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Literature & Fiction

Burns, Will

Poetry

offord road books

Ella Frearss debut is a collection of wry, vivid poems whose power lies in their intimacy. They are as insistent as they are circumspect, drawing close to the readers ear and bringing them into confidence. The engine of Shine, Darling is one of strength, of fortitude in confronting and surviving the world, of a lifted-chin audacity There was pain, the speaker allows, but it was not new pain. Frearss work is world-weathered rather than world-weary, delighted by service stations, f**king on bins in Cornwall, in constant communion with the moon. It lives for the power-play of people, of the pull of the sea, the smoky air Stormy, sticky with flies and tangled underbrush where the land ends. Her characters test each other, experimenting with the boundaries of physical violence, of punishment, of traps, all the while drawing the reader into a complicity that gives these poems all their daring, electrifying muscularity. In Shine, Darling, the desire to expose and disclose wrestles with defence and defiance. The result is exhilarating, a glorious full-bodied debut collection with the draw of an adamant tide.

Shine, Darling

Ella Frears

In Spoils James Brookes advances a lyrical, frank and unsparing consideration of the England in which we find ourselves. While retaining the historical interest and folkloric reinvention of his spectacular debut Sins of the Leopard, Brookes has clarified his poetic concerns into the less comfortable questions of freedom and liberty. In this new book his praise of the achievements of one figure is necessarily tempered by a curt frustration at the lives not lived as a result of that achievement, of the successes not ever to be and, again and again, the suppression of women's achievement. But these poems do not preach or lecture; rather, they plumb the deep well of history and language and come up each time with a glittering fragment. Here is the weirdness of heraldry, the intrigue of politics and war, finely drawn by a poet with an eye for texture and material; from time to time, in Brookes's bestiary, we glimpse something dazzling in the corner of our eye. Everywhere in Spoils there is struggle, conflict, but the pantheon of strivers that Brookes employs assert his skill as a poet of high humanity, unshakeable conviction, and a consummate talent.

Spoils

James Brookes

Working Class Voodoo

Parker, Bobby

A Working Model of the Fall from Grace: Essays & Poems for David Harsent

Various, Authors

Literary

"[A] dazzling and immensely readable collection." -- Andrew McMillan 'never say / the best of summer's gone', the poem asks, a plea for permanence that sustains throughout Fondue, the second collection by A. K. Blakemore. In these louche, candid poems, bearing the marks of Mary Ruefle, Emily Dickinson and The Smiths, the inner life prowls, smoking a cigarette, as the fantasies of sex and violence allowed to play out in the subjugations that have long been the poet's concerns. Here they are exposed, interrogated and attacked with a fierce melancholy. These lines understand their power to manipulate: 'this is a poem about my mouth / intended to draw attention / to my mouth', the title poem instructs. This is what I like; this is what I don't like 'i want you / like a scorpion down my shirt' there is a plaintive charisma in the ability to ask for the things a body needs. And for all of Blakemore's defiance, the savagery and storm, this world holds a prismatic, surprising beauty, the beauty of rain-washed streets, of comedown mornings, of the potential for tenderness in the brutality of love and play. The poet who can strike so fiercely at the times when 'truth is just a sharp thing you stand on in the night' can also conclude 'but god i love the world. the things you do'. Tigerish, impetuous, quick-witted and never self pitying, Fondue reaffirms Blakemore's place on the barricades.

Fondue

BLAKEMORE, A. K.

Where are you from? What's your accent? ask these poems in their two-strand voice, English and Malay woven together into a tapestry of the long- and recent-dead. The unquiet will not stay away, but press whispering at the boundaries of our world. Often, again and again, they burst through that tensile barrier, catching at us. Ghost after ghost visits, bringing the scents and voices of their waking lives. Here, each word has a twin the learned and the mother tongue are one, and language is layered like sediment containing the bones of our ancestors. These are dispatches from the porous borderland of this world, humming with its traffic of ghosts and visitors, and told through subtle, complex poems in which The hitch slips . . . Yokes transmit tension but, ultimately, the harness holds.

The Unquiet

L. Kiew

Votive

Keiran Goddard

Lantern

Seán Hewitt

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