The poems in How to Read a City feel urgent to me, speaking as they do of ecological destruction and complicity. The elegiac feel is so delicately contrasted with the many musical resonances and the inherent call to take note of the beauty and joy that is still with us, however endangered. Everything “is a work of art”, and the final poem in the collection, “Soil Punk City”, makes clear, there is always a hope of renewal in urban regeneration in soil, planing, leaning to work together.
Category: Poetry Reviews
A review of Prayer to the Invisible by Diane Frank
The invisible is a key concept in Diane Frank’s poetry and thought. It recurs in “Some Days You Wake Up Singing” (“ocean birds / continue their migration / to an invisible world”), “Quintara Street,” which is an elegy for her dead friend Mickey, who’d been a slave in a Japanese internment camp in Indonesia during World War Two (“When it’s my time / to walk through the door to the invisible, / I know that Mickey will be waiting…”), and in “The Last Sunset,” a poem whose tone is similarly elegiac: “everything you know / merging into an invisible world….”
A review of Mimosas at Sunset by Sharon M. Carter
Carter practiced psychiatry for four decades. Her ability to translate perceptions, moods, and emotions from nature to humanity provides unique, original, revelations about the common flora and fauna of the Northwest. She is a master of the verb, the most important word in a sentence, and certainly in a phrase of poetry. “…vines ribbon, the ocean takes root inland, seed pods scab.”
A review of The Side Effects Poems by John Compton
The Side Effects is a chapbook like no other. In “side effects to talking” the speaker’s “voice loses its balance.” But the poet never does. Time and again he goes to the edge but not over, in these visceral poems written by a poet with things to say, who says them very well.
A review of Dear Palestine by Emma Goldman-Sherman
Goldman-Sherman is a poet uniquely able to identify with the oppressed, knowing what it is to be controlled, fed lies while vulnerable, and used at the pleasure of another. If family can hurt family, it is because Abraham’s sons continue to live and die. Philadelphia can only survive and bear a courageous witness, sharing in ways the reader won’t easily forget.
A review of Gran Partita by Matthew McDonald
Gran Partita is a postcard from a rare place, a musician cum poet’s work, or rather a series of them. It ranges around the world as well as within the mind of a creative.It is an eclectic collection that bucks strict theming, opting instead to name its sections after classical movement forms that have a rough correlation, but allow for expressive musicality.
A review of Through a Glass Darkly by Libby Hathorn
Central to the work is the instability of what we see, how identity is shaped not only by what is visible, but by what is obscured or misinterpreted. The title’s allusion to partial vision comes through Evie’s growing self-recognition, rendered in language that is both delicate and exacting. Hathorn avoids overt dramatisation, instead trusting the cumulative power of small moments: a shift in tone, an image or character that recurs with altered meaning, from happiness in all of its forms, dreams, time, marriage and divorce, care and los
A Review of Perdido by MF Drummy
Drummy’s debut collection, Perdido, takes the reader through physical and emotional landscapes, revealing the bittersweet beauty of our real and metaphorical deserts. The backdrop of human loss sits behind the comforts that remain: the places we’ve been, the memories we hold, our loving relationships, and hope’s constancy glimmering at the edges.
A review of Goddess of Swizzle by Shirley Brewer
Getting drunk on Shirley Brewer’s words, binging on her rich imagery and drinking in her joyous perspective are truly the bacchanalian treats offered by Goddess of Swizzle.
A review of Golden Armor by Armenida Qyqja
Golden Armor by Armenia Qyqja, a full-length poetry collection of a 111 pages, is an empathetic, ingenious, heartfelt, and passionate manuscript full of feministic candor, by an Albanian poet, showing readers how and what it means to stay alive mentally, physically, and emotionally during and after war.