by Helen Ivory | Feb 17, 2022 | Reviews
I was intrigued when I saw on social media that Martin Figura was regularly staying in a haunted inn in Salisbury during lockdown. I used to live there, taught at the boys’ grammar school and gave birth to our first son at what is now Salisbury District...
by Helen Ivory | Feb 16, 2022 | Reviews
Beirut, 1975. I remember the news bulletins, the disbelief that anyone, let alone children, could survive the horrors of a bloody civil war. But they can, and Shahé Mankerian’s History of Forgetfulness delivers an extraordinary testimony. His poems are...
by Helen Ivory | Jan 27, 2022 | Reviews
Mary Borden, in her forward to her WW1 modernist memoir of prose poems, The Forbidden Zone, writes how her pieces are fragments of ‘a great confusion’. The poems that make up a great part of Szirtes new collection are themselves fragments of a great...
by Helen Ivory | Jan 2, 2022 | Reviews
Living in such a digital age, it is increasingly rare to not at least know something about a writer even before we read their work. I wanted to try to approach this collection by Jane Burn as if I was in a vacuum, unaware of what I know of her from social media...
by Desree | Dec 15, 2021 | Reviews
In just 31 wee poems of 10 lines each, Sanjeev Sethi, an Indian poet, creates a monumental work of grace from raw feelings. The themes are all too familiar, but the little chambers they reside in are unique. Heavy furniture goes out of the window as rooms are...
by Helen Ivory | Nov 15, 2021 | Reviews
Spoiler alert! This is a seriously good book, but it pulls no punches about the nuts and bolts of motherhood. No quaint, cooing here. Instead, there’s blood and milk; love and its shadow; the joys and the sheer brain-boiling frustrations of...
