Category: Reviews

Reviews of other poets’ work and events.

Review of  ‘In the Shadow of Gods’ by Rachel Deering

By elpoet

Wherever you open this collection, a strange poetic music snakes its way into your ears.

The 21st century (often) seems a long away off. We are in a world of forest, river and myth from Greek, Celtic or Old Norse cultures.

There are rich close-ups of the natural world, of trees, fish, birds, plants and the seasons. The poet creates startling images, for example, ‘my heart is a crow/ its wingbeats, a pulse’, or, ‘toads are waking, mothered/by water, belched’.

This is very structured collection, with sequences of poems dealing with different aspects of the living world and yet it feels like each poem flows from what comes before.

Sometimes the poet’s emotions shine through, but often expressed through metaphors relating to nature or myth.

In ‘Tawny Owl’, she grieves for a friend who she visited in hospital, reflecting that ‘we are so mysterious; the calls/ of tawny owls in conversation/ with the night.’ Even silence is full of meaning: ‘what is exchanged thickens the air/ between us, conveyed by touch and/ the coalescence of shadows.’

At the end of this bewitching collection, is an unexpected bonus, under the title ‘Words found in a hidden nook’. Eight extra poems to add to this substantial trove of strange, wild work, including one of my favourites, ‘The Night Heron’ who stalks ‘in stealth, creepfoot to creepfoot’,  and who is finally summed up as ‘a swindler, troubled and untroubled/ she loves and sleeps like a poet.’

I like the idea of poets as herons. (God help the fish.)

This is a beguiling, haunting collection by Rachel Deering, available from Black Bough Poetry.

‘Street Sailing’ by Matt Gilbert

By elpoet

After reading Matt Gilbert’s ‘Street Sailing’, I feel like I have been for a long walk with him, in Bristol and the country and places in-between, a meditative walk noticing tiny detail and letting it stir the emotions.

He is not afraid of showing his own reaction to places and events, including being moved by the ‘wood-hard muscles’ of hornbeam trees, and an incident where he lit the match to burn a bunch of dead, poisoned rats – ‘layered in between sticks and crumpled /paper, like rat lasagne.’

One of my favourite poems is ‘Garden bag resurrection’ which I remember reading on a long-ago TopTweetTuesday on Twitter. This surreal imagining of the bag as ‘a crumpled, green face’ transforms the ‘death-mask’ into a temporary hive for bees who the poet sees as ‘reinventing space, bridging hope and ruin.’  I can only marvel at such generosity of imagination, to cull this from a mundane object.

There are remarkable relationships at work here, with the living world. The poet sees an old oak in ‘Undercliff’ and staggered, stops. ‘Together briefly, we are a pair/of pilgrims, passing on the road.’ This, somehow, feels like an encounter of equals.

Matt Gilbert (skilfully edited by Matthew M C Smith) has woven some kind of deep magic here from unprepossessing, everyday fabric. Treat yourself to a taste of his conjuring skills.

Available on Amazon 

Brain food

By elpoet

If you haven’t discovered the Hedgehog Press and its ‘Stickleback’ editions, please go and find them. These are slim volumes of four poems from a single poet, or sometimes two poets. They are beautifully- produced, colourful gems. My favourite at the moment is by Jules Whiting and Vic Pickup.

It’s about four responses to an EEG, a method of recording brain activity. In one poem, the technician shines lights at the patient, which become a fairgound ride, the sun glinting on trees and a glass bird. It is a fine way of showing how our imagination creates glorious things out of what is a technical but scary procedure.          

Another disturbing poem deals with falling in love – how the radiologist ‘holding her head in his hands, whispered reassurance’ and how he watches ‘this electrolysed Medusa’ and imagines her convulsions.

And in ‘Sleep EEG’ a wonderful conceit unwinds, where the patient asks if the technician can press a switch to ‘restore factory settings’.

The last poem ‘What Colour is My Brain?’ is a tender portrait of the interaction between patient and a radiologist who has himself had cancer. The patient touches his arm and wishes him a long life. ‘He cups my hand in his, smiles’.

If, in future, I have an EEG, I will carry these images with me, these human interpretations of what is a unsettling but necessary intervention.

I can’t recommend the Sticklebacks highly enough – they give huge bang for a poetic buck. www.hedgehogpress.co.uk