Author Archives: tearsinthefence

Psalmbook by Laura Walker (Apogee Press), Saints of Little Fish by Megan Pinto (the 87 press), Vespers by Jane Lewty (Uni of Iowa Press, Hide Me Under the Blood and I Shall Be Satisfied by Keith Jarrett (Bad Betty Press)

Posted on September 24, 2026 by tearsinthefence
Psalmbook by Laura Walker (Apogee Press), Saints of Little Fish by Megan Pinto (the 87 press), Vespers by Jane Lewty (Uni of Iowa Press, Hide Me Under the Blood and I Shall Be Satisfied by Keith Jarrett (Bad Betty Press)

One of the things that seems to have happened in the poetry world over the last few years is the adoption of religious and liturgical forms and ideas for authors’ own secular ends. Laura Walker’s Psalmbook from a few years ago reimagines the Biblical book of Psalms as a series of meditative prayers addressed to the world around her. The poems focus on presence and the present, work to try and capture moments of wonder and incidental thought as the author walks and tries to remember. The detailed observation is in tension with the abstraction of seeking, and the absence of, the ‘you’ the poems address.

Megan Pinto’s poems in Saints of Little Faith feel much more spiritual but is also more earthbound, with parts of the book dealing with the familial, including the author’s father’s illness and decay. Overheard sex, a flasher on the night train, and hospital food, smells and  routines are contrasted with more abstract ruminations on wonder, love, heaven and ‘the vastness of space’. There is a sense of dreaminess overlaid upon the realities of human life: the author prays – to ‘a female God, a kind of God // who radiates light / that does not blind’ – and knows she ‘must learn to live in this world’, but remains restless and uneasy throughout, aware that ‘Obsession is a godless place. I go there every day.’ In the final poem, ‘Harvest’, Pinto turns her spiritual and human desires inside out, regarding herself as desired rather than desiring:

     I think of those late summer walks
     through the meadow and the neighboring
     meadow, where I 
     was not longing but the one
     who was longed for.

Vespers are evening prayers, and in her book of the same name, Jane Lewty turns these into reflective poems about creativity and making within daily life. Getting up times, routine (or lack of), make-up, worries and ecstatic moments are woven into poems full of both abstract questioning and stream-of-consciousness memories and moments. I would have liked the poems to have been more rooted in the world around the author, soon tired of the nervous engagement with the world and self-negation. In ‘Vesper #1117: Triptych’ she contradicts herself, saying

     I think you should not
     say or write a single word until you have made some terrible mistake.

as if only error or wrongdoing can provoke a poem, which seems as questionable to me as sitting around waiting for a fictional muse to inspire. Although the final poem, ‘Oxen’, self-consciously references ‘these gross nightletters, this vespers, husssh’, there is little quiet or contemplation here, only restless, fidgety self-awareness and doubt.

Keith Jarrett’s book, Hide Me Under the Blood and I Shall Be Satisfied, is the book I most enjoyed reading here. He lives in a world I know, a rough and tumble urban environment, and struggles with a gospel background derived from a church upbringing. Despite the fact he is 

     bored of God and his insufferable mother-
     in-law jokes           his magic tricks          clumsy
     sleight of hand    we laugh because if we didn’t

     hell would break loose

he is ultimately ‘thankful to be spared / another day’. These poems are tough, taking faith and doubt, colonialism, being black and queer in their stride, whilst drawing upon performance poetry alongside the mystical, experimental and canonical. There are poems after Edwin Morgan, Walt Whitman, William Blake and John Latham; songs of praise, anger, resistance, love and lust; family stories, ‘origin stories’ and lists (‘partial index’s) of ‘Some Gods’; contemporary fascinations, prophecies, warnings and addictions. The remnants of spiritual engagement underpin Jarrett’s poems, yet he is weary and resigned:

     If we must pray, then let this be our prayer:
     If we must live, then let us live sincere.

There is sincerity by the bucketload in all these books, each author struggling to shake off and abandon, or appropriate and make use of, religious forms and concepts that were once everyday. Sometimes, the notion of prayer, praise or deity sits uneasily within the work, at other times a sense of wonder, attention and love underpins and informs the writing.

