Monthly Archives: January 2026

Everything Is Present by Anna Woodford (Salt)

Posted on January 30, 2026 by tearsinthefence
Everything Is Present by Anna Woodford (Salt)

Its references to Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds tell us that this is a so-called ‘confessional’ collection, though it rejects the torment and taboo-breaking of its models: the present of these poems is happy marriage, pride in motherhood, pleasure in sex, enjoyment of career, and love of parents and grandparents. Fair enough: the poets of personal apocalypse are scarce these days, while many contemporaries look out from a such a level headland that they risk being swooped on by the Smug Poem or Boast Poem vultures – or just dying of boredom. One strategy is to direct anger and hurt at the mad outside world in poems about prejudice, poverty or the environment. Another is to look back at a horrendous personal past. A third is to cherry-pick moments of tragedy (bereavement, break-ups, pathosis) in an otherwise grounded life. Anna Woodford’s originality here lies in her aptitude (or desire, or determination) relentlessly to see the ‘Bright Side’, as one title puts it. Teenage, in ‘16/17’, is viewed not via the usual alienation but as opportunity and potential: ‘Newcastle is Annacastle upon Tyne’. A grief poem has the startling line ‘I was not prepared for all the fun we had’. The workaday world is ‘How I love lotsofpeopleinaroom’ [sic] ‘and me coming in/ as the teacher’. Even a poem of parental expiration gets a forceful upbeat twist:

          You were flying, Mum. Bloody Great Death
          was at every window, jemmying them open
          so you could make clean away in your hospital gown
                                              […] What could I do
          but cheer you on – Go Mum! Go for it! […]

Where there are difficulties, the focus is on happy resolution. Two years’ disrupted schooling is sketchily hinted at, but via positive commemorations of a therapist, a private tutor and a music teacher. Poems featuring unsuccessful former relationships frequently recall their good parts. A train crash in which ‘we nearly died’ is remembered as:

          […] for years after we laughed
          about the mother locked in the loo, about the man
          who sat on Helen’s suitcase and burst it […]

This desire to upend expectations extends even to a Heptonstall Graveyard poem which is (mainly) about a resident other than that one. Nor is this one of those collections that begins with poems about childhood and ends with poems about death. Alert to the structural cliché, it reverses it. The book’s title justifies the re-ordering, but fortunately its sweeping assertion isn’t treated simplistically. History, which here is family history, remains a site of revision. Speaking of an immigrant grandfather, ‘the terrace/ he named Lwów after the home he lost’ had been named ‘Leopolis’ by him in an early poem, and the amendment from the Latin/ Hapsburg name to the Polish one suggests a significant change of perception or loyalty. ‘Everything is present’ is, among other things, also a Buddhist notion. Fans of Changing Room will find fewer shrines and monks this time but it’s certainly arguable that the book’s outlook owes something to the Four Truths.

Stylistically, the free verse demonstrates a deft mix of end-stopping and varied enjambment that bolsters the conversational flavour while regulating the flow. An alertness to sentence-shape suggests that Anna Woodford might also write good prose. A particular feature is the anaphora; above all, the ‘How’ formulation used in many poems: 

          How Mum cannot open the door enough.
          How she grabs our things as if against
          a big lit clock. How her pinny is
          all frills […]

Not least, there’s the constantly enjoyable phrasing. I liked ‘the bubble of your flat with its solid/ teapot’ and ‘my A++ in grieving’ and ‘Mike and I/ were riding around on my bedroom’s white charger’ among many more. With its thirty-eight pages of poetry, this is a large pamphlet that’s grown a thin spine, but it packs a lot of interest in. Who wants poets to suffer when they can write so well and be happy? 

Guy Russell 30th January 2026

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Berlin Lines by Penny Hope (Tears in the Fence)

Posted on January 11, 2026 by tearsinthefence
Berlin Lines by Penny Hope (Tears in the Fence)

In Berlin Lines, Penny Hope’s fine pamphlet published by Tears in the Fence, an observer recounts their perceptions and experiences of the city’s history, language and environment. Throughout the poems runs the theme of reflections – reflections in the sense of pondering and thinking but also with the meaning of vibrations and echoes, the resonances of the past. 

The evocative cover image, ‘Reflections in the Spree’, is taken from a photograph by the author. This significant river, seen in the context of the city’s present environment and its history at the time of the Cold War, is one of contrasts. The ‘slow drift of dark water’ may be beautiful with its ‘trail of rippling light’ that is  ‘dissolving in reflection’, it may be ‘a busker’s water-music’ and a source of purification, but it is also like a polluted soup, thick with sulphates, pesticides, ‘detergents   residues of oil   cigarette butts   bicycles’.  (‘Museum Island’). Overshadowing all this is the memory of the Spree during the time of the Berlin Wall when it was part of a natural but heavily fortified border, a dangerous escape route where several children drowned, a barrier that was both physical and ideological.

