Andrew Martin’s new collection is from the pen of a modern lyricist who tips his cap to John Clare and Edward Thomas while having a thoroughly contemporary take on things. While ostensibly about the natural world his work is imbued with deep feeling and a sensitivity which verges on the vulnerable.His use of imagery has a minimalist precision and combines an aesthetic beauty with an approach to the world which contrasts the internal with the external in a manner that is fresh and approachable. The reader is constantly surprised and challenged into seeing the world anew and perhaps into rethinking preconceived positions. Martin also designed the cover art and book layout and he has a real flair for typography.

walking the worn edge

I’ve unseen things

you believed in

doves on fire

wings shredding

in the belly of Betelgeuse

I’ve heard waves

shadow-shimmer in daylight

far from the desire paths

To experience Toti O’Brien’sIn Her Termsis to enter into the physical and mental space of someone else’s reality, to feel what it is to be that person, the good and the bad. This collection is about many things, but much of it comes down to what it means to be a human being today. Much of that is made explicit by the way she relates to the physical world within her body. We are allowed to see both the pleasures and pains of staying alive. Equally, she invites us into the vastness of her intellectual and emotional world as she discusses what it means to be a multilingual artist.In Her Termsis an inside, often gritty, often exuberant look at what it means to live the life that she has lived.

     Part of what drew me into her collection is the way that O’Brien allows me to…

New Year’s Eve Day is foggy and warm. My husband and I eat Chinese food for dinner, our decades-old tradition. We drink champagne while we talk to our children and their spouses on Zoom. Our son-in-law’s parents join us, and it’s good to see them, too, after so long. We light the Shabbos candles and speak of what we’re grateful for—that we’re together, healthy, and that our pets are with us, too. This is what we celebrate—life going on, light in the darkness. Later, we say goodbye to 2021. Though 2022 seems scarcely better, who know what the future brings? The sun and moon still rise and set.
And there is champagne.

fog-obscured
river a mystery—
beckoning

For dVerse. Earlier today, I couldn’t get WP to work, and now there’s no problem. Oh, there are definitely WP gremlins!

Hangzhou is the political, economic and cultural captial of Zhejiang province in south-eastern China. Like its neighbour Suzhou, Hangzhou has long been revered for its beauty. An old proverb says:

There is heaven above.

There are Suzhou and Hangzhou below.

When Marco Polo visited Hangzhou in the late thirteenth century, he went as far as todescribe Hangzhou as ‘the city of heaven’, and declared it to be ‘the most beautful city in the world’. Indeed,today Hangzhou presents itself as ‘Heaven on Earth’, and so it is hardly surprising that my immediate sensation on arrival was one of wellbeing. Our group from Cambridge was staying at the beautiful New Hotel by the side of West Lake. As well as views of the city’s skyscrapers to the east, there were enticing glimpses of cloud-shrouded mountains in other directions. I was anticipating a visit to Tea Mountain, and was wondering how it might…

‘Before you were born your mother too was visited by dogs (…) They told her it’s not wrong to want a child who fights for its food. Sinks its teeth into the ankle of the world. Sleeps in the sun, vendetta-less, untroubled by strange men.’ (‘The dogs’)

And so we slide into Eleanor Penny’s strange dreaming world of animals, bones, teeth and blood. The world ofMercyis a cruel one, but it is not without its own tender mercies, as the lines between the human world and the animal world meld and shift. In this debut pamphlet, Penny’s dense, atmospheric poems weave rich and bloody interior worlds.

Throughout this arresting, uncanny collection, Penny’s imagery is often visceral, and sometimes grotesque: a woman gives birth in a gutter, ‘there is the gasping light, bloodwaters sluicing off into the drain’, a boy opens a crow to find its ‘stinking knuckle of…