Rupert Loydell 24th September 2026

Leave a comment

Posted in American Poetry, Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Mapping Broken Roads by Roger Bloor (Barnard Press)

Posted on September 20, 2026 by tearsinthefence
Mapping Broken Roads by Roger Bloor (Barnard Press)

Roger Bloor’s second collection explores Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and is mainly in first-person narrative. In case a reader is tempted to read ‘I’ as autobiographical, Kahlil Gibran’s epigraph reminds us: ‘I am not what I seem’, and it is also worth bearing in mind that the poet is a former psychiatrist. The title refers to Danielle Schaub’s work on trauma theory, whereby one’s inner world consists of a conscious mind with accessible past experiences and a dissociated part of the mind holding an inaccessible traumatic past. Bloor attempts to map these broken roads ‘home from the house of silence’.

       Despite such weighty content, Bloor finds space for humour. ‘A Young Boy’s Guide to Living on the Surface of the Sun and Other Difficult Things’, from the first section, recalls a young narrator’s innocence as a friend, ‘Pedley in 2B’, corrects a sketch of ‘what girls are like ‘down there’’.

       The book has three sections: in the first, the speaker grows up, experiencing first love, has hopes, then comes disillusionment and a triggering traumatic event in the heart of the book, where the poem’s title is only the time ‘20:58 (53.00, -2.21)’. Following poems explore living with trauma and roads to possible recovery.

       Key to the collection is Bloor’s employment of formal experimentation: poems are redacted, found (from medical forms), text-speak, fading font, comic-style balloons of text on black pages. These don’t make for easy reading, but are not mere play but a subtext of the emotional journey. ‘Criterion A: Stressor’ is a short, justified prose poem which conveys how someone struggling to hold onto ‘normality’ may find themselves fading in and out: ‘The person was exposed to death, threatened death, actual or’. 

       ‘Twonnet’ is Bloor’s invented form that uses the 140 characters (once stipulated on Twitter), arranged in 14 lines of 10 characters without spacing. This creates a sense of being hemmed in: ‘thesilence/runsacross/thepageand’ (‘Ghosted’). Even the Pantoum ‘Lyt’ has a Bloor-twist, employing condensed spelling, reflecting the speaker’s jumbled, circular thinking. ‘I rOt deez lines 2 mk a mark/my lov upon yr vrgn page,/ n gave 2 lot sum drk’.

       This is a journey from innocence to secrecy, shame and fear and ultimately possible healing. But if Bloor’s inventiveness makes at times for challenging reading, there is also much lyricism. In ‘All floral tributes will be removed after seven days’ the speaker burns the memories, ‘and no one knows which jade black rose/ is nourished by them now.’ 

       With mental health so much in the news, this collection should be welcomed for broadening our understanding of the experience of PTSD. 

Mary Mulholland 20th September 2026

Leave a comment

Posted in Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

48kg by Batool Abu Akleen (trans with the poet by Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Vita & Yasmin Zaher (Tenement Press)

Posted on September 18, 2026 by tearsinthefence
48kg by Batool Abu Akleen (trans with the poet by Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Vita & Yasmin Zaher (Tenement Press)

Max Porter describes 48Kg. as ‘one of the most viscerally affecting collections of poems I have ever read’. I saw the young Palestinian poet, Batool Abu Akleen, at the Southbank International Festival in July 2026, when I heard Cristina Viti read a selection. The audience was mesmerised by their atrocity and beauty. The way Abu Akleen brings together war and the body is chilling. From ‘Consider 37Kg. The leaving game’

         He said:                Hold the box

                                    open it

                                    take out the scissors

                                    cut out your heart

         I touched my heart for the last time

         He said                 I’m leaving

         I cried

         He whispered:       Shhh

                                    don’t cry.

                                    You don’t have a heart anymore

         In ‘5Kg. I don’t know how to sew’ the narrator is with her grandmother:

         I hold a needle & thread in one hand

                  & your features in the other.

         I look among the doctors          who are busy with the living

         I look for someone to sew your torn face together again

         so I can kiss it

                  for the last time.

