Category Archives: Books

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

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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

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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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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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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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