Category: reviews

  • Notes on the half-hidden: “Thimblerig” by Annette Skade

    Thimblerig by Annette Skade Bradshaw Books 2013 63 pages Notes on the half-hidden Annette Skade’s debut collection Thimblerig was published by Bradshaw Books in 2013. Thimblerig is a collection of some 53 poems on themes of family, familial history, and on the poetic striving for voice. Skade’s sub-thematic flow, her buried themes, are brought out…

  • Crown Of Thorns by Bethany W Pope

    Crown of Thorns by Bethany W. Pope Oneiros Books 2013 Crown Of Thorns by Bethany W. Pope is published under the Oneiros Books imprint. This is not an easy book to read. Ultimately it is a tale of triumph against war, where  war is child sexual abuse, rejection, and alienation. Throughout Crown Of Thorns there is…

  • The Co. Durham Miner’s Granddaughter’s Farewell to the Harlan County Miner’s Grandson

    The Co. Durham Miner’s Granddaughter’s Farewell to the Harlan County Miner’s Grandson by Kit Fryatt   Published 2013 Knives Forks and Spoons Press Pages 61 New Words to the Tailor’s Air   Rome, you barely inveigh when governments settle traders’ gaming debts with money stolen from the sick and children. Instead you spew sermons on…

  • Regarding the void through the lens of The Zero Eye

        ‘In the realm of suffering, affliction is something apart, specific, and irreducible.’                                                                                  …

  • Mike Begnal’s review of ‘Three red things’

    With thanks to Michael Begnal for his astute reading of my 2013 chapbook, Three red things (Smithereens Press, 2013) The chapbook is readable here, Three red things From, Murray & McCardle, Smithereens chapbooks One section I particularly like is “reed songs I-IV,” set at Trá an Dóilín in the Connemara town of An Cheathrú Rua. Trá…

  • Small Press Poetry and Indies

    A moveable feast of blogs and websites dedicated to poetry as literary form necessarily lacks an authoritative critical hub, which is an excellent thing. Current literary critique lends weight to fictional work and celebrity biography as ‘cultural’, thus levelling newspaper inches at some phantasmagoric hybrid audience of child/woman now perceived as the Irish  literary market.…

  • Review: All Stepped / Undone – by Michael McAloran.

    the griefscape as no-place: All Stepped / Undone – by Michael McAloran. endless ribcage of the sky / the glut of blood beneath and a pulse of shit / dry your eyes / it’s just beginning ( p123 ,  all stepped / undone – ) is © Michael McAloran All Stepped /Undone- is Michael McAloran’s fifth full poetry collection, and…

  • Impress by Candi V. Auchterlonie

    Impress by C.V Auchterlonie. Published Punk Hostage Press 2012 nest   1.   I see us as if we’re not us at all as if we’ve let our body suits already slipped off and skinny dipped under some glass blown lake one in /one out we walk the same /we drown the same.’    nest…

  • Do Not Censor Craig Podmore

    Do Not Censor by Craig Podmore Published Oneiros Books 2013 Jonestown In the name of television, The crucifix And the glossy magazines (The deflowered dead that we are.) A-fucking-men. Jonestown, by Craig Podmore Do Not Censor is divided into two sections, Fiction and Reality. Craig Podmore investigates the blurred line between the two in a manner…

  • In Damage Seasons by Michael McAloran

    ‘Clear the air! Clean the sky! Wash the wind! Take the stone from the stone, take the skin from the arm, take the muscle from the bone, and wash them. Wash the stone, wash the bone, wash the brain, wash the soul, wash them wash them!’   The Chorus , from Murder In The Cathedral by T.S…