In her introduction, Aku Akleen writes how for a while she stopped writing, ‘believing that poetry wouldn’t change the world’,  then realised ‘the importance of giving a form to feelings in order to understand them’. She writes in Arabic but says it is in self-translation that she understands. ‘In Arabic [..] I was afraid of death […] but when I started to translate this book, I made peace with death.’

         In the foreword, Cristina Viti, one of the translators, says she encountered Aku Akleen’s work through an anthology dedicated to the memory of Etel Adnan. Her poem, ’47Kg. I didn’t steal the cloud’, won the Barjeel Poetry Prize in 2020 when the poet was 15: ‘I wear the clothes of those who live in their own land/ ‘refugee’ written on my forehead.’

         All poems are written in Arabic on the left and English on the right. The title refers to the 48 poems of the collection, numbered in reverse, each testament to a body under siege. In the final poem, ‘IKg’ a soldier ‘sharpens his missile by the kitchen sink’ then takes the speaker ‘to the living room./ the safest spot/ or so I thought.’ where ‘I die without a voice./ he skins me flesh from bone./ cuts me into forty-eight pieces.’

         As Jack Underwood says, ‘No one should have to write these incredible, haunting lines, but everyone should read them.’

Mary Mulholland 18th September 2026

Leave a comment

Posted in Arabic Poetry, Books, Translations and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Late Inscriptions by David Miller (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press)

Posted on August 23, 2026 by tearsinthefence
Late Inscriptions by David Miller (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press)

Since the death of his wife Dodo (the philosopher Doreen Maitre) in 2022, much of David Miller’s work has been an elegiac exploration of grief. Late Inscriptions continues this theme and phase in his poetry as Miller recounts and reimagines, remembers and re-members in his attempt to commune with the dead and navigate grief.He writes in the minimalist style derived from the great US poet and mystic Robert Lax. Keith Jebb has noted that Miller admires Lax immensely and says that ‘few have pitched words in space, found the pitch of words, like Miller and Lax.’ When I interviewed him in 2023, Miller said that Lax was exemplary for him, both as a writer and as a person, and emphasised the ‘strong, even severe strand of minimalism in a good deal of his work’. What this means in practice is that each word used is significant because each word bears meaning. Miller leans on and stresses each word because they bear the weight of sorrow. Jebb says that Miller creates ‘with a balance of minimalism, repetition and the abstract, words isolated and ringing.’A similar minimalism is also to be found in the content of these poems. In the words of the Del Amitri song, in these poems ‘nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all’. Harriet Neville notes the happenings as being: a bird landing on the door, waiting to be fed; a dog entering the bedroom through an open back door; and Belgian waffles and eggs Florentine shared with old friends. Although nothing significant seems to happen, actually everything happens and we, as is the poet, are changed.It is not just words that become significant in poetry and grief but also events and activities of any kind, whatever they may be. Each and every event is a potential trigger for emotion or memories and a potential healing agent enabling the one grieving to cope in the face of loss. Attention is paid to each event or activity and is rewarded as all are meaning-full.Addressing simultaneously both ourselves as reader and Dodo, his late wife, Miller moves seamlessly between event and memory, action and reflection in his sharing of his grief journey. While inscriptions are usually permanent markers of significance, these inscriptions shift and change in the moment, as minute by minute, page by page, we move beyond them. What counts, as Neville identifies, is the activity of recounting and reflecting:

To speak –        

to not speak –          

to write –             

through – and out   

With the simplest of elements sparely rendered, Miller tenderly explores the paradox of love and loss by weaving together fragmented memories ‘coloured by grief’. As Jebb comments, ‘No other contemporary poet does this so skilfully, or with such honesty.’ Between Late Inscriptions and Eight Poems, both of which cover similar ground, is a short Untitledpoem for Rupert Loydell on the subject of prayer. Loydell has been a supporter of Miller over the years and published The ABCs of Robert Lax, edited by Nicholas Zurbrugg and Miller, which includes essays and tributes from many poets, writers and critics. This poem was originally published by Loydell’s Stride Magazine as part of a series of poems inspired by The Prayer, an art-installation by German artist Diemut Strebe, that tries to explore the supernatural through artificial intelligence. Miller’s response is that while, in this installation, ‘A mouth speaks’, it is ‘not mine’. What is his, as Miller himself has articulated, is the care for ‘each and every syllable’ that he finds in Lax’s poetry and practises in his own. A ‘gentle yet strong focus, lucidity and faithfulness of the act of attention (to words, to the things and the people around him, to whatever he names in poems)’ that ‘constitutes one of the most salient features of Lax’s poetry’ and also of his own.