A striking feature of Berlin Lines is the way different poetic forms are used to capture diverse aspects of the city and beyond. Several poems feel fragmentary and notelike, a form that suits images of ‘maps// diaries, letters/blown about’. (‘City Notes’). Throughout, there is skilful use of white space, a poem may be punctuated or not (‘Treptow’), several poems are written in a minimalist, short-stanza style (‘Stones’. ‘Palace of Tears’), others are lyrical and expansive. (‘Trail’. ‘Bridges’). Among my personal favourites is the prose poem sequence ‘Bridges’. Other favourites are the longer prose poems that are set out in blocks, especially the surreal poem ‘In the Square’. Here the author imagines herself climbing into a carving of a gigantic ‘Great Ear’ where she passes through a tunnel ‘lit dimly by overhead lights’ until she reaches the membrane of the tympanum whose ‘meshed quality reminded her of a textured curtain pulled taut, or the screen of a confessional… Here, in this inner sanctum, she would make herself as comfortable as she could, as she prepared to tell what she needed to tell.’

This last sentence about needing to tell brings to mind the question of language. In many of the poems there is a fascinating, seamless interplay between English and German. Phrases in both languages flow like the river, the use of German gives the English reader the feel of being in a foreign city. Notes at the back of the pamphlet are helpful for those who need them for translations and references. In the richness of this multi-lingualism, words may be forbidden, kept secret or spoken aloud ‘in a nostalgia/of naming’. (‘Trail’).  ‘We must speak our stories when we can’ say the women in ‘Circle’ referring to the need to ‘shake up our languages, speaking in turn, around the table in our own and other-mother-tongues’. 

Words may be ambiguous, loaded with double meanings. But they may also be used in fun, to be relished for their sounds and complexities.  Berlin Lines is full of examples of alliteration, and the Text Tile ‘Urban Weave’ can be enjoyed for its clever blending of image and anagram.

One more inspiring feature of language is Hope’s use of quotations. Biblical quotations in German add lyricism and symbolism to ‘Museum Island’ and German writers such as Brecht, Goethe and Hölderlin add their energy to new contexts such as in the poem ‘Waldbühne’ where the international concert brings harmony like ‘a swoop of great wings’.  ‘Who would wish to laugh alone, cry alone?’ asks Goethe.

Mandy Pannett 11th January 2026

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The Literary Business by Peter Finch (Parthian Books)

Posted on January 1, 2026 by tearsinthefence
The Literary Business by Peter Finch (Parthian Books)

Can Peter Finch really be so successful as a poet and editor, and so nice at the same time? In this episodic autobiography, Finch has kind words for everyone he has ever met, for every book he has ever read, performance he has seen, those he has done business with and worked for, along with the charlatans, pretenders and would-bes the poetry world knows all too well. 

The usual collective name is ‘a bitch of poets’ but Finch rises above that. Having immersed himself in concrete and sound poetry, as both cultural historian and creator, there is little that can weird him out, and he seems to have the patience of a saint when it comes to dealing with hangers on, bumbling amateurs, egotists and the textually or socially deranged. Instead, he prefers to encourage and offer examples and a context for it all, in the hope that things will grow, be that personally, poetically, creatively or editorially.

If ley lines existed for the poetry world, then Peter Finch would be the Alfred Watkins we need. Whilst bigging-up and documenting publishing and poetic activities in Wales, particularly Cardiff, Finch clearly documents how local politics, power structures, writerly rebellions, outsiders and arts quangos overlay and interact with creativity and artistic activities, and also reach out to the world outside Wales.

These are only hinted it, sketched quickly, before Finch returns home to Wales. It’s a breath of fresh air, even as someone born and bred in London, to find a new and engaging point-of-view on offer, a world where purveyors of Anglo-Welsh and Welsh poetries argue and debate, and the usual academic and big name authorial suspects are missing. For Wales has its own hierarchies, its own countercultures, its own magazines, poetry slams, upstairs rooms in pubs, lecture halls, bookshops and bookfairs, open mic events, its own groups of poets jostling for attention. Make that lots of its own groups.

Somehow Peter Finch seems to be or have been part of, if not central to, all of these groups. He knew and still knows everyone. He ran Oriel Bookshop for years, flogging every poetry magazine known to mankind; performed as part of Cabaret 246 with [Chris]Topher Mills (who my mother still remembers insulting her down the phone because he thought he was talking to me, the editor of Stride, who had carelessly misspelt a word in his poem); was Chief Executive of the Welsh Academy; tutored at Tŷ Newydd, the Welsh Arvon; and helped initiate the Welsh Poet Laureate. And just in case you’d forgotten, he also wrote, indeed still writes, his own brilliant books of poetry and alternative guides to the ‘Real Cardiff’ and elsewhere.

He’s also affable, enjoys a drink and a chat, remembers people’s names and backgrounds and is one of the world’s great encouragers and facilitators. Finch seems to regard everything as creative, from organising a reading (there’s a How to Organise… chapter here) or running a magazine or bookshop to writing in all its many possible forms, via avant-garde performances and alcohol-fuelled debating sessions in dodgy pub back rooms.

Although I miss the usual sideswipes and derogatory remarks that usually punctuate the divided worlds of creative writing, Finch is an example of an enthusiastic and catholic form of ambassador. I don’t believe for one moment he likes all the work of those he shakes hands with and has worked alongside, but he knows it is a given, part of the literary business he has chosen to engage with and now write about. After all, those givens may be something to resist and write against as much as anything else. We can’t all be Pam Ayres or Bob Cobbing, most of us reside somewhere in between. Or in Finch’s case, everywhere. Omniscient.

Rupert Loydell 1st January 2026

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