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

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Ghost Town Street by Kenny Knight (Shearsman Books)

Posted on June 1, 2026 by tearsinthefence
Ghost Town Street by Kenny Knight (Shearsman Books)

Plymouth has become noted for its poetry scene – Steve Spence (who wrote about it in Tears in the Fence #66, #73, #78 and #82), Norman Jope (who wrote about it in #67), Mélisande Fitzsimons, Philip Kuhn and many more – but in choosing the poet most strongly associated with the city, you could make a good case for Kenny Knight. He’s lived there nearly all his seventy-plus years and his three earlier Shearsman books detail his urban adventures from its Honicknowle council estate and outwards. In a typical poem, Kenny Knight’s persona is wandering the streets like a Baudelairean flâneur or the O’Hara of Lunch Poems, while thinking about Plymouth’s past (Drake, Darwin, Nancy Astor, the Mayflower), his own past (plimsolls, bands, romances) and his contemporary concerns. The poems often take off into the fanciful, fuelled both by the general interests of his generation (rock music, America, Sixties TV) and his idiosyncratic ones (Lobsang Rampa, Llandegley International Airport, Rosemary Tonks). The local place-names and pop-cultural references get so rammed that the three most recent books provide a glossary for them. 

It should be said that we Kenny Knight readers (those I know, anyhow) aren’t there for the prosodical chrome. Lines end at phrase-ends and stanzas end at sentence-ends. There’s no insistent audio-effect or vainglorious figuration or sublime wordplay or big-dictionary words or rhythmic whizz-bang. Nor are we there for philosophical heft or post-structuralist smirk or translations from the Medieval German. The allurements, besides the sense of place and the nostalgia, are the naturalised surrealism of English whimsy and the smart-silly stand-up lines. Stuff like: ‘The best part of the Cold War/ was Ski Sunday’; ‘I want to win the Nobel Prize for Literature/ in a penalty shoot-out’; ‘the literary quarter of Honicknowle:/Tennyson Gardens./ Byron Avenue./ Dickens Road.’; ‘I’m looking for a lover/ from the constellation of Pisces/ but can’t afford the airfare.’

Unfortunately, all those examples come from Kenny Knight’s first and sparkiest collection, The Honicknowle Book of the Dead. This latest one is far less lively. The quirky titles are gone. So are the quirky cover-shots, to be replaced by a grim wooden ruin under a louring sky. The themes are dark: ghosts, shadows, emptiness. The usual supporting cast (Queen Log, the Buckingham Shed Collective, Grand-daughter Grizzly, &c.) are absent.  The city is hushed. And all because – as with so many recent collections – it’s Covid Time. In this episode, the narrator is not having fun. His walks are limited by decree. He’s ‘pretty much blind’. And lonely. And ‘sleep seems to have been/ not much longer than a sigh’. So there’s a bitterness to the nostalgic wit now

          the clocks went back last night
          but an hour isn’t far enough

 along with general sadness

          As the rain starts to tumble out of the air
          it falls from your eyes in solidarity

and minor querulousness: ‘The radio […]/ doesn’t play much music that I like/ […] when do you ever hear/ any Bob Dylan […]’. Those once-ebullient flights towards the Wild West or stardom or city history are now being made as solace. The cowboy bandana doubles as a Covid mask. The Sixties TV that feels most apposite is The Prisoner. Some longer third-person poems bimble like directionless stories; in others the poet’s mind circles, flits, recircles, wobbles and plummets.

Of course, it’d be churlish of the readers to expect entertainment amidst an epidemic. And writers must needs defer to their emotions. And there are, inevitably, plenty of acute moments. A eulogy, for instance, for Nye Bevan: 

          clapping for the man who for me
          is the grandfather I never had
          the grandfather who gave my mother […]
          a place to give birth to three children 

But overall, this may be one for the hardcore fans. For Knight entrants, I’d recommend instead (or as well) The Honicknowle Book of the Dead; at least while we’re waiting with fingers crossed for this customarily off-beat and congenial poet’s next volume.

