Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 22

What are reviews for?

A recent debate about a review (of someone else by someone else) led me to try to formulate what I am trying to do when I write one, and what I think essential in a review. I'm talking here about reviews of books, since that's what I do and mostly read.

In the first place, one could and possibly should rephrase the title. Whom are reviews for? They may be useful to the writer of the book, in that they give some feedback on how it has come across to a (hopefully) intelligent reader; they may also raise the book's profile, ensuring more attention from critics and possibly more sales, though that effect is apparently marginal. For the reviewer, they may mean money, an enhanced profile in the writing world and the opportunity to air one's opinions, always an attractive prospect.

But for me at least, a review should be mainly for the benefit of, and aimed at, the potential book-buyers, and it should give them some indication of what sort of book this is, what it is trying to do, whether, in the reviewer's opinion, it is worth reading and, as far as possible, whether the potential buyers are liable to like it. This, it seems to me, a reviewer can only do by including at least some description of the book's contents and above all by quoting from it. How else is Gentle Reader to assess the author's subject matter and style, and whether it is to her taste? I will concede that this can be difficult in the case of a novel where mystery is part of the plot and one is trying to avoid spoilers, but it is always possible to find a paragraph somewhere that doesn't directly bear on the plot and from which the reader can gauge her own reaction to the style, be the reviewer's what it may. If a review is well written and contains enough in the way of quotes and instances, it should in fact be possible for a negative review to leave the reader thinking "well, Reviewer X didn't like it, but from what he's said about it and quoted from it, I think I might" (and the reverse with a positive review, of course). I have bought a novel after reading just such a negative (but very useful) review.

Suppose you are reviewing a novel in which, to your mind, the author is far too keen on Fine Writing at the expense of other qualities like momentum, so that the narrative drags and meanders. Say so, by all means, but quote a paragraph of the Fine Writing in question, so that the reader can judge whether she would forgive these defects for the pleasure of the style. I wouldn't, but some plainly would, or Mr Banville would not have the success he does…

If you were writing a school essay, you wouldn't make bald assertions and back them up with no facts, or your teacher would be scrawling EVIDENCE? down the margin in big red letters. If you think an author's humour is lame, or a poet's rhythms awkward, quote instances; if an historian's claim seems too sweeping, say why. Otherwise your opinions are just that, and as such fairly unhelpful to your readers.

If you write reviews regularly, and for editors rather than your own pleasure, I can hear you saying "but word limits… how can we quote when we have to cram so much into 2000 words?" Well, first I'd say, if you are being asked to shoehorn so many writers into one review that you really can't do them justice, protest to the editor and tell them so. We all want to see more books reviewed, but better to review three books usefully than five perfunctorily. Second, there are other things you can jettison in favour of quotes. That paragraph of generalised waffle at the start, trying to find something all the books you're reviewing have in common. That biographical bit that is almost certainly irrelevant. That anecdote about how you once met the writer. Those smart remarks that show what a clever fellow you are. The reader doesn't need any of this, and she does need the quotes.

Unless you are reviewing a book that is part of a series, don't get too fixated on the writer's past work. It is relevant to note whether the present book is like or unlike it; someone who hasn't liked writer Y in the past may be interested if he has taken a whole new tack. But your reader wants to know what you made of one book, not the man's whole career. "Influences" and comparisons with other writers are also of limited use in my view. Many a writer has learned for the first time in a review that he was strongly influenced by Fred, whom he never read in his life. I think some reviewers, perhaps especially new and unsure ones, like to seize on what may well be mere coincidences to get a handle on the writing. Not every poet who happens to mention a fox is channelling Ted Hughes. Nor am I keen on the "if you like X you'll like Y" school of reviewing, mainly because I have almost always found, in my own reading, that it doesn't work. Just now and again, it may be useful, especially if you sense a trend starting, but I think it works better in a back-cover blurb, where you are looking to create an instant impression in a few words.

