Category Archives: Pamphlet

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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Fabrics, Fancies & Fens by Gerald Killingworth (Tears in the Fence)

Posted on August 22, 2025 by tearsinthefence
Fabrics, Fancies & Fens by Gerald Killingworth (Tears in the Fence)

The first section of Gerald Killingworth’s superb new collection is called ‘Fabrics’ and is preceded by the author’s note concerning his ‘sense of fabric’ which links closely with imagination. Readers will have their own mental images of fabrics but they’re unlikely to include some of the diverse objects in these poems such as bread, a drumskin, ancient scrolls, shrapnel, a gutted and carved up pig, a feather, and a marble fragment from a chiffonier top.

Extraordinary images, and in this section we have examples of extraordinary juxtapositions as well with graphic details linking humour and horror, the quotidian with the tragic. ‘Sambridges’, for example, begins with humour in its title, the mispronunciation of the word ‘sandwiches’. There is laughter and a feeling of comfort as the narrator nibbles the dry slices which gives him the chance ‘to get the feel and to remember’ but then, in an abrupt shift, we are suddenly in the middle of a battlefield where a sandwich is offered to fill the gap ‘between breakfast and dying’ and the mouldy bread parallels the decay of rotting bodies in the mud, the ‘cheese and jam already indistinguishable from the/ muck they fell in.’

‘Jack’s Drum’ is a subtle confrontation of the question of value. The drum with its softness derived from ‘the downy pelt’ of a calf is worth the cost because of the exquisite music it creates, but, in a clash between harmony and disharmony, no one hears ‘the silent sounds – the anguished/bleating, the stunning smack.’ 

‘Great Uncle Harry’ features in ‘I Have Four Children’, presenting an image of ‘elegance along a seafront somewhere, /complacent, dapper’. Someone else takes care of the pig he owns, the ‘feeding, killing, quartering’ while tender hearted Connie shows no qualms or queasiness when called on to ‘slice off a porker’s/nose and turn his jowls inside out.’ This, like war, is slaughter and mess off stage.

The second part of the collection, ‘Fancies’,  is full of sounds as well. In ‘May Morning, Cerne Abbas’ we are taken to ‘a hill of cloth of gold’ where the air is full of trumpets and horns and the vibrations of hundreds of cowslips – but all these sounds are ‘too subtle for us.’

I admire all the poems in Fabrics, Fancies & Fens but I think my favourite section is this one – ‘Fancies’ – which is clustered with magic, music, dance and, most of all, imagination. ‘True magic isn’t ready-made,’ says the narrator in ‘Poundbury Wassail’, ‘we need to conjure it defying all sorts of gloom.’ Speculative writing that explores possibilities beyond any current reality is a popular genre in fiction and is becoming more so in poetry with elements like science fiction, alternative histories, myth and its contemporary relevance. But fantasy with its cast of giants and fairy folk, its world of ‘what ifs’, is so much harder to write about in a way that’s both imaginative and ‘convincing’. Gerald Killingworth is an exceptional writer and achieves it, perfectly in my opinion, as poems in this collection show. 

He does this by creating an atmosphere of mystery and ambiguity, by inviting us to explore the curious and inexplicable, to share a glimpse of an ‘inner vision’. ‘I am a stranger facing down shadows’ his narrator says in ‘An Etruscan Tomb Outside Orvieto’ as he haunts the ‘dead streets’ and wonders if ancient deities and spirits ‘haunt ours and wonder what/the world has come to.’

This poem also gives an account of a strange experience where, at the threshold of the tomb, with not a plum tree in sight, the narrator sees two unripe plums ‘green as the/verdigris on an Etruscan bronze’ and wonders:

          Are they an offering from…whom? an 

          enticement from some shade? Their 

          greenness is unnatural – perpetual?

          like the hillsides of the afterlife painted in 

          tombs elsewhere, its music never-ending, 

          its wine never sour.