Jonathan Evens 23rd August 2026

   

 

1 Comment

Posted in Australian Poetry, Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Candlelight by Seán Street (Poetry Salzburg)

Posted on August 3, 2026 by tearsinthefence
Candlelight by Seán Street (Poetry Salzburg)

A candle is a powerful instant symbol that communicates across cultures and languages with associations of light, imagination, remembrance, renewal and hope, but also connects with transience and mortality for, in the process of giving light, a candle flame, as Gaston Bachelard describes it, ‘dies a good death; it dies in its sleep.’ Seán Street draws on all these symbols and more in Candlelight, going deep into human conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings, accessing the ancient and the elemental.

Fire is an element at the heart of the poems with their images of flames and the sun. Saxon men and women, with their love of riddles and kennings, saw the sun as the world’s candle and the poem ‘Dawn Chorus, Evensong’ depicts a world where Earth will be ‘deserted by sun’ if the dark is not kept at bay. Here is an ongoing struggle, a paradox of ‘flameless fire’ with a million suns blinding the narrator as he imagines journeying to ‘worlds past dreaming’, to a light that is ‘past metaphor’ (‘White as Jasmine’).

Water and Air are almost synonymous in Candlelight. Both represent the inner self even more than the outer. Rain provides a motif for several of the poems, often, like a low mood, doing no more ‘than drizzle’ or being grey or resembling glass or tears. ‘Prelude’ references Chopin’s Opus 28, No 15, usually known as The Raindrop Prelude’. Here, in an atmosphere of rain and ‘white silence’, is the impression of a bell being played ‘under the water’ of a pewter lake. Outside, there is no rain.

There are spaces in the air of Candlelight, spaces for the slow emergence of things. In the visionary poem ‘Newsham Park, Evening’ the reader becomes aware of

            A narrow

            still moment,

            air before 

            the air knows

            itself, faint

            whispers round

            the bandstand

and the lake,

places where

an almost 

poem can 

hang on space

between things

happening,

existing

but not yet

ready to

be written

or spoken.

Spaces, silence and stillness – but there is sound as well, the music of memory or ‘the noiseless noise’ of an aeolian harp which tells the self to create a garden with ‘earth, pen, paint, song’ and  ‘plant something through which responses can sing.’ (‘Wind Harp’).

There are several elegies in Candlelight – tributes, memories, nostalgia, a sense of being ‘speechless in the face of mortality’ and a feeling that ‘The world’s layers peel off one by one,/coming to the edge of a thin place’. ‘Viewpoint’, the first poem, uses the metaphor of the path as journey but the poem’s ending is inconclusive – not hopeless but not hopeful either. Distant hills, with their promise of arrival and attainment, are invisible in the fog and seem to offer only ‘a blankness of possibilities’. 

Yet in this beautiful, deeply moving collection of poems there are small portals, thresholds and open gates, there is colour and starlight and candles that lit ‘sparks in a pool,/a movement bright in deepest dusk/with beads down the rich glass searching.’ There is gratitude and joy for every moment of living, for ‘being a part/of the whole green flickering thing/while it lasts, for now.’ (‘Q &A’)

Mandy Pannett 3rd August 2026

Leave a comment

Posted in Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Tears in the Fence 84 is out!

Posted on July 31, 2026 by tearsinthefence
Tears in the Fence 84 is out!