I know I am lucky now; I not only have no word limit, I can review on my blog only what I fancy. This means, in the nature of things, that I don't write many negative reviews; indeed some are downright enthusiastic. I have noticed that when one does have more light and shade, people trust it more and think it more "honest". This is particularly so with poetry, where a lot of people seem to feel many reviews consist of anodyne praise because reviewers are afraid to hurt anyone's feelings (or possibly because there are many poet-reviewers and they are scared the same will become of their own next book). For the record, it's quite possible to be unreservedly (or almost unreservedly) enthusiastic about a book and still be honest. It is also possible for acerbic, negative reviews to be less than honest. When I am hugely enthusiastic about a book, I do want to communicate that if I can, but I'm still thinking not of the writer so much as the reader, and of wanting to alert said reader to the pleasure it may give them. It should all, in the end, be for the benefit of the reader.

Review of The Chicken Soup Murder, by Maria Donovan, pub. Seren 2017

Janey's mum tells us a story and we listen with our eyes shut. We've heard it before but we don't say because we're trying to give her a boost. It's the story of one day when she was fishing here with Janey's dad – way back before Janey was born – knee deep in the sea at the end of a hot summer afternoon. An old man was walking slowly along higher up the beach, followed by his little dog. The dog stopped to sniff something and the man got ahead, when suddenly the cliff slid and crumpled and massive chunks of rock thudded onto the beach; the old man turned half-unseen through the dust and stood quite still until at last the dog trotted out of the yellow cloud as if nothing was the matter.

This time when she tells the story I think: maybe they're both dead by now anyway, but I can still see that man and his dog walking out of that dust cloud on a perfect summer beach.

Incidents in novels that don't apparently advance the plot can often tell you a lot about what the author is really doing, aside from telling a story (and by the way this novel is on one level a cracking mystery/detective story that moves at a fair pace and keeps the reader wondering and guessing for a long time). In the passage above we have children taking emotional care of an adult, rather than the other way around, a potentially fatal danger coming almost literally out of a clear sky and a vision of two who may physically be dead but who live in imagination.

The imagination of an eleven-year-old, and here we come to a key feature of the novel: we have a first-person narrator who is eleven when the book begins and twelve when it ends. Nor does he write in a "looking back on childhood" way but in the present tense, in a voice which convinces throughout; I can literally think of only one moment when he didn't sound his age, and then only for the space of 7 words, which is a considerable achievement. The question is, does this make the book one aimed at children or YA readers, as many will assume simply because it has a child protagonist/narrator?

I think not, though an intelligent pre-teen or teen reader could certainly both enjoy it and empathise with the challenges the child characters face. To me it is not a book specifically aimed at children, but it is very much about childhood and in particular the relationships between children and adults, the power balance between the two, usually skewed so unfairly in favour of adults, and how this can sometimes be altered. I've seen reviews suggesting it is about loss and grief and I would agree that this is partly true, but it wasn't what most leapt out at me. In this book we have parents, or adults in parental roles, failing in various ways. A widow wallows in self-pitying grief to the point of neglecting her children. A woman lets her new relationship with a man undermine the loyalty she owes her friends and their children. A person in a parental role conceals from a child things he has an absolute right to know. Teachers and other authority figures make unjustified assumptions, often based on a patronisingly inaccurate notion of how much children understand.

Meanwhile the children get along as they can, sometimes evading or subverting adult rules and interference, sometimes managing by their own efforts to change things for the better and even to make the adults around them see and admit that they are not always right. Because we see things from their perspective, we share their often caustic humour and observation, their way of cutting through hypocrisy and social politeness, and there are some very funny moments.

Because the plot is, essentially, a sort of detective story, I don't want to give away too much, beyond the fact that our young narrator thinks murder has been done next door but can't get any adult to take him seriously. Perhaps the most important thing to convey is that this novel definitely crosses age boundaries: in view of its narrator and themes it would certainly please a YA audience, but adults should not avoid it on that account, since its stylistic and narrative skills have much to attract them as well.