Guy Russell 1st June 2026

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Strange Architectures by JL Williams (Shearsman Books)

Posted on May 2, 2026 by tearsinthefence
Strange Architectures by JL Williams (Shearsman Books)

Our culture’s obsession with property – as self-expression, as glamorous or quirky backdrop, as literally solid investment, as anything beyond mere shelter and warmth ‒ has long called for some poetic attention. This book steeps us in the language of estate agents (‘a queen’s bath/ all fixtures and fittings/ Grade A’), of homes-and-gardens magazines (‘her unmistakeably good taste in period furniture’), and of TV property programmes (‘this house you’ve lovingly/ restored’). It indulges the lush clichés of those genres: the ‘generous’ terrace, the ‘expansive’ view, the ‘sprawling’ garden, the ‘sapphire’ pool. Things are ‘nestled’, ‘richly patterned’, ‘timeless’ and ‘chocolate box’. An archway ‘embraces’, a sofa ‘relaxes’, cliffside houses ‘cling’, and one place even ‘offers its liminality’.

Each poem here is a different building, most often experienced from inside and, notwithstanding the book’s title, attending as much to interior design as to architecture. And each poem, the paratext tells us, is a dream. Many of the buildings, then, are dream houses in every sense. Floors are marble, beeswaxed, ‘sun-faded cobalt’ or ‘tiled in tarnished gold’. Ceilings are coffered, vaulted, ‘triple height’ or ‘unreachably high’. Walls are amber, sienna, candy blue, yellow and pink. We’re regaled with endless balconies, sofas, gardens, pools and views. Size and space are the qualities most insistently featured:

          Capacious central foyer,
          multi-level entrances
          into tremendous apartments.

          Cathedral ceilings, crystal wall
          views to the ocean.

          Turkish rugs.
          Sculpture.

          A sense of space […]

The temples of consumption and culture also cross the threshold of this sleeper’s subconscious: hotel, restaurant, mall, opera house, concert hall. But it’s not all glitz: so do a hippy bender and a hovel, the latter as nightmare.

The dream conceit spares us from narratives that make conventional sense. Also from direct politics ‒ excepting a Palestinian-run café with a poster saying, ‘burn our houses but we’ll keep dancing’ at the degree zero of housing crisis. Dreams of buildings, rather, point to psychology, and especially (I assume) to Jung, for whom the house was the archetype of the psyche. Jung’s ideas might be without empirical foundation, but they’ve got longstanding artistic utility, and a common move within the poems is to turn from the outward descriptions towards an ‘I’ or ‘we’ discovered within them. 

This is where it gets really interesting. The dreamer’s response to all the architectural splendours isn’t confined to the awed and admiring adjectives. She’s persistently afflicted with anxiety and unease. ‘I pretend I belong’; ‘I will not go further in’; ‘I am panicking’; ‘I need to leave’. She views the buildings’ owners sceptically or distrustfully. She is excluded or, one time, chased out. To finish the poem quoted above:

          Intercom,
          guards, multiple
          pools outside
          to which residents only
          are granted access.

Where, as often, the architecture of impressiveness is also an architecture of hierarchies and exclusions. 

The unease is linked to the desire for these inaccessible splendours, starting with the proem’s plaintive ‘How can we reach them?’ not long followed by, ‘how could we afford this/ ever’. Of course, the house is famously the commodity that you can spend your life buying. ‘Why are we here?’ our dreamer asks teleologically. ‘House shopping…’ But even in ownership, anxiety remains unallayed. In one dream, ‘we’ ‘invested in property’ ironically enough in a ‘conservation area’:

          But our home is gone.

          All that remains is a dusty
          square surrounded by other
          people’s properties.

 And the book’s final image is:

          A house
          that from a distance
          looks like a house
          but when approached
          becomes a sheet of plywood
          raised up on stilts
          in the shape of a house.

In their materiality, buildings are about basic needs; in reverie, this book proposes, they’re sites of conflicting emotions that we can find hard to acknowledge, never mind resolve. In its elliptical, quiet way, it’s onto something resonant and rather subversive.

