by Helen Ivory | Sep 28, 2018 | Reviews
Ghosting for Beginners’ amusing title poem plays on the idea of social-media “ghosting,” the act of going absent online after the end of a relationship, but there are many ghosts and hauntings in Anna Saunders’ fifth collection. The poet’s delicate...
by Helen Ivory | Aug 30, 2018 | Reviews
Losing a parent is hard and when it happens, it’s tough. It brings a glut of unexpected emotions and without a doubt, More than you were, Christina Thatcher’s debut poetry collection, deals with the death of her father in a beautiful,...
by Helen Ivory | Jul 6, 2018 | Reviews
Susie Wild’s Better Houses announces a new, highly distinctive and exciting poetic voice. The subjects of this collection – a boyfriend mowing the lawn, an ill pet, a pub crawl – are universal, and give the poems an immediate accessibility. The author’s balance...
by Helen Ivory | Jun 10, 2018 | Reviews
The most recent collection by Ruth Sharman, Scarlet Tiger, Templar Poetry 2016, won the 2016 Straid Collection Award. It is dedicated to her father and to her son. It is a substantial collection, featuring fifty-nine poems divided in three sections. The...
by Helen Ivory | May 20, 2018 | Reviews
The author of this cerebral and assured debut is the joint editor of a magazine called Kaffeeklatsch. Its manifesto suggests (in the midst of a post-modern welter of interlocking footnotes) that the reader of poetry ‘must be like the cat, flirt with...
by Helen Ivory | May 14, 2018 | Reviews
Pagdin’s pamphlet, Caldbeck presents poems which are unflinching in focus, and confidently varied in form, as she explores her experience of sudden postnatal psychosis. The poems are thoughtfully arranged to trace the emotional and physical...