Review of The Sixteen Trees of the Somme by Lars Mytting

The following day I asked the woodwork teacher a question. He swept the wood shavings from his leather apron and said, "Flame-birch? The finest cabinetmaking material in the country. Comes from trees that are scarred in some way. The pattern comes from the tree doctoring itself."

[…] He disappeared into a closet and came back carrying a small cupboard door which had a golden shimmer. The meandering pattern created shades of black and shadow play on the luminous, amber-yellow woodwork.

"What you see are scars," he said. "The tree has to encapsulate the wound and continue to grow. The growth rings find alternative routes, extend across the wound. The pattern is unpredictable. Only when you saw parts off the tree can you see how it will turn out."

This is a novel by the chap who got famous with "Norwegian Wood", a sort of lyrical paean to the carpenter's trade. Trees and wood figure heavily in this book too. In 1991, after the death of the grandfather who brought him up, Edvard, a young Norwegian man, decides to unravel a mystery about his childhood. Twenty years before, Edvard's French mother and Norwegian father were killed in an accident in France; he himself, as a young child, was with them but went missing for four days, of which he has no recollection, until his Norwegian grandfather travelled to France, found him and brought him home. This at least is the story he has always been told, but he is certain it is not the whole truth. Furthermore the grandfather had a brother, Einar, from whom he was estranged and who is now, allegedly, dead, but after the grandfather's death, Edvard discovers that Einar's alleged death date can't be true either. The plot, basically, is his search for the truth, which takes him to Shetland in search of Einar's life and to France in search of the missing four days of his own childhood. On the way he gets embroiled with two women, Hanne and Gwen; his love life might best be summed up in John Gay's aphorism: "How happy could I be with either, were t'other dear charmer away".

I was drawn to the book because it is partly set in Shetland, where I live. It's only fair to note that there are some technical problems with the Shetland part: the author clearly has been in Shetland, and done research, but there are errors. It is not true, for instance, that there are "no police in Shetland"; there are fewer than some TV viewers of crime series might think, but there's a perfectly serviceable police station in Lerwick and I'm surprised he never came across it. Also there are problems with timing; Einar cannot be drinking in Captain Flint's in the 1970s because the premises wasn't a pub then; it was the top floor of a grocery shop, and the most northerly fish and chip café in the UK, Frankie's in Brae, wasn't so much as built in 1991 when Edvard eats there. As for swimming nude off Unst at the end of summer… well, maybe Norwegians are unusually hardy, but sooner him than me, mate.

However, this is the sort of thing that makes odds to someone who knows the location but not to most readers. As a mystery, it is a genuine page-turner; I would defy most readers not to share Edvard's curiosity to unravel the past. There is also a fascinating web of deception going on in the present, between Edvard and Gwen, who for good reasons never tell each other the whole truth and are often working behind each other's backs. Betrayal, both real and imagined, is in fact a major theme of the book. So is forgiveness, or maybe not so much forgiveness as living with what people are, particularly if they happen to be part of one's family and hence part of oneself.

None of this would matter, of course, if Mytting couldn't write, which he can. His lyrical gift is an odd one: it is not triggered nearly as much by nature or sense of place as it is by man-made objects, as can be seen in the extract above. His style is very readable, unfussy and clear in the Scandinavian way, never letting fancy stylistic devices overwhelm or slow down the narrative but not ignoring either the need for nuance and layering.

Review of Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III by Philip Schwyzer, pub, OUP 2013

This is not a book about Richard III. Nor […] is it a book about Richard III. It is a book about everything in between. Its chief protagonists are the left-over remnants and traces of the years 1483-85 that made the journey into the sixteenth century […] my chief aim has been to observe how the present turns into the past […] and to explore how the past negotiates a place for itself in the present.