The final section of Fabrics, Fancies & Fens is titled ‘Fenlandia’ – a play on words and subtle allusions which appear throughout the collection and are a delight to come across. Many earlier themes and images recur – land here is ‘dissolved in water’ and it’s ‘water so/thick it has texture’. Sunrise in the Fens is a ‘bloody smudge’ while a downpour of rain is ‘incessant drum-rolling on the windows’ that later washes down ‘the bloodied tarmac/after another hit and run.’ The poem ‘The Bog Oaks’ recalls ‘an echo of centuries’:

       Millennia since their thoughts reached 

       cloudwards, branches feathering the unreachable.             

       Precipitation became intense, ground waters rose,

       reeds and sedges, confident, empire-building, 

       ingratiated themselves into every spinney:

Fabric, Fancies & Fens is a stunning collection – witty, lyrical, quirky and insightful. It is one to read many times. 

Mandy Pannett 22nd August 2025

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Mate Arias by Lewis Buxton (The Emma Press)

Posted on August 13, 2025 by tearsinthefence
Mate Arias by Lewis Buxton (The Emma Press)

This pamphlet of part-rhymed and unrhymed loose sonnets, which Lewis Buxton styles ‘arias’, repurposes its venerable form for satisfyingly down-to-earth subjects, and for poems of friendship rather than romantic love. The speaker and his mates are going to the gym, the pub and the seaside; they watch films and TV, play football, drink, smoke and eat take-away. He also enjoys, with other friends, slightly less archetypal pastimes: doing crosswords, talking about novels or going birdwatching. 

With its plain titling, familiar situations and everyday vocabulary, it’s a swift and easy read. The references are more commonly from TV, comic books and films (The Walking Dead, Marlon Brando in Streetcar, Christopher Walken and especially superheroes) than literature – though James Wright and Sally Rooney get a look-in. The verbal pleasures, likewise, are less about abstruse wordplay or sublime alliterations than charming and offbeat figurative language. Someone is like ‘an unexpected cup of tea’, and ‘an apple crumble and custard kind of bloke’. Obituaries are ‘the football statistics/ of truth’. Slovenly dressers are ‘bathtubs half-covered by shower curtains.’ The sea is ‘a blue duvet’. Such whimsical wit extends to the setups. In the ‘Sensitive Gentlemen’s Club’, ‘The bouncers all have trained therapy dogs’ and ‘you can pay for drinks with […] / completed mental health first aider handbooks.’ An appeal for new football team players is done like a lonely-hearts ad. There’s drolly attentive notice to quotidian moments: ‘nodding solemnly at the mention of money’ and ‘the deft mime of a signature mid-air.’ 

There are, nonetheless, serious issues among the conviviality. The agitations of adolescence elicit sympathy

          All the ghosts came home, crow-unlucky kids
          who were bullied bad (not that you can be
          bullied good, that is) but come home they did:
          soiled, cold and tired backpacks, acne.
          When they were home, speaking was stuck zips.
          What’s wrong? Mum asked, their skulls tucked into hoodies,
          their tongues football boots that did not fit:
          everything is luck, nobody will ever like me.

while the major motifs here, superheroes and horses (‘genitals/ open like a stallion in a field’), emblematize the culture’s impossible expectations of masculinity. ‘[L]et Lois Lane fall’ and ‘put my glasses on’ seem to be the wry recommendations in response, along with acknowledging that ‘We’ve left it too late/ […] to be prodigies’ and settling for the pleasures of the homespun and the unambitious alongside alternative images of personal development: ‘the sunflower man I could/ grow up to become’.

It feels like this review is becoming little more than snippets of things I enjoyed. And indeed, it’d be very hard to dislike this short collection; it’s the kind of pamphlet you might buy for a friend who thinks of poetry as only up-itself or overly intellectual or otherwise not for them. For instance, it’s one of those refreshing, rather rare collections that never uses the words ‘poet’, ‘poem’ or ‘poetry’. It tunes more to the wavelength of relatable experience than of the recondite. Most of all, it comes across as the nicest kind of companion in its unpretentious kindness, its unabashed mansuetude, its understanding of gender as performance, and its humorous balance of gruffness and tenderness: ‘[…] I love her/ and how we talk as if we do not also suffer’; and, ‘We grow so beautiful/ galloping into oncoming collisions’; and, ‘I judge books by their covers/ and I really like your jacket.’ It’s hard not to just keep quoting from it, which is as good a sign as any. 