Guy Russell 2nd May 2026

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Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak by Rishi Dastidar (Nine Arches Press)

Posted on March 13, 2026 by tearsinthefence
Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak by Rishi Dastidar (Nine Arches Press)

Rishi Dastidar has always been an accessible and entertaining poet, with asides in satire and political comment. Since his last book, however, he seems to have been taking lessons in lyricism and romanticism, perhaps from the likes of Brian Patten: because the opening poem ‘Whiteboard’ is nothing if not Pattenesque. It plays with the idea of transience and starting over, beginning and ending with the same two lines:

     I wrote a poem on a whiteboard
     so I could wipe it away, begin again.

In the four lines between the repeat the poem asks ‘Who needs their words permanently stored / when you can write a poem on a whiteboard’, which basically reframes the two line repeat and tells the reader that:

     Transience should be what we applaud;
     fixed words – fixed ideas – are a pain.

Are they? Isn’t this very poem fixed upon the page, at the start of a 75 page book where every poem is intransient? Am I missing the joke or at least a punchline? Is it just me that thinks trying to write a transient poem that is not fixed or final might be far more interesting than this squib of a poem?

Actually, I am a fan of Patten’s poetry (possibly because one of the first poetry books I bought was one of his), especially his love poems, although they can sometimes veer uncomfortably close to naive hippy idolatry. There are plenty of love poems in Dastidar’s book too, with rather a lot of ‘transcendence’, magic’, kisses and desire. It’s all a bit vague, non-specific and trite, adolescent even: passionate and well meant, possibly even ‘true’ if by that you mean felt and/or experiences, but they are the sorts of poems I used to tell my creative writing students to discard.

In a similar manner, the A-Z games of ‘Credentialism’, which is basically an alphabetical list poem moving towards a melancholic punchline reads like a workshop exercise and nothing more. Better are the reimagining of ‘Charon the bus driver’, who watches Friday night couplings and encounters whilst singing, and the more serious ‘On board the “Tynesider”‘ which finds Martin Luther King on the train to Newcastle to accept an honorary doctorate there. Dastidar suggests that King ‘was at his best / when he was harried, harassed’ and the poem concludes with him

                  on a slow train to somewhere
     he would never go again, minting
     coin as easily as he breathed, currency
     we still spend in the realm of hope.

This is moving and original, and in stark contrast to the overstated and overwrought ‘Ah the sweet breath of creation! swoon the hemispheres in unison’ which occurs in ‘Salon de creation’, a prose poem where ‘Left brain is giddy with excitement at this world, synapses being shown a whole new social whirl, while right brain is simultaneously smug and serene’. If Dastidar is set upon satirising the notion of creative salon then I want it to cut to the bone, savaged, not reliant upon the rather tame and repeated idea that ‘intellectual coups […] will be repudiated at precisely 7.27 the next morning’ and ‘may our metaphor for making never be exhausted, or at least until the sun comes up’.

And, actually, ‘may our metaphor for making never be exhausted’ seems like quite an admirable ambition, especially when presented with such a tired and unambitious book of poems such as this. I wish Dastidar had taken note of himself in ‘Melted cockerel’:

                            Feeling alive isn’t the sin you
    think it is, but believing it trumps all is.


Rupert Loydell 13th March 2026

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Under Druid’s Hill by Gerald Killingworth Troubadour Publishing

Posted on March 11, 2026 by tearsinthefence
Under Druid’s Hill by Gerald Killingworth Troubadour Publishing

There is a quest in this novel, a mystery to solve, rooted in parallels and counterparts. It involves the slow unravelling of memories, the unwrapping of secrets and a journey which is more than a family trip to Anglesey but involves a search for truth and the essence of self.

An intriguing story that raises questions in the reader’s mind from the start. Why is the family going on this holiday in response to an apparent whim and obsession on Michael’s part? Why do his childhood memories of playing with Olwen seem so symbolic? What is the significance of the dolls, of Droody Hill, the holes that appear in the land around the church and seem to be leading to ‘some lower region of death’? There are no easy, straightforward answers to these and other questions. They are for the reader to puzzle out.

An aspect of Under Druids’ Hill that I found both tantalising and captivating is the depiction of the family, the psychology of their contradictory personalities and relationships. Sandra, the mother, sets out on the trip determined to be agreeable and go along with her husband’s need to revive and explore his childhood, but she refers to the holiday as a ‘crisis’ and longs for meaningful conversations and more of her husband’s attention. She seems bewildered at times and at a loss to understand or relate to her small daughter.