Tears in the Fence 84 is now available at http://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward and features poetry, prose and visual poetry and fiction by Jeremy Hilton, Eliza O’Toole, Kelvin Corcoran, Mandy Pannett, Morag Kiziewicz, Aidan Semmens, Lesley Burt, Adam Piette, Tim Allen, Saema Choudhury, Mark Dickinson, Tracy Turley, Paul Brownsey, Tim Cresswell, Kate Noakes, Matt Haw, Cole Roulain, Randolph Healy, Janet Sutherland, Huw Gwynn-Jones, Niall McGrath, Jessica Mookherjee, Chris Kerr, Jacob Burgess Rollo, Keith Jebb, Marilyn Francis, Steve Spence, Michael Henry, Lyndon Thompson, Claire Booker, Martin Stannard, David Hayman, Seán Street, Kathleen McPhilemy, Peter Dent, Andrew Henon, Michael Farrell, John Kinsella and Mark Goodwin.

The critical section consists of the Editorial by David Caddy, Mark Dickinson’s letter on J.H. Prynne, Poetry on Edge, Steve Hitchins on Frances Presley & Tilla Brading, David Annwn on Jeremy Hooker, Robert Sheppard on The Literary Business by Peter Finch, Mandy Pannett on Geraldine Clarkson, Andrew Duncan on The Book of Inversions, Guy Russell on Frances Presley, Ralph Hawkins on Imogen Cassels, Sascha A. Akhtar on Ryũnosuke Akutagawa, Steve Spence on Linda Kemp, Kym Martindale on Steve Ely, Carrie Etter, Barbara Bridger on Cherry Smyth, Mandy Pannett on Osip Mandelstam, Norman Jope on Attila Jozsef, Keith Jebb on Norman Jope, Andrew Duncan on Christopher Hassall, Steve Spence on Brian Herdman, Kenny Knight, Clare Morris on Kevin Bailey, Morag Kiziewicz’s Electric Blue 19, Notes On Contributors and David Caddy’s Afterword.

Leave a comment

Posted in Books, Criticism, English Fiction, English Poetry, Essays, Literary Magazine, Prose Poems, Visual Poetry and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Crossing The Hinge by Mandy Pannett (Tears in the Fence)

Posted on July 8, 2026 by tearsinthefence
Crossing The Hinge by Mandy Pannett (Tears in the Fence)

This small but densely crafted and reflective collection encompasses vastness. We move, though not in this order, between the asteroid impact that marked a boundary in geological time and its effect on the ‘Lilies and Fish’ in the title of one poem,  and the vividly imagined life of a specimen of homo erectus some of whose teeth are discovered in the grit of a quarry (‘Essence’, a particularly fine piece),   through various historical periods to the present and into a dystopian future.  

People’s destructiveness is a recurrent motif, mainly to other people,  but also to other beings: another stand-out poem matches the pathos of a creature driven to extinction with quaint, obsolete language which is now just as dead (‘Forgotten Words for a Dodo’).  

 Mediaeval drama and a Renaissance painting  reflect the duality of life, its Heaven and Hell. A ‘singing-bird sky’ stretches across a hinge (hence the poem’s and the pamphlet’s title) separating  panels of what a note tells us is  a Hans Memling triptych, from the donor and his family to the image of the Virgin on her throne – but also to the ‘vermillion abyss’ in which ‘tiny fiends… tumble downwards.’ The wings of the painting close, we are told , and ‘with the next daybreak’ open on a mysteriously transmuted secular heaven and hell, a pastoral landscape –  though even the heaven here is ambiguous – and a confusing scene of a soldier in a city street with a ‘skeletal-white’ face, anticipating a sniper’s bullet.  

It’s no accident that the whole first of three sections in the book takes its title from that phrase describing Memling’s Hell, ‘A Vermilion Abyss.’ There is much darkness in these meditations, and the contrast between secular hints of heaven and all too powerful experiences of hell on earth is pervasive. ‘A Chain of Words for Roseanna’, set in a  nineteenth century Brighton slum, asks ‘Did you hear the applause Roseanna/for the queen in her Pavilion while you paddled/ in puddles of shit and sickened/       on water and grease’ . There is no punctuation, leaving the reader to make what they can of what is as much a statement as a question.   