This book was published in 2013. I found it when I was looking for a 15th-century poem and it came up in Google Books. I daresay it shouldn't have; it is after all still in copyright. But in this case it worked in the author's favour, because, having found the reference I wanted, I was still reading, entranced, three pages on and realised that I would have to order the book.

I have often enough finished a novel and gone straight back to the start to re-read it, when its world had fascinated me so much that I didn't want to leave it. This is the first non-fiction book I've done it with.  I only hope I can make it sound as gripping, absorbing and thought-provoking as it really is.  It takes a brief period generally agreed to be on the cusp of great change: the end of Plantagenet England, and traces the bits of it that survived into a new world – artefacts, like a bedstead and an annotated prayer book, laws and institutions, memories strangely displaced and distorted by time and oral transmission, even people, like the old lady whose first name may have been Jane or Elizabeth but was still, while Henry VIII was negotiating his first annulment, known as "Shore's wife"; Edward IV's mistress, hanging on to life in London, with chroniclers already arguing about whether she had, in youth, been beautiful or not.

Schwyzer is particularly thought-provoking on the subject of "memory cycles", the way in which people tend to revisit the past when certain landmarks are reached. The first, as those tired of Diana-olatry have good cause to know, tends to be 20-30 years after the event in question, when the first post-event generation has grown up and when those who lived through it can view it from some objective distance. The second happens 50-60 years after, when "as the last witnesses near the ends of their lives, anxieties centre on the transmission of personal memory".  The third occurs around 100-120 years after, when the event is passing even beyond the kind of memory communicated by grandparents and becoming definitely "history"; this is sometimes marked by a flurry of commemoration, as the Great War has been. What is happening at these times in the present may well colour and shape memories of the past, a telling example being John Taylor's account of a very old man, Tom Parr, who thought he recalled two people being boiled alive for murder in the reign of Edward IV. They were, but it had happened fifty years later in the reign of Henry VIII.

Parr was one of a number of people who were alleged, in the 16th and early 17th centuries, to have attained an impossible age - the Countess of Desmond was variously reported to have made it to 140 or even 184. She must indeed have lived a long time if, as some stated, she grew a third set of teeth, a thing that does sometimes happen in extreme age, as the Persian poet Rudaki found in his own case and celebrated in verse. But the improbable attempts to date such people to before Tudor times read, as Schwyzer remarks, almost like an attempt to hang on to a vanished world.  The 50-year anniversary of Bosworth happened to fall during the dissolution of the monasteries, which must have seemed, to those who lived through it, like another world-changing event.

People interpret the past according to their own needs in the present. Some will allow their memories to be reshaped by prevailing opinion; some will cling doggedly to their own version if the whole world says different. And when history is fictionalised, the fiction, if powerful enough, may even outweigh the history. The transmission of information, particularly through oral sources, is both fascinating and frustrating. "I have heard of some that say they saw it", writes More, and in those three verbs we see how easily facts may be distorted.  Observation and memory may both be faulty, as the police know well; information may be poorly transmitted or understood; those who then write it down may alter it to suit their agenda.  Yet "the past" will keep cropping up, demanding some foothold in the present.  Elizabethan theatre companies, as Schwyzer points out, bought up old clothes and artefacts to use as props, and it is well possible that the "rotten armour, marvellous ill-favoured" which Richard and Buckingham wear at one point in Richard III was indeed genuine decayed armour, a survival from an earlier time.

When characters in a history play speak of the future, they are speaking of what, for the audience, is already the past and may well be used by the playwright to hint at the present. Concepts like time, memory, history, fiction are all, in this book, not only masterfully examined but brought to life, and in language which manages always to be clear and readable. As he observes of a Wyatt family legend from the time, "it is not unlikely that Sir Henry, starving in prison, was glad to dine on pigeons brought him by a friendly cat (many of us have received such services, albeit probably with less gratitude)."  Some of the survivals from the past that he traces are also truly fascinating – Wolsey's fancy porphyry coffin, coveted by Henry VIII but eventually ending up housing Nelson in the crypt of St Paul's; the Honourable Company of Wax Chandlers, granted their charter by Richard in 1484, still in existence today and still bearing his rampant boar device. But it is the book's central idea: how present becomes past, how past shoulders its way into the present, that is so unforgettable and so apt to make one examine events, artefacts, memories and fictions in a new light.