Guy Russell 13th August 2025

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Summer to Summer Looking by Gill McEvoy (Cinnamon Press)

Posted on March 28, 2025 by tearsinthefence
Summer to Summer Looking by Gill McEvoy (Cinnamon Press)

It is always a joy to read Gill McEvoy’s discerning poems with their perceptions and insights and microcosmic observations. In this pamphlet, Summer to Summer Looking we see the narrator’s clarity of attentiveness that can wait and watch for the special moment when one can hear ‘the thinnest trill’ of the dipper and notice in its flight ‘the bright moon / of its small breast’ that shines like snow. )’The Bird by the River’). Elsewhere, the ‘crowned heads’ of two crested grebes are held in the air ‘like hieroglyphics’ (‘At Stover’) while an ‘October Forecast’ lists a season of ‘sharp stars, huge moons’ but also of ‘slow moving wasps and bluebottles’.

Throughout the poems in ‘Summer to Summer Looking’ there is a keen awareness of changes in climate patterns.  ‘Drought’ is a particularly vivid and horrifying poem with the sun rising ‘from its blood-streaked bed’ in a ‘blinding sky’ as it burns and scorches the earth and ‘flames take hold of dried-out edges.’ Birds and plants in a later winter season mistake milder weather for signs of spring although, ominously, ‘snow is forecast’. (February Afternoon’)

The quality that appeals to me most of all in Gill McEvoy’s poetry is an impression of transcendence, a symbolism that lies beneath the everyday. One of the most beautiful poems is ‘To Watch a Cloud is Consoling. Always’ where the narrator on her sickbed has been ‘sent’ a cloud as a special gift and observes it shift from being the shape of ‘a grey horse resting in a field’ to becoming a cloud again, ‘as such shapes do’. Yet this gift, this cloud, this grey horse does not disappear. In some way the narrator feels it is ever present.

‘Haunting the Pool by the Bridge’ is a more sombre poem in that it depicts the futile search for the kingfisher’s ‘un-nerving shock of blue’ which would be ‘the longed-for vision’ to ‘fill our hearts with radiance.’ On this occasion it is not to be, but there is hope and a ‘kind of glory’ in the later poem ‘Dealing with the Straying Sheep at the Holiday Cottage’ where someone, possibly a child, has gone out ‘in the dark alone’ to rescue a sheep and afterwards walked about the kitchen in wet bare feet leaving, as a sign of passage, ‘shining prints of night-dew’. 

Mandy Pannett 28th March 2025

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1/, tests by Luke Emmett (Litter Press)

Posted on June 29, 2024 by tearsinthefence
1/, tests by Luke Emmett (Litter Press)

I’ve come across Luke Emmett’s poetry on the internet in small doses. This larger ‘small dose’ made up of 20 minimalist poems is an intriguing read. Each poem is discrete, puzzling, sonorous and yet demanding of an explanation which is (obviously) not forthcoming. Which is not to say that they are unsuccessful as poems because this is clearly not the case yet even with material which plays with obscurity and difficulty the reader (this reader in any cases) puzzles away at interpretation because the temptation is unavoidable. Now, to a few of the poems, not necessarily in chronological order:

          That Hobgoblin,

          he’s a real card isn’t he?

          What does he say?

          NOTHING IS FOREVER

This is in fact the final poem in the book and probably one of the most ‘coherent.’ The title runs into the following line and prompted me to check the meaning of ‘hobgoblin’ as I realised I wasn’t entirely sure of the derivation! Ah! Puck from a Midsummer Night’s Dream, of course and references to mischief and shape shifting are useful pointers. We could go into a history of folklore and pagan conflicts with Christianity here but best not. The point being that the intelligence being transmitted in these four short limes is of an ‘outsider’ nature and points towards serious jesting and philosophical puzzling. Which is what we seem to get in abundance with these poems where syntax and function is slightly skewed and where the sound aspect of the poetry (the way words jam up against each other) is as important as the semantic content. I find myself reading these pieces through quickly to get an overall feel then attempting to relate this ‘immediate grasp’ to a sense of conventional narrative construction. Which is completely mad, of course, but what you (I) instinctively attempt and I have to say that the process is both frustrating and very enjoyable. These poems remind me, to some extent of John Philips’ minimalist investigations. Here are a couple more to ‘get to grips with.’

