I have in the recent past reviewed two fine pamphlets that explore the profound impact of life-threatening illness, namely Nikki Strange’s Body Talk and Ross McGivern’s Fragments and Stages. Jamie Woods’ Rebel Blood Cells (Punkdust Poetry, 2023) has a similar focus, but like Strange’s and McGivern’s work, it has a unique, uncompromising story to tell. In Woods’ case he takes us through the story of his diagnosis of acute leukaemia, the illness, his treatment and his ultimate recovery. What made the pamphlet particularly powerful for me is the rawness, the authenticity and the honesty of the poems.

These are emotionally engaging poems. Sometimes almost too heart-rending to read, yet I don’t think Woods is asking for our sympathy. He is merely telling it like it was. Take for example, Diagnosis, which tells of the moment his wife informs him that ‘They think you have Leukaemia.’ Woods is clearly suffering…

A Random Parasite Bemoans the Fallen Light

From glorious clouds to wayward seas, to earth’s horizon and below, Opines our muted panoply: “Intuit in green, oh, stubbornness,” “Oh, humans failing us, forefend, Who forthright with their undertow align our cosmos in their schemes.” For we take it as opining, and think the war is one of ours, But yet contests of water, bowers, Are not ours to direct. We shrink from humble servitude To all we should be sustained by, To us, our faces are supreme in photographs, in ego’s memes, And we do not involve the earth Except to think it photo-bombed us in our pictures of ourselves. Background, we think, because we fear To know we could destroy our source, These are my flowers, we say to friends, Look! Blooming here, my peonies, Or on the hills, this is my gorse, And it’s so much the easier to…

*****

William Carlos Williams: Paterson  •  Tom Lachais:Three Hundred Streets of Venice California • Calvin Wharton: This Here Paradise 

*****

Paterson by William Carlos Williams. £20. Carcanet Classics. ISBN: ‎ 978-1800173613
reviewed by Tom Phillips

The poetry that falls within the broad category of modernism however we want to definite that exhibits two opposite tendencies, both driven by a desire to – in Ezra Pound’s words – ‘make it new’: one essentially minimalist, the other essentially maximalist. On the one hand, there are haiku-esque Imagist miniatures; on the other, The Waste Land, The Cantos, Four Quartets, Paterson, Maximus Poems, Briggflats and so on. Despite the flourishing of the former, long or at least longish poems are as much a part of the landscape of modernism as they are of romanticism, neo-classicism et al. Don’t just make it new, in other words, make it big.
Most immediately, perhaps, the…

photo from pixabay (Klau2018)

Bio of Steve can be found here: https://www.flinders.edu.au/people/steve.evans

Sending You a River

In the second part of this poem,
I will be played by a different actor
with the wrong accent

so, I’m cancelling the subscription
to my own newsletter
after first writing a letter of complaint,

and if I hear another love song
rhyming start and heart,
I think I’ll rip the singer’s chest apart.

But for now, I’m sending you a river,
one mouthful at a time —
not quite enough to drown in.

And Then

And then he kissed her,
in French
without subtitles.

Her Love Poems for Others She offers them to me as if to tease, testing the bounds of my jealousies. The answer’s clear, and merciless. I admire their highwire plays and twists, their luxurious, earthing lust for place, but wrench to imagine her this way. I’m not proud of…

“I see all the things we write and publish as markers in time.”

Follow this link to my Substack page to find out what’s happening: Substack