Review of Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III by Philip Schwyzer, pub, OUP 201

This is not a book about Richard III. Nor […] is it a book about Richard III. It is a book about everything in between. Its chief protagonists are the left-over remnants and traces of the years 1483-85 that made the journey into the sixteenth century […] my chief aim has been to observe how the present turns into the past […] and to explore how the past negotiates a place for itself in the present.

This book was published in 2013. I found it when I was looking for a 15th-century poem and it came up in Google Books. I daresay it shouldn't have; it is after all still in copyright. But in this case it worked in the author's favour, because, having found the reference I wanted, I was still reading, entranced, three pages on and realised that I would have to order the book.

I have often enough finished a novel and gone straight back to the start to re-read it, when its world had fascinated me so much that I didn't want to leave it. This is the first non-fiction book I've done it with.  I only hope I can make it sound as gripping, absorbing and thought-provoking as it really is.  It takes a brief period generally agreed to be on the cusp of great change: the end of Plantagenet England, and traces the bits of it that survived into a new world – artefacts, like a bedstead and an annotated prayer book, laws and institutions, memories strangely displaced and distorted by time and oral transmission, even people, like the old lady whose first name have been Jane or Elizabeth but was still, while Henry VIII was negotiating his first annulment, known as "Shore's wife"; Edward IV's mistress, hanging on to life in London, with chroniclers already arguing about whether she had, in youth, been beautiful or not.

Schwyzer is particularly thought-provoking on the subject of "memory cycles", the way in which people tend to revisit the past when certain landmarks are reached. The first, as those tired of Diana-olatry have good cause to know, tends to be 20-30 years after the event in question, when the first post-event generation has grown up and when those who lived through it can view it from some objective distance. The second happens 50-60 years after, when "as the last witnesses near the ends of their lives, anxieties centre on the transmission of personal memory".  The third occurs around 100-120 years after, when the event is passing even beyond the kind of memory communicated by grandparents and becoming definitely "history"; this is sometimes marked by a flurry of commemoration, as the Great War has been. What is happening at these times in the present may well colour and shape memories of the past, a telling example being John Taylor's account of a very old man, Tom Parr, who thought he recalled two people being boiled alive for murder in the reign of Edward IV. They were, but it had happened fifty years later in the reign of Henry VIII.

Parr was one of a number of people who were alleged, in the 16th and early 17th centuries, to have attained an impossible age - the Countess of Desmond was variously reported to have made it to 140 or even 184. She must indeed have lived a long time if, as some stated, she grew a third set of teeth, a thing that does sometimes happen in extreme age, as the Persian poet Rudaki found in his own case and celebrated in verse. But the improbable attempts to date such people to before Tudor times read, as Schwyzer remarks, almost like an attempt to hang on to a vanished world.  The 50-year anniversary of Bosworth happened to fall during the dissolution of the monasteries, which must have seemed, to those who lived through it, like another world-changing event.

People interpret the past according to their own needs in the present. Some will allow their memories to be reshaped by prevailing opinion; some will cling doggedly to their own version if the whole world says different. And when history is fictionalised, the fiction, if powerful enough, may even outweigh the history. The transmission of information, particularly through oral sources, is both fascinating and frustrating. "I have heard of some that say they saw it", writes More, and in those three verbs we see how easily facts may be distorted.  Observation and memory may both be faulty, as the police know well; information may be poorly transmitted or understood; those who then write it down may alter it to suit their agenda.  Yet "the past" will keep cropping up, demanding some foothold in the present.  Elizabethan theatre companies, as Schwyzer points out, bought up old clothes and artefacts to use as props, and it is well possible that the "rotten armour, marvellous ill-favoured" which Richard and Buckingham wear at one point in Richard III was indeed genuine decayed armour, a survival from an earlier time.