          Rub

          Jacket on chair

          still there. I will

          wear it;

          it creaks.

          Buttons

          For short thread string to

          cloth, the button I’ve kept

          has three holes, shines.

          Continue to pick the loose 

          matter; I hope for visitors.

There’s a continuity here as both poems deal with items of clothing which take on a ‘life of their own’ as they are the key subjects of each piece. There’s a basic rhyme in the first piece, slightly humorous, there is a suggestion of the owner, the ‘I’ of the piece, and very little else. We may have ‘visitors’ in the second poem, a hint at isolation perhaps, a touch of melancholy, a note of ‘obsessional’ behaviour (‘pick the loose/matter’) the possibility of hope, yet each poem feels complete and somehow just right. I haven’t read any of Samuel Beckett’s poetry but I imagine it may have been a bit like this.

          Nightshade Hymns

           Bloody poison of milky red

           berry

                 shade

          toward sleep and move route,

          spit in basin, check image,

          has passion again, unfamiliar.

Here the reader can perhaps construct a narrative around the given information. We are probably talking about deadly nightshade (again I felt the need to consult google!) but this may be a diversion as the berries of the nightshade are black though they are apparently related by family to the tomato. The linking of ‘poison’ to ‘passion’ as much by sound and look as to meaning is indicative and the reference to sleep (death via shade?) again suggests something toxic and intoxicating! Yet ‘move route’ and ‘unfamiliar’ are more troubling though tempting at the same time. The point being I think, as I’ve suggested above, is that you have to take the entire poem as an entity and attempt to intuitively appreciate its whole without being bogged down with ‘meaning’ while yet being unable to completely avoid the search. I’m sure I’ve read a lot of ‘obscure’ poetry which doesn’t sing and somehow work on you and which you wish you’d never encountered but these pieces are successful though I’m not entirely sure why.

     Here’s a final poem to further whet your appetite, hopefully:

          Stuck

          Movement; a spasm

          of laughter accusing

          uncared. Taste

          pain to bodies, touch

          on coupled scissor,

          reddish, bent.

It’s the careful relation of the words to each other (accusing/uncared, for example) and the force of such minimalist phrasing which makes these pieces really shine. There’s a sense of disturbance and also isolation and of a possibly troubled mind but I don’t want to overplay this thought too much.

I could try out an overall critique based on what little I know about Luke Emmett but I’m not going to attempt that here. Suffice to say that I’m glad I encountered these short poems and was pleased to make some faltering attempts at interpretation and engagement. I enjoyed the experience.

Steve Spence 29th June 2024

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Preloved Metaphors by Rupert Loydell (The Red Ceilings Press)

Posted on April 23, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Preloved Metaphors by Rupert Loydell (The Red Ceilings Press)

There is a moment near the end of Rupert M Loydell’s new poetry collection, Preloved Metaphors, that recalls Homer’s Odyssey.  Loydell’s poem ‘Wherewithal’ includes the sentence ‘Everything / should have a poem written about it, // nothing should be left out.’ The echo, of course, is of Odysseus’ duping the Cyclops by identifying himself as ‘Nobody,’ so that when the Cyclops calls for help he inadvertently sends his potential rescuers away by his explanation to them that ‘Nobody is killing me.’  It’s a funny moment in the Odyssey, one the ancient bards surely enjoyed singing, and I imagine Loydell smiling at his desk as he scribbled out (keyed in? cut-and-pasted?) his sentence with its analogous ambiguity.  On one reading, it calls for countless poems, one for each of the countless things in the world, with not a single thing left unsung; on the other reading, it calls for a single poem that is about the category “everything,” and eschews mention of the contrary category, ‘nothing.’