Charlotte, this daughter, insists on being known as Tottie. Described as ‘a mixture of the fetching and the peculiar’ she is a mass of contradictions – precocious and demanding but also clear-sighted, perceptive and ‘responsive to beauty.’ Michael is ‘in awe’ of his daughter as if she’s ‘a refugee from a country one had barely heard of.’

Being a parent doesn’t seem to come easily to Michael. Fatherhood is a role he feels obliged to play with determination. After a day at the beach, we are told that ‘he had enjoyed playing families.’ He has such hopes for this holiday, this chance to re-encounter Olwen, the little girl whose friendship had seemed magical. ‘I was unbelievably happy that summer,’ he says when questioned by his wife. ‘And it was all because I was Olwen’s friend, her best friend.’ 

Olwen, for Michael, ‘stood at the gate of that summer’. The memory of the brief time was ‘set in amber. It glowed and hadn’t tarnished since the moment he boarded the train back to London.’ If Tottie could meet the adult Olwen, he thinks, she too could experience the magic, the ‘transfiguring’ and ‘the indefinable sense of rightness’. 

The novel’s title ‘Under Druids’ Hill’ creates its own atmosphere of mystery and things that are hidden. Reputed to be the last stand of the Druids against the Romans it enhances the sense of unease and the lost. The dolls do the same, adding a tone that is sinister and, if not evil, at least of disquiet. Pamela and Belinda are Tottie’s dolls, like puppets they often speak for her, are ‘a piece of her personality’, present critical assessments of characters and events. Tottie herself is glad when she can have ‘a respite from the dolls. She hated their cold fixity at times.’ Paralleled with this unpleasant pair is Olwen’s doll ‘Scraggy Aggy’, an ancient rag doll dressed in tear-stained grey fabric and with large glass eyes on the ends of wires.

Symbolic and bizarre amid a book of strangeness and a search for ‘Welsh magic’ which might have a redemptive power. During the summer of Olwen, Michael felt himself ‘adored,’ was as ‘near as possible to be in a state of grace.’ The unhappiness of a disordered childhood home was always there for Michael but ‘in that period of grace, he had never heard anyone speak of divorce.’ For the adult Michael it all becomes centred on Tottie. The place he had found could be, for her, ‘a place where grace was possible.’

The narrative has an unexpected, ambiguous ending but I won’t say any more. Under Druids’ Hill is a remarkable book with much to explore and consider.

Mandy Pannett 11th March 2026

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Tears in the Fence 83 is out!

Posted on February 13, 2026 by tearsinthefence
Tears in the Fence 83 is out!

Tears in the Fence 83 is now available at http://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward and features poetry, prose and visual poetry, flash fiction, fiction and creative nonfiction by Judith Willson, Kelvin Corcoran, Kym Martindale, Lucy Ingrams, Michelle Penn, Mandy Pannett, Rimas Uzgiris, Kenny Knight, A.W. Kindness, Daša Kružlicová, Wendy Brandmark, Anya Reeve, Cherry Smyth, Lesley Burt, Kasia Flisick, Steve Spence, Charles Wilkinson, David Punter, Andrew Henon, Nigel Jarrett, Rachel Goodman, Robert Sheppard, Rebecca Rose Harris, Sarah Watkinson, Jane Wheeler, Jeanette Forbes, Vincent De Souza, Cathra Kelliher, Norman Jope, Pamela Coren, Beth Davyson, Heather Hughes, James Sutherland-Smith, Phil Williams, Kareem Tayyar, Basil King, John Freeman, Susie Wilson, Robert Hampson, Jean Atkin, David Pollard and Penny Hope.

The critical section consists of the Editorial by Joanna Nissel, Aidan Semmen’s 2025 Tears in the Fence Festival Address, Richard Foreman on J.H. Prynne, Elźbieta Wójcik-Leese on Ágnes Lehóczky, Barbara Bridger on Virginie Poitrasson, Guy Russell on Mark Goodwin, Peter Larkin on recent British & Canadian Ecopoetry, Kym Martindale on Eliza O’Toole, Robert Sheppard on Tim Allen, Ian Seed on Jeremy Over, Mandy Haggith on Gerry Loose, Mandy Haggith on Katherine Gallagher, Mandy Pannett on Lesley Saunders, Kelvin Corcoran in conversation with Alan Baker, Graham Hartill on Caroline Goodwin, Mandy Pannett on Agnieska Studzińska, Keith Jebb on Gavin Selerie and Tim Allen, Vincent De Souza on David Miller, Elaine Randell on Chris Emery, Morag Kiziewicz’s Electric Blue 18 and the Notes On Contributors.

