always for more. As personal as these slices of ordinary lives are, in each I suspect you’ll find something recognisable, moving and remarkable.

Grief’s Alphabet by Carrie Etter is published by Seren Books. Buy your copy here.

This book was given to me in exchange for a fair review.

What are you reading? I’d love to know. I’m always happy to receive reviews of books, art, theatre and film. To submit or suggest a review, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud.com.

Poetry review – The Country With No Playgrounds by Elena Croitoru

The Country With No Playgrounds by Elena Croitoru coverBook Balm recommendation: Read to have your empathy heightened and awareness deepened.

In her debut poetry pamphlet The Country With No Playgrounds, award-winning British-Romanian poet Elena Croitoru has captured a place and period in time so precisely and skilfully that you’ll find yourself transported.

Stark scenes are highlighted with words that seem fondly chosen for their beauty: “We grew up in our spare time,/ beyond a tower block island/ where pearly cement dust lay…”

Relayed with disarming matter-of-factness, many of the poems are almost cinematic, such as in The Last Wedding: “She looked out of the window/ at the militiamen who watched our balcony/ from below, the way one would watch/ the funeral of someone still moving.”

It’s heart-stoppingly alarming, yet clearly for the inhabitants utterly normal, to live with such a palpable threat. As worrying as the situation must have been for the adults she mentions, for the children Croitoru counted herself among, this was nothing more than ordinary. This gives her the tools to describe moments with a lightness of touch that draws us in rather than pushing us away, so that we read each stanza with wide open eyes.

Continue reading

Poetry review – We Have to Leave the Earth by Carolyn Jess-Cooke

We Have to Leave the Earth by Carolyn Jess-Cooke book coverBook Balm recommendation: Read to immerse yourself in wonder.

The contents page of Carolyn Jess-Cooke‘s third collection offers a clear indication of the skill at play here. Poem titles are mini-masterworks, with each offering sense of perilous climatic times we live in couple with an awe for the world we inhabit.

Section 1, Songs for the Arctic, illuminates scenes by scattering words across the whiteness of the page. in We Flicker too briefly, you can roll the flavour of the lines over your tongue: “Bone sky./Ocean’s oil-dark/cloth unsettled” and “green sky-rivers/ arrows of geese/ water scythes of whales.”

Section 2 opens with the title poem, which sets the tone for a sequence about beauty and strength in fragility. In Birdsong for a Breakdown, we’re introduced to the extremity of sensations experienced through the rawness of mental ill-health: “Because sweetness amidst such unnameable dark/ is magnesium, too bright to miss.”

Continue reading

Poetry review – Much with body by Polly Atkin

Much With Body book cover. Shows figure floating in green water.Book Balm recommendation: Read to remind yourself to pause and pay attention to your natural surroundings.

From frogs and toads ambling into her home to the herons glimpsed nearby to the imposed quieter times of lockdown, Much with body by Polly Atkin is a reminder to take a breath, open your eyes and observe.

In Lakeclean, Atkin immerses us in the magic of wild swimming. The lines are dizzyingly visual and elemental, while hinting at the freedom and physical relief offered fleetingly in water, as opposed to time spent on land. Atkin alludes to the joy of  being: “released from the tyranny of gravity”, dwelling “in transparency”, and sweeping “mountains aside with our arms without wincing.”

Notes from a transect offers series of determinedly hopeful snippets, each of which works as a standalone poem. In What’s Under Your Feet she records: “One school wins a visit from a scientist. When she asks/ does anyone have wildlife stories to share?/ the whole school put up their hands.” In Windows we glimpse “Those lightless days when pain/ keeps you in, under, and the feeder/ at the window is the only source of movement/ you count birds.”

Continue reading

Poetry review – Fontanelle by Helen Sheppard

Fontanelle cover by Helen SheppardFontanelle by Helen Sheppard opens aptly with ‘Opening’, a poem that deposits us directly in the most intimate of situations – a birth. We’re at the business end with Sheppard, guiding a person into the world with all the gunge and wonder it entails.

And herein lies the power of Sheppard’s poetry. As a former midwife, her awe at this daily miracle is evident, even garlanded in the gravy of bodily excretions. Far from shying away from squeamish sights, Sheppard celebrates them for their essential role in our most earthbound and miraculous acts.

“A gestation reaches its timely conclusion./ Her muscled hammock softens, slackens./ I am with her wet slit, hands quiet, ready.”

In Safe Harbour we meet a person yet to breathe: “You flex and stretch/ and wallow in water,/ all bump and tail./ You tether, then float,/ wriggle to sea sounds”.

The writing is visceral, yet tender, each layered emotion wound in with exquisite tension.

Continue reading

Poetry review – Bloodlines by Sarah Wimbush

Bloodlines by Sarah WimbushSarah Wimbush won the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2019 with this slim yet seductively insidious collection. Wimbush’s verses creep in under collar and cuff, sending shivers across your scalp.

Weaving in the salt and pepper of Traveller idioms, Wimbush draws us into a journey through her own heritage, where we meet heroes and queens of lanes and fields.

You’ll learn some gorgeous terms along the way: “nose warmer” for pipe, “hedge mumper’ for tramp, and “drum” for road, as well as less familiar words, such as “yog” for fire and “chokka” for shoes. Some felt familiar without me knowing why – “mush” for man, for instance, and “shushti” for rabbit. It all adds to the richness of the telling.

In some poems Wimbush conjures the litany of a life in just a handful of lines, such as with Our Jud, who “rarely missed a fisticuffing up the Old Blue Bell./ And that time calmed the lady’s filly bolting up the road.” Each sentence has the fireside flavour of a blustering anecdote, yet summons facets of courage, heart and honour beside the bravado. Any of us could be proud to be seen as clearly as Wimbush describes Jud.

