You can never get a cup of tea large enough, or a book long enough to suit me

C.S. Lewis

Winter is setting in and despite the mild weather, it’s making me want to curl up in the old armchair, put the reading light on and listen to the rain lashing the window as I disappear into a good book. Here are five books I’ve read this year that suit a Sunday afternoon of cosied up reading.

Much With Body

Polly Atkin

Poetry

Find it here, at the Seren Books Website: Seren Website

If you’re familiar with Polly’s work you’ll know how her poems fold you into them, how they open worlds. If you ever get a chance to see her read, do it, don’t hesitate, do it. I’ve been lucky enough to have her read as part of a course I ran and double lucky in that she has…

I have only just learned from the Bloodaxe Books website that the poet David Scott passed away earlier this year. I take the opportunity here to post a review that I wrote on the appearance of Beyond the Drift, New and Selected Poems. The review was first published in TheNorth in 2015. .Here is a link to the poet’s page on the Blooaxe Books website:

https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/david-scott

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David Scott’s Beyond the Drift, New and Selected Poems reviewed by David Cooke

Beyond the Drift, New and Selected Poems by David Scott. £14.99. Bloodaxe Books. ISBN: 9781780371047

David Scott’s Beyond the Drift, New and Selected Poems brings together seventy poems written since Piecing Together (2005) alongside the contents of two earlier collections and the new work he included in his previous Selected Poems (1998). Until his recent retirement, Scott worked as an Anglican vicar in various parishes and…

Very late with this one for Paul Brookes’ challenge. The inspiration is Gaynor Kane’s photo. You can see all the photos here.

Some things

There are words,
Firenze, Brunelleschi, Duomo,
Palazzo, Uffizi, Arno,
Medici, Buonarroti, azzurro,
like waves of the sea that lap
the edge of memory, ring bright
as bells and drift from then to now,
almost tangible, not lost,
but insubstantial as cloud wisps.

I wish, I dream, I will
go back one day,
just to hear the sounds,
smell the scents and feel
another sun upon my face.

This is the first time I have had an opportunity to review a publication by the excellent publisher, The Emma Press. Overlap (The Emma Press, 2022) is a pamphlet by poet, Valerie Bence, and introduces us to three grandmothers, Winifred, Harriet and Valerie Bence herself.

The first part of this thoroughly engaging pamphlet recreates in loving detail the poet’s relationships with her two grandmothers. The poem that begins the collection is typical, French cricket at Grandma’s, circa 1960. It depicts a memory, triggered by a visit from her own grandchildren. Bence shows us that the 60s is a less prosperous time and that Winifred, the subject of the poem, is a survivor of the war, living between ‘overgrown allotments and shattered glasshouses/ not repaired since the war.’ She is an unpretentious, affable and generous woman for whom Bence has a strong affection: ‘She laughed at anything, taught me to…