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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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Posted in Autobiography, Books, Literary Magazine, Publishing, Welsh Poetry and tagged , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

The Folded Clock by Gerhard Rühm (Twisted Spoon)

Posted on December 8, 2025 by tearsinthefence
The Folded Clock by Gerhard Rühm (Twisted Spoon)

Gerhard Rühm has spent decades exploring concrete poetry, collages and the interfaces between numbers & language, and language & music. The Folded Clock is translated from German (Rühm was born in Austria) into English and published by Twisted Spoon in Prague. This sometimes means that puns and concepts which are integral to understanding the poems are not translatable and even short cryptic notes at the bottom of some pages cannot help this reader.

Elsewhere there are simplistic exercises in visual text, such as ‘homage à kurt schwitters’ where a horizontal line of the numbers 1-26 intersects with a vertical line of capitalised letters A-Z, with the O becoming part of 10; or ‘sixty-nine pairs of lovers’ where the number 69 is turned sideways and gridded into six rows of ten and one row of nine. 

The book also features some long pieces to do with counting and interruption, duration and interruption, as well as shorter counting poems and brief arrangements of numbers, such as this, ‘lucky calculation 2006’:

76   67
13   13
4   4
8
4
2

I can see that the numbers add up to the number below (i.e. 7+6=13, 1+3 = 4, 4+4=8) but why the mirror image to start with, and why after 8 do the numbers become halved? And why is it lucky? 

Other poems are similarly confusing or impenetrable: handwritten calculations on a scrap of graph paper (perhaps a found text?), collaged grids containing numbers, simple visual cutups, some texts as part of a simplistic musical manuscript (unchanging notes on a single stave) or spindly but fluid ink drawings.

Mostly, the book is full of the kind of work that makes me go ‘And?’, just as much conceptual art in galleries does. Yes, I get it, but there’s not much to get, and once you have got it, there is little left. Better are the text poems, but they often read as squibs, reminiscent of the most banal and slight poems that performance poets use to punctuate their live sets. Take this for example:

     birthday

     i was never one hour old
     or ever one year
     i never turned 12
     or ever turned 20
     i was never 42
     or 63 either
     i was never younger or older
     than NOW

Deep, eh? We only live in the present, or something like that. It’s sad when one is reduced to preferring the banality of this:

     line for line

     the first of the lines doesn’t think it’s fine,
     so encourages the second to really shine.
     the third says : reader, go ahead and take your time,
     take your time and linger on the fourth and very best line.

If you like that kind of thing, then there’s a similar poem in the book, ‘sonnet’ which begins with ‘first stanza first line / first stanza second line’. If I tell you it has four stanzas which are structured in 4 lines, 4 lines, 3 lines, 3 lines then you can write the rest yourself.
     
The book’s postscript briefly discusses numerical relationships and graphic notation, and claims that ‘the number, at least as far as structure goes, is the common denominator of all the sundry forms of art’, despite being ‘without any additional semantic function’. It also has brief notes on a few specific texts where it mentions source materials, some kabbalist ideas and some instances where specific correct pronunciation is required.

I was looking forward to this book, hoping that it might link back to Dada and Surrealism, which I have been researching recently, and to mathematics, which I studied and enjoyed in the sixth form. I still find resonances between pure mathematics and poetry, the way things balance and find natural answers and forms, but these texts are not working in that way. I also like Twisted Spoon’s books, their high production values and intriguing catalogues of books. Unfortunately, with The Folded Clock, I simply find evidence of an insular and obsessive poet whose work I mostly find incredibly banal, linguistically, semantically, visually, and conceptually.

Rupert Loydell 8th December 2025

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Posted in Books, Concrete Poetry, German Poetry, Uncategorized and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
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