Both moments, the episode in Homer and the lines in Loydell, offer the reminder that irony and bullshit don’t pull neatly apart, that truth-facing Socratic / Kierkegaardian irony and truth-trashing Trumpist hoo-ha serve opposite ends but apply the same medium.  Both recognize that, as Wittgenstein so cannily confesses, ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’  Odysseus gets it that wordplay can deceive; language can mask me.  Loydell gets it that wordplay can undeceive; I can unmask language.  Loydell’s poems, generated not by emoting tranquil recollections but by a recuperative process of collage/bricolage, ever implicitly ask what his poem ‘A Theology of Ghosts’ asks explicitly.

Do you understand

the words?  Do you know

that I have my own way

to burn away mind’s fog?

If language is a window, there are poets who would look through it, emphasizing that out my window I see the world, and others who would look at it, emphasizing that I see the window itself, and of the world only what the window frames, as the window frames it.  There are poets, that is, who take themselves as seeing the world beyond the window, and those who take themselves as seeing the world in the window.  If, say, Larkin could captain the former camp, Loydell could captain the latter.  Preloved Metaphors is, as its title suggests, medium-forward, linguistically self-aware.  If the book’s title suggests that self-awareness, the poems’ titles, plural, confirm it: the Table of Contents is an abecedarian, revealing that the poems are arranged in alphabetical order by title.

Preloved Metaphors is in various ways a compact book.  Physically, it is pocket-size, A6 (U.S. readers: about 4” x 6”), and slender, give or take 40 pages (few enough that they need no numbers). Even the press run is small, a limited edition of 40 copies.  In other respects, though, this book is large.  One of the lines in the very first poem, a prefatory poem called ‘All That Is Melts Into Air,’ reads, ‘We only believe what we can question,’ and that indicates something of the book’s capaciousness.  In Preloved Metaphors, as is typically the case in Loydell’s work, the poems don’t pretend to be ‘straight talk.’  Every declarative offers also an interrogative, so everything is open to question, meaning everything is open.  

Loydell’s process of ‘remixology,’ reconfiguration rather than invention, results in poems that are about seeing the world and seeing oneself seeing.  These poems see the seeing no less than they see the seen, as in ‘By Any Other Means.’

… everything is made, 

hands-on experience suspended as

we try to find the words we need to

describe the accidental and obscene.

We only have to look to see ourselves.

Loydell’s remixing makes other remixes possible, such as repurposing a fragment from one poem in Preloved Metaphors, assigning it standing as an indicator of the tenor of the whole book.  As I do here, with the last line of Loydell’s poem ‘Unclear’: ‘this is a live beyond.’

H.L Hix 23rdApril 2024

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This Was Your Mother by Sam Szanto (Dreich)

Posted on April 6, 2024 by tearsinthefence
This Was Your Mother by Sam Szanto (Dreich)

Sam Szanto’s chapbook This Was Your Mother is a breath of life, a work of art wrought by a person alone in a room with language. In the canon of contemporary works it takes its place along side Christine Tabaka’s For Love of You from the U.SA., and Lindsay Soberano Wilson’s Hoods of Motherhood from Canada.  Szanto writes from where she lives, in the U.K. Tabaka’s poems center around being a daughter, Soberano Wilson’s around being a mother, and Szanto’s around being a spouse and a mother, part of a family. Considering threads of commonality, three tones Szanto evokes are anticipation, elation, and reflection. 

   The anticipation of birth, a new life entering the world is felt in parts 2 and 3 of the epistolary ‘Letters to R.’  Throughout these poems Szanto brings the past to present.  In 2, a mother tells her child, ‘At ten weeks I bled’ and ‘The bleeding continued/ off and on.’  While her anticipation is joyful, there is also anxiety.  ‘For the first time since my wedding day/ I went inside a church, lit a candle/ and prayed for your life.’ She is not alone.

The Jasmine Unit was apart 

from the hospital’s main midwifery building

and hard to find.

We sat for a long time in a yellow-painted room

full of people who looked as scared as we did.

A midwife put cold gel on my stomach and pressed hard

with the scanner, searching

for your heartbeat.