And yes, there is romance in much of the lustrous imagery, but unfrilled and honest. There’s a nod to the rebellious, the eternally loyal and the larking, with hints of hardship and hard work among revelries.

Continue reading

Poetry review – Empire of Dirt

Empire of Dirt coverThe poems in Thomas Stewart’s debut pamphlet Empire of Dirt share the enchanted forest feel of the darkest fairytales. Nature appears on these pages as something elemental and vaguely sordid, with humans only one footfall away from entering the shadowy, loam-scented spaces on the fringes of suburban streets.

Moving, enticing and richly redolent, these poems summon the paradoxical sense of peace laced with disquiet that’s so particular to woodlands, where the unseen creeps ever closer.

Many of the poems are about observing. In And then The Flowers Came, he writes: “outside/ the trees can/ smell me, their/ roots/ brew plots,/ they’re watching/ me, with/ everyone else”.

In Skull, Stewart invites us to become the voyeurs, ogling the intimate miracle of Adam birthing his Eve.

More contemporary suspicions come into play with the awareness of a neighbour spying from between the petals of a hibiscus across the road: “she watches/ how many cigarettes/ I smoke/ or how many times/ I check Grindr/ on my phone.” The tension between timeless and modern, and between threat and temptation, is palpable.

Continue reading

Milk Poetry review

Tom DenbighUnfolding in Foyles Bookshop Bristol as part of Bristol Festival of Literature, Milk Poetry wound through our ears, hearts and minds, reminding us that words have a life beyond the page. This group of skilful poets and their guests each imbue their lines, rhymes and musings with startling individuality and honesty.

Malaika Kegode founded Milk Poetry in January 2015. “Milk Poetry was conceived to be a friendly, nurturing night that treated all performers with equal respect, warmth and room for growth,” she says. “The impetus behind the night was to offer equal billing and opportunity for up and coming poets, with a focus on artist development. Many poets can get stuck in limbo after performing for a couple of years; not quite a headliner but creating work more advanced than standard open mic fare. So Milk Poetry was created to bridge that gap and offer chances for people to hone their skills on stage and perform shoulder-to-shoulder with ‘big name’ acts, so they can feel like the true artists they are!”

She adds: “As Milk Poetry has grown, I think that nurturing backbone has just become stronger, and some artists who started performing for the first time at Milk Poetry have gone on to be major players in the poetry world.”

Tom Sastry

The evening opened with the wit and self-depreciating humour of Tom Sastry. Tom is one of the 2016 Laureate’s Choice poets. He brought us the first and only use of the word “ersatz” and wrote of “ganging up on our past selves who we secretly love” and “dead cakes in cellophane.” Many of his poems were a whisper away from being reclassified as flash fictions, pouring whole lives into our ears distilled down into a few vivid lines.

Malaika Kegode. Photo by Judy Darley

Next up, Malaika Kegode’s poem rattled through and over us, drawing us into a train journey, a relationship gone awry, and an ending so tragic that it made my teeth shake. There’s something powerfully filmic about her composition, so that you see the train carriage and its passengers, see the passing fields with their excess of sheep, and see the moon and the sun each highlighting what went wrong.

Next up, multiple slam winner Tom Denbigh (picture at the top of this post) delivered a story in the form of a poem, setting word choices at curious angles that created a sense of eavesdropping, and getting caught. He brought us the evening’s first use of the word “cardigan.” Offbeat and comic, the poem twitched with a sense of the search for identity, and of trying to solve the puzzles that make up the people we encounter.

Sam Grudgings. Photo by Judy Darley

Milk co producer Sam Grudgings, who describes himself as a poet perpetually on the edge of collapse, had rather delightfully brought his granny along. Taking us collectively by the hand, Sam led us on an excursion into a haunted house, speaking not to us but to the ghost herself, with her “arson fingers.’ Exquisite imagery drew us into a gloriously painterly scene, pegged with emotion.

Beth Calverley. Photo by Judy Darley

The potent Beth Calverley, co producer of Milk and Chief Operator of The Poetry Machine, performed Witchcraft, a poem laced with tenderness. Her words glimmered as though lit from within, with echos sounding quietly on the peripheral of our hearing. As Sam said in introducting Beth, her poetry is comprised of layers of meaning – there’s far more here than a single read or listen can reveal.

Rebecca Tantony. Photo by Judy Darley

Our final poet Rebecca Tantony shared a set of poems rooted in the complexities of family. Visceral, raw and compellingly intimate, Rebecca’s poems sent tremors oscillating the bookshop’s air, rustling pages and ricocheted empathetic shivers down listeners’ spines.

Find Milk on Facebook.

Seen, read or experienced anything interesting recently? I’d love to know. I’m always happy to receive reviews of books, art, theatre and film. To submit or suggest a review, please send an email to judydarley(at)iCloud.com.

 

Poetry review – Visiting The Minotaur by Claire Williamson

Visiting The Minotaur by Claire WilliamsonDrawing on myths to make sense of our mortality, Claire Williamson’s first collection with Seren is at once heartbreaking and comfortingly human, with the skill to make your spirits soar.

Seen through Williamson’s eyes, a half bull, half man hybrid is nothing compared to the complexities of surviving your average childhood. From the aching tenderness with which she knits memories about her own daughters to the grief and confusion of losing a sibling and mother, Williamson immerses you with such conviction that you can’t help but empathise.

There’s a distinct irreality to much of the carefully conjured imagery, which only serves to heighten the stark honesty of the sensations being shared. Family members long gone return as horses: “She thrusts her black muzzle/ into the cleft of my torso and arm/ and I feel her warmth for the first time/ since she drank that poison.”

Bereavement is a theme throughout, but even in the bleakest contemplations, Williamson manages to find humour in the moments she captures.

Continue reading