As we saw with the white-faced soldier, the sufferings of our contemporary world are also represented. In ‘Everything, at Once’  an expansive evocation of an English riverside idyll encloses an almost parenthetical hint of a very different world ‘beyond the gate’ (so this idyll is not open to all?) which  ‘…is feverish with heat./Many die gasping like goldfish left too long// in a fairground plastic bag.’ And a little later ‘…daylight is gunfire/in the trenches and over Syrian skies.’  

It is, as this poem remarks explicitly (and as the whole collection implies), ‘A simultaneous world.’ It concludes with a return to that idyll: ‘…Here on the Avon/ bees and butterflies, bright as any aubade/ wallow in the buddleia.’ That word ‘wallow’ is one of several in the poem which hint at an ironic distance from the apparently innocent and pleasant world described. 

If we have the leisure and the capacity to read and write poetry, whatever our other individual and collective troubles, we might be seen as among the privileged, the relatively fortunate, compared to many people and other living creatures we know to be suffering, and to have suffered, appalling extremities. How can we live our lives, knowing about that vast world of pain, without becoming overwhelmed by it on the one hand, like the poor madman in Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo who says of himself,  ‘Me — who am as a nerve o’er which do creep/The else unfelt oppressions of this earth’; or, as so many around us  seem to be, defensively callous and complacent on the other? In short, how do we deal with cognitive dissonance? Part at least of Mandy Pannett’s answer is to imagine, empathise with, and steadily contemplate that suffering , and to acknowledge how it coexists with ‘Everything, At Once’ in ‘a simultaneous world.’ And to use all the resources of a deeply meditated and highly skilled poetic art to do so. To be the world’s conscience, or part of it. It is an ambitious undertaking.  It deserves  attention  and respect. 

John Freeman 8th July 2026

1 Comment

Posted in English Poetry, Pamphlet and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

the uncorked banshee rebellion bottle by Andy Fletcher (legalhighspress)

Posted on July 1, 2026 by tearsinthefence
the uncorked banshee rebellion bottle by Andy Fletcher (legalhighspress)

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

Leave a comment

Posted in Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

The complete pieces by Sam Smith KFS Press

Posted on June 24, 2026 by tearsinthefence
The complete pieces by Sam Smith KFS Press

Sam Smith is an under-recognised talent. He’s published a large number of novels in various genres as well as getting on for 20 collections of poetry and for many years edited the poetry magazine The Journal (previously the Journal of Anglo-Scandinavian poetry) which combined a range of material and an impressive reviews section. 

the complete pieces is a tour de force, comprising 60 plus poems, one per page, each title indicated by the bold type opening phrase and each poem made of 18 lines, a five line stanza, followed by a six line stanza, followed by a seven line stanza. This formalised layout gives scope for an expansive landscape which is nonetheless prescribed by the central motif of a concentration camp world which could be either set in WW2 or in Bosnia or elsewhere at a later date. 

The historical location isn’t really the point as this is a sort of melded history which moves between time frames, set during the experience itself or at a later date, reflecting on changing times. It’s an astonishing ‘overview’ filled with detail and disturbing imagery yet having many moments of sheer beauty and contemplation on the nature of humanity. There is also plenty of reference to the natural world and while this is a work devoid of sentimentality it has moments of uplift amid the sheer existential bleakness. 

                    A cirrus sky-frost repatterns the sky,

                    creates a double smear of westering sun –

                    replicating itself in a herringbone

                    segment of refracted rainbow. Up,

                    up there, a planing gull cries, and cries.

                                 The white man in the shower, beaten blue

                                  face down among pink suds, and crouched

                                  in a fearful death; backside dripped upon;

                                  has an arsehole like a purple mouth. Thin

                                   slippery limbs straightened – for carrying –

                                   the anus becomes a brown asterisk.

                    A meadow brown butterfly, on day’s warmed

                    stone, opens its wings, a one-page book.

                    When flown, the kneeling man looks over to

                    the guardhouse garden, watches petals close

                    around day’s end sun, considers

                    properties of colour and light, the electro-

                    chemical processes of thought and being.              (p 13)

You need to read this collection through at least a couple of times to begin to get a picture of the relation between past and present, an individual (or individuals) contemplating a past world of horror and subjugation and commenting on the here and now, across generational divides and experiences. It may be that Sam Smith has incorporated a vast amount of historical reading and resources to construct this work as well, of course, as applying his own life experiences, of which I know little, but this is certainly a collection which pulls you in and asks difficult questions as well as having an aesthetic quality which is very much given a back seat. In short this is brilliant writing, all the better for its avoidance of flashy foregrounding and high-wire pirouetting. 