It came.

What I was hoping for, what we were hoping for happened, she suggests in this second epistle. We were all right.  In 3 she says ‘Labour went on and on/ and your heartbeat dipped/ and I bit your dad’s hand.’  Part 1 begins ‘Suddenly I knew you were there.’  There’s a strong sense of lineage. In another poem that anticipates new life, Szanto comments on her expectant parents. ‘I picture him pacing the corridors/ in his odd socks and old corduroy jacket,/ scared and bored/ as my mother sucked in gas and air/ and her body performed an everyday miracle.’

   The baby is born, the baby comes home from the hospital.  There’s a lot of intense joy, elation. Elation is evident in the second strophe of ‘When I dream of my Grandmother She is Not.’  It is seen, heard, and felt in ‘Singing at Bedtime’ and ‘My Son Falls in Love with a Potato’ and subtle in ‘My Mother, the Protestor.’  A counter to the war machine’s bringing destruction and death is the mother’s bringing life into the world.  Just as Rilke evokes the mother in poems protesting war, Szanto evokes her mother in this poem, doing her part to stop the tanks and guns and their wake of destruction.  The elation is embodied in humanity, as the poet-daughter wonders

Did she join in with the mass

ululations?  Was she dragged out of her tent

in the dead of night by soldiers?

It’s easier to imagine her chatting

with them through the fence

about their wives and daughters.

That her mother is not so much reacting against war, but acting for peace is cause for celebration.  Celebrate the life of one who gives life, not takes it.

   Considering the chapbook’s title, This Was Your Mother, readers, along with the speaker, reflect. The poet looks back in ‘History,’ ‘The Rabbit,’ and ‘The Mouse.’ Her present tense verbs vivify her refections. The mood, the tone of reflection pervades in the chapbook’s first poem and in its last.  ‘Hiraeth’ begins ‘There is another place/ in which she exists/ the girl I did not give birth to/ fourteen years ago,’ and concludes ‘in February she is in my heart’s cold chambers/ her home is me/ her home was me.’  What comes in between is intensely reflective.  Just as there is a speculative daughter in ‘Hireath’ there is another woman, perhaps a speculative mother, or even a woman her son will marry in ‘My Son’s Life Story Book.’

The woman squeezes past me in the hall

where he battled to crawl, my brain rattling

with the little stories I cling on to

now he is gone.  She wants to take photos

of pertinent things.  Take one of me, please,

I want to plead, but show her his bedroom,

an unfilled space where his cot used to be.

There’s a sense of loss, absence, a sense of time moving forward, and a sense of looking back.  Photos capture the past, so do words.

   These poems are deeply personal, and intricate.  About mothers, fathers, children, in their humanity they include others.  That each merits being read time and again is due to Sam Szanto’s skills with language, her knowing what to put in, what to leave out, her precise imagery, and lyrical phrasing. The sense is in the sound, and in her depiction of things and people.

This Was Your Mother is very good. It embodies the best in contemporary poetry.

Peter Mladinic 6th April 2024

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Dark and Tender Principles by Mike Ferguson (Gazebo Gravy Press)

Posted on September 21, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Dark and Tender Principles by Mike Ferguson (Gazebo Gravy Press)

It’s autumn, the sun has disappeared beyond clouds, it’s melancholic and it’s raining; in fact it’s been raining for days. Even though I mentally wake up a bit as the temperature drops, I can’t escape the fact that winter is on its way and a few depressing winter months wait ahead. Listening to the new Lloyd Cole album, On Pain (the titles says it all) and reading Mike Ferguson’s new pamphlet don’t help, although the latter – sonnets and other poems: July-September, 2023 – contain glimmers of optimism and light as it grapples with notions of memory, old age, darkness and uncertainty.

