Roger Bloor’s second collection explores Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and is mainly in first-person narrative. In case a reader is tempted to read ‘I’ as autobiographical, Kahlil Gibran’s epigraph reminds us: ‘I am not what I seem’, and it is also worth bearing in mind that the poet is a former psychiatrist. The title refers to Danielle Schaub’s work on trauma theory, whereby one’s inner world consists of a conscious mind with accessible past experiences and a dissociated part of the mind holding an inaccessible traumatic past. Bloor attempts to map these broken roads ‘home from the house of silence’.
Despite such weighty content, Bloor finds space for humour. ‘A Young Boy’s Guide to Living on the Surface of the Sun and Other Difficult Things’, from the first section, recalls a young narrator’s innocence as a friend, ‘Pedley in 2B’, corrects a sketch of ‘what girls are like ‘down there’’.
The book has three sections: in the first, the speaker grows up, experiencing first love, has hopes, then comes disillusionment and a triggering traumatic event in the heart of the book, where the poem’s title is only the time ‘20:58 (53.00, -2.21)’. Following poems explore living with trauma and roads to possible recovery.
Key to the collection is Bloor’s employment of formal experimentation: poems are redacted, found (from medical forms), text-speak, fading font, comic-style balloons of text on black pages. These don’t make for easy reading, but are not mere play but a subtext of the emotional journey. ‘Criterion A: Stressor’ is a short, justified prose poem which conveys how someone struggling to hold onto ‘normality’ may find themselves fading in and out: ‘The person was exposed to death, threatened death, actual or’.
‘Twonnet’ is Bloor’s invented form that uses the 140 characters (once stipulated on Twitter), arranged in 14 lines of 10 characters without spacing. This creates a sense of being hemmed in: ‘thesilence/runsacross/thepageand’ (‘Ghosted’). Even the Pantoum ‘Lyt’ has a Bloor-twist, employing condensed spelling, reflecting the speaker’s jumbled, circular thinking. ‘I rOt deez lines 2 mk a mark/my lov upon yr vrgn page,/ n gave 2 lot sum drk’.
This is a journey from innocence to secrecy, shame and fear and ultimately possible healing. But if Bloor’s inventiveness makes at times for challenging reading, there is also much lyricism. In ‘All floral tributes will be removed after seven days’ the speaker burns the memories, ‘and no one knows which jade black rose/ is nourished by them now.’
With mental health so much in the news, this collection should be welcomed for broadening our understanding of the experience of PTSD.
Mary Mulholland 20th September 2026
