At first glance, this doesn’t look like an exceptional collection. Its frontage is minimalist of a conventional kind: lower case, scant punctuation, plain vocabulary, curt titling, unfussy syntax, present tense. The poems are aired in lines-as-phrases or in prose. The first one reiterates the word ‘language’ (‘language/ as fuel ready to burn/ language/ as a wave surging around you/ language/ as a scarecrow’ […]) in a performance manner. Shortly, the anaphoric ‘a day (2)’ tells us there’s ‘a day for being lost/ a day for arriving or failing to arrive/ a day for an unexpected visit’, and so on. Most of the longer words in ‘‘g’ poem’ begin with ‘g’: ‘you may think this is gimmicky,’ the poem says. Some micro-poems offer micro-jabs of sarcasm (‘you touch me/ with all the gentleness/ of a knife slitting a melon’) or of adolescent spoof (‘the search for reality’s been called off’). The poem ‘football talk’ (‘it was a real game of two halves’, &c.) lists football clichés. In ‘rucksack’, the speaker takes a river, and later a quarry, a frog and finally his own body out of his rucksack in a familiar brand of surrealism.
And yet among these unthrilling pieces are others that feel as if they’re by a different poet altogether, in which there’s a strangeness that’s harder to dismiss:
i lower the stylus
on to the wing of a starling
and listen to the mass migration of violins
or
you come to me
with your jewellery
made from the cries of birds
Another begins ‘when a baby and its mother are made of wood/ birth involves a lot of splintering’, and twists through freakish horror into tenderness. In another ‘language has been privatised/ so now we have to pay to use words’ and when the speaker accidentally says hello to a friend, he immediately gets a phone message: ‘the appropriate charge will be deducted from/ your account/ thank you’, with the efficient corporate politeness providing the sinister bite. In another, the speaker finds ‘a baby in the drawer’ who ‘puts her arms up to me’ and says ‘you’d better make a good job of my upbringing’ but it’s the final weirdness when the baby ‘stuffs a handful’ of sultanas into his mouth that makes it most disturbing. In one of my favourites, Adam and Eve ‘wander out of the garden’ and see a military parade ‘with the latest tanks and missiles’ and
before she and adam can raise
their glasses or wave a flag
they’re arrested for indecency
In ‘the knocking’, as a last example, the speaker hears ‘people from the past’ knocking on his door, and at the poem’s turn, in an intensification of unease into horror, ‘I do the same to them’:
i go out in the darkness
and knock on their doors
even if they’re thousands of miles away
even if i don’t know where they live
In these poems and others like them, the deadpan tone, the faux-naïvety, the oneiricism, the comedy-horror and the absurdism play off against a commanding use of narrative: the set-up, the build-up, the swerve, the finesse of the endings. In the cap to one about televised bombing, the speaker looks up at ‘a cloud. how can it be so big and quiet/ and unarmed?’
Over his three collections, Andy Fletcher’s themes and favoured images have steadily emerged: trains, cats, militarism, birds, relationships, flying, football, pianos and violence (the previous collection has the provocative title How to Be a Bomb). The style has stayed consistent across time (the first collection dates to 2007) and each book has the same inexplicable mix of the dazzling and the so-what. Is this poet still unclear on how he gets his effects? If so, well… I am too. If one part of a reviewer’s job is to illuminate how humble print gets transformed into somatic payoff, then the best poems here engender that pleasurable but annoying critical paralysis: how did the poet do that?
Guy Russell 1st July 2026