The narrator of these lyrical poems finds himself ‘beyond our precipice’ (‘July’), knows ‘what is missing but not why’ (‘Missing’) and takes refuge and delight in simple things around him: sycamore ‘helicopter’ seed pods in flight, fishing boats on the Devon coast, visits from a stray cat, ducks flying above the river estuary, the distant sound of hymns drifting from a nearby church. These are real, carefully observed and recalled moments, but they do not hold back the decline into the future:

     The sails are taking us nowhere.         (‘Sails’)

It gradually dawns on the reader, or should, that these poems are not writing as a gendered or regal plural, but about the narrator and a partner, a long term relationship and marriage. There is one discreet mention of ‘a progressive disease’ (‘Calico in Waiting’) which suddenly sheds light on what is underpinning these uneasy and gentle poems:

                                                                            This is
     our bifurcation, together and apart on journeys

     then and now. It is that plunge into darkness
     again and the rattles and moans and shudders.           (‘Roller Coaster’)

So, this poem is not only a memory about only one of a couple going on the Santa Cruz Giant Dipper whilst the one other one ‘stayed on land’, but it also vividly recalls the physical sensation of the ride whilst at the same time using it as a metaphor for separation. The text also comments on what the poem itself is doing:

                                                 Feeling existential
     this suffices when stripping away an emotive

     rise and fall to leave behind wood and its
     thunder and an awareness of age, these old-
     fashioned realities […]

Ferguson’s speaker, despite himself, is struggling in that darkness he has plunged into. There is no self-pity here as he offers up

                     further evidence of forgetting
     how to behave as if there is no change.        (‘Sometimes’)

although there is pertinent and considered reflection, particularly in ‘The Tenderness Principle’:

     We can all rise to our own level of ache
     when facing the paradoxes, and tenderness

     will hurt most. It is in those shadowy
     conflicts where remembrance and feelings

     break through, and in a moment of pure calm
     it is rebuke and retribution for the doubts.

     Incompetence registers too, dumb to the
     futility and fury: how it is unfair to treat

     your own pain with more pain.

This perhaps confessional writing, very different from Ferguson’s recent concrete texts and satirical political commentaries, takes its place alongside poetry collections such as Thom Gunn’s The Man With the Night Sweats, detailing the effects of AIDS both physically and mentally, and Douglas Dunn’s moving and mournful Elegies. It is emotional, clear-sighted and original without ever being self-indulgent, ‘a reminder of what would otherwise be lost.’ These studies of forgetfulness, despair and desperation, studded with jewelled moments from the past and present should definitely not be misplaced or abandoned.

Rupert Loydell 21st September 2023


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Hearts Forged In Resistance by Chella Courington (Finishing Line Press)

Posted on August 21, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Hearts Forged In Resistance by Chella Courington (Finishing Line Press)

Chella Courington’s chapbook, Hearts Forged in Resistance, is available for preorder now from Finishing Line Press, and I highly recommend ordering it. I have long been a fan of Courington’s work for the power of its language and imagery. This collection does not disappoint. It was written in reaction to the war in Ukraine. When I contacted her, I asked her about the relationship of her title and her work’s theme, and she wrote, ‘At the time of entitling the collection, I was thinking about Ukraine and the heartfelt, strong way in which Ukrainians met life-threatening adversity. How they forged their passion for freedom and for their citizens into resistance where friction transforms feeling.’ This idea runs through the work; however, her work goes beyond this as she meditates on how resistance in people’s personal lives creates richness in their perspectives and humanity. 

     The title of the collection comes from a line from her poem, ‘Strength,’ and that is where the theme of the work grows out of:

7000 miles away         tanks roll across Ukrainian borders

trying to wipe them off the map

grandmothers  aunts    fathers sons

throw their bodies against bully armor

hearts forged   in resistance

The poet takes to heart the courage of those people she sees in the news not giving into Putin or his forces. This is a powerful moment for her and all of us who have watched the war. Many of course assumed that Russia would simply be too powerful, and it is surprising to see the strength of the resistance including in Zelensky’s response. She writes in another poem, ‘Zelensky takes off his suit         puts on battle fatigues / stands in the streets        talks with his troops.’ As the title suggests, it is the courage in resistance that creates character in the poet’s eyes.

