by Helen Ivory | Mar 7, 2019 | Reviews
Duane Vorhees’s Love’s Autobiography: The Ends of Love comprises of selections from The Many Loves of Duane Vorhees. Apart from the Prologue, the book is divided into three sections titled “Beth”, “Jenny” and “Yeobo”, with the last section having the...
by Helen Ivory | Feb 28, 2019 | Reviews
Before I embarked upon writing this review, I had only read the words on the page. However, recently I had the very great privilege of hearing some of the work read by Roy himself at an event in Mid Wales. When I say read, what I really mean is delivered...
by Helen Ivory | Jan 31, 2019 | Reviews
Dylan Thomas believed that fine poetry is marked by words that ‘lift off the page’ and a prize winning pamphlet by Amy Kinsman fulfills this criteria beautifully. & ( Indigo Dreams ) is a collection of poems which leap of the...
by Helen Ivory | Jan 3, 2019 | Reviews
The poetry of Neil Elder has a compelling domestic surface. By surface I don’t mean superficial. By domestic I don’t mean limited. What he makes of family incidents, whether joyfully tender or horribly upsetting is very distinctive. It’s very difficult to write...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 1, 2018 | Reviews
‘The Man Who Wasn’t Ever Here’ begins with a useful scene-setting in prose, and a mystery – perhaps two. Thomas Ovans, the poet’s grandfather, was born in County Leitrim, moved to Middlesbrough to work in the shipyards and married a local woman, went to...
by Helen Ivory | Oct 21, 2018 | Reviews
This is a book of translucencies. Nothing is over-solid or overstated, nothing prosaic, yet the poems have an energy and exactness that capture relationships, places, people with unusually fine detail. Take the opening poem, ‘Crockery’. The ‘you’ it’s...