                    In the blood-thick dark thoughts coagulate and 

                    clot. Pressed to the bottom of night’s trough,

                    gasping a wet panic, one arm reaches up, numb

                    finger and thumb cuts into the black fug with

                    a snick. Bedside lamp throws light up the wall.

                                Phlegm, on a piece of rubbery string, coughs up

                                and down the epiglottis. Yesterday

                                he was shown photographs – left and right profile,

                                full face on – of men he’d avoided looking at

                                 by men who will, today, still believe in justice.

                                 Lavatory flush refills., boiled kettle clicks off.

                    Sink-back spider, grown enormous on detritus, folds

                     its legs through the overflow. On the kitchen radio

                     the religious self-blow their bugles: at this bleak hour

                      a trumpeting aimed at the isolated, the rootless,

                      the drifting, bibles in hotel rooms, bedside hospital beds

                      -primed to explode in fractal minds. He switches 

                      the radio off, and coughs, invocation for an atheist.

Steve Spence 24th June 2026

4 Comments

Posted in Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Until the Twilight Fails by Kristján Norge (Dare-Gale Press)

Posted on June 5, 2026 by tearsinthefence
Until the Twilight Fails by Kristján Norge (Dare-Gale Press)

You couldn’t make it up, yet MacGillivray has. Manuscripts, archival documents, academic research, history, location, and a poet descending into madness or, as he believes, fairyland: the sith. Like other Norge books (this is the third and possibly final one) it is framed as a transcribed and edited version of the source material, in this case a jotter, found by an actual Shetland archivist and poet, and accompanied by an introductory essay which undertakes a number of sidesteps and sleights-of-hand to create an implausible occult web of geography, poetics, linguistics, folklore and magic spells to show how Norge ends up ‘trapped in perpetual twilight – norranta, or asleep, within his vision of the dream.’

The majority of Until the Twilight Fails shows Norge trying to deduce a way to escape from his own notebook, where he believes he is trapped as a stain on the page. So we get lists of ‘Fairy Lure Plants & Protective Tress’, brief sections on clan badges and ‘The Nine Ages of Fairy’ along with recounted dreams, journal entries and poetic reflections. In between the transcribed texts MacGillivray carefully notes where diagrams and drawings were in the original: only three are reproduced here, collected on a single page of the pamphlet.

The tone of the work is strident and declamatory, liturgical:

                                 I can only speak in the language of the dead,
               a robin in my mouth, accompanied by the wounded stone’s song

but also mystical and allusive. Norge recalls a ritualistically-induced hallucination ‘behind the pounding waterfall’ and casts wooden staves in an attempt to negotiate the ‘clot or whirlpool of meaning’ that wrong sequences or materials and erroneous deductions or assumptions produce when attempting ritual magic.

Eventually Norge recognises that there is a conflation of stars and standing stones, a wounded eagle and realises that Eilean a’ Bhàis, the Hebridean Isle of the Dead, is only a discarded flint in the grand scheme of things, although there is a suggestion that the eagle is some kind of sacrifice:

     The holy stone: the animal is an eagle
     on the recumbent altar stone

Norge may also have wished to become an eagle. He intuits the shape or essence of the island as ‘Bird Wound Man’, noting that there is ‘A constant line around the island for the journey of the dead.’

Until the Twilight Fails may be read as a personal book of the dead, a manual for what the back cover describes as ‘numinous transference’ or it may simply be what Norge calls ‘the book of dying dreams’, written after witnessing ‘a fairy death rite’. It is a shamanic, mythological and ritualistic cul de sac, a book of failed incantations and poetic last rites. ‘Nothing correlates, nothing calms in this book of dead dreams.’ 

Rupert Loydell 5th June 2026

Leave a comment

Posted in English Poetry, Poetry Pamphlet and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
← Older Posts
→