     However, this collection is not simply about the war in Ukraine; it leads her to a larger meditation about the idea of dignity put to the test with pressure, how it has affected many of the people she has known and loved. In ‘Grief,’ she develops a vision of her father. This once powerful man who worked in steel plants is now old and weakened, and he misses his wife who has passed away.

. . . [His shoulders] began to sag after my mom fell

no moon out    and died while he slept           My dad saved the hair

from her brush            wrapped in Kleenex    stored in a wooden box

beside their bed           Every night he rubs strands against his cheek.

Through his loss of power and the loss of his wife, he has transformed from someone who once was merely strong to someone with a complex emotional life with compassion and love at its root. Throughout the collection we are given examples of how people react to the worst kind of pain. We are shown strength in its various ways.

     Hearts Forged in Resistance is a necessary book as we face new challenges. Of course, to be alive means facing pain and difficulties. Courington’s collection reminds me of Viktor Frankl’s idea of what it means to be worthy of one’s pain. Pain, if confronted correctly, can help us to see the more noble elements of our humanity. It can clarify what is beautiful inside of us.

John Brantingham 21st August 2023

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Mr and Mrs Andrews Reframed by Lesley Burt (Templar)

Posted on July 12, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Mr and Mrs Andrews Reframed by Lesley Burt (Templar)

An anecdotal style in this series of short poems and prose vignettes brings the three main characters to something resembling life. The tone is both stately and colloquial. Gainsborough is called Thomas, Mr and Mrs Andrews are referred to throughout as Mr A and Mrs A. It’s only in the penultimate poem that we learn Mrs Andrews’ name is Frances. The reader is invited to ‘Picture this’ as Mrs A, with echoes of Alice through the Looking Glass, ‘peers out of the portrait’, breathes on the glass and steps through to the ‘outside’. Her husband and the artist presumably follow her. For once she is taking the lead. 

Incidents and anecdotes occur in an intriguing mixture of countries and chronology. Mr A checks his Twitter feed and comments ‘I see we have taken Pondicherry from the French.’ Throughout, the background is colonial, wealth and status are based on property, exploitation of ‘slaves’ and ‘riff-raff’ is taken for granted. The cover design reveals a trespasser lying dead in a pool of blood. Mr and Mrs Andrews, the dog, the oak tree, the landscape of ownership, are shown as they are in the portrait. Mr A is holding his fowling piece and the caption reads ‘There was no right to roam in Gainsborough’s Day’. The reader is left to draw their own conclusions.

The characters are depicted skillfully. Mr A, true to his nature, is holding a gun in many of the poems. Verbs that describe his actions are ‘grunts’, ‘frowns’, ‘yawns’, ‘snores’. He is content to pat the dog, blast pigeons, wing pheasants, take satisfaction in his estates. He returns to his frame unchanged.

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Mrs A ‘sighs’ and ‘whitters’, is careful to cross her ankles and clench her knees under voluminous skirts. As in the portrait, she comes over as passive and on display. She does at least have dreams of what might have been. At the end of the sequence, she returns to her canvas with the realisation that ‘men have framed my life’.

It is the character of Thomas Gainsborough, as Lesley Burt conveys him in Mr and Mrs Andrews Reframed, that interests me most. Before she climbs out of the portrait, Mrs A ‘unclenches her knees’. I feel there is a sense of ‘the gaze’ in these poems, the way that someone or something being gazed at becomes an object, there is a hint of voyeurism. ‘In the Library’ shows a dubious side to Thomas as he calls to Mr A ‘Over here! Look at the librarian! Bare arse and bubbies!’ He licks his pencil but the implication is that he is mentally licking his lips. He goes on to paint a still-life portrait which includes a nude woman. 

So what exactly is reframed in this fascinating pamphlet? A layer below the surface appearance? An emphasis on predation? In Gainsborough’s portrait Mrs Andrews’ lap and the front panel of her skirt are left unpainted. There are several theories as to the reason. In the very last line ‘Mr A drops a pheasant in her lap.’ Maybe Gainsborough didn’t show this because the red bloodstains would have been too vivid a contrast with the lady’s blue silk gown. Lesley Burt leaves the reader to untangle many tantalising threads.

Mandy Pannett 12th July 2023

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