When characters in a history play speak of the future, they are speaking of what, for the audience, is already the past and may well be used by the playwright to hint at the present. Concepts like time, memory, history, fiction are all, in this book, not only masterfully examined but brought to life, and in language which manages always to be clear and readable. As he observes of a Wyatt family legend from the time, "it is not unlikely that Sir Henry, starving in prison, was glad to dine on pigeons brought him by a friendly cat (many of us have received such services, albeit probably with less gratitude)."  Some of the survivals from the past that he traces are also truly fascinating – Wolsey's fancy porphyry coffin, coveted by Henry VIII but eventually ending up housing Nelson in the crypt of St Paul's; the Honourable Company of Wax Chandlers, granted their charter by Richard in 1484, still in existence today and still bearing his rampant boar device. But it is the book's central idea: how present becomes past, how past shoulders its way into the present, that is so unforgettable and so apt to make one examine events, artefacts, memories and fictions in a new light.

Review of "macCloud Falls" by Robert Alan Jamieson, pub. Luath Press 2017

Instead, she had his written account of the time they'd spent together in Vancouver. But it wasn't what had really happened. Some of it she remembered, some of the things they'd done, even some of the words that he'd put in her mouth. But the names were wrong, the details were wrong. If she had become the story, he had told it his way and it wasn't how she would have done it. His story.

I don't recall writing a review, before, in which even to mention the real name of one of the main characters would be a spoiler. But it would, if I named the woman who thinks the above, because nearly everyone and every place in this novel has at least two names. Even the protagonist, Gilbert Johnson, is called Gil by some, Bert by others, and the odd typography of the title is because the place its inhabitants now know as Cloud Falls was once called MacLeod's (soon misspelled MacCloud's) Falls after an early settler (and would, before him, have had an indigenous name, now lost). The point being that naming is a form of owning and changing, and that everyone tells a story his or her own way, and makes a different tale out of it.

Gil is an antiquarian bookseller from Edinburgh, also the kind of writer who is always going to write a book but never quite does. He has recently had radiotherapy for throat cancer, and while it seems to have worked, it has made him far more conscious of mortality and spurred him to finally research a piece of family history – he thinks a man called James Lyle, who emigrated from Scotland to Canada and became well known as an ethnographer and political activist, may have been his grandfather and has come to find out. Lyle, by the way, though fictional, is based on an historical character, James Alexander Teit, and if you say the two surnames together it will become clear by what impish process Teit has been fictionalised as Lyle.

Once in British Columbia, Gil becomes very caught up in the First Nations history of Cloud Falls, where Lyle lived with his first wife, whom Gil has previously known as Lucy, the English name she was given by missionaries, but whose real name, he now finds, was Antko.  She was also the source for the research Lyle did on First Nations culture, and to the indigenous people Gil meets, she was the story and Lyle her scribe.

However, though Gil certainly makes plenty of notes for the book on Lyle, the one he actually finds himself writing concerns himself and a woman he met on the plane. She too is a cancer survivor – they call themselves radiation twins – and follows him to Cloud Falls out of concern that he may be having suicidal thoughts (he is, though it was never quite clear to me how this meshed with his new-found determination to write and to spend his time less tamely than he had before the cancer).

As the book progresses, he begins to care less for the past than the present, and Lyle's story starts to fade. There are questions we never get answers to, not because they don't exist but because Gil has ceased to care about them as much. I must admit, being myself a history nut, I had got quite involved in Lyle's story by then and rather regretted this; when Gil, having seen a bigger waterfall, thinks of Cloud Falls; "It was nothing like as tall as Helmcken, not nearly so impressive" there is a little shock of betrayal. But in narrative terms, the shift is completely justified.

Narrative devices are important in this novel: people read each other's journals and fictions, whole sections appear to be told by an outside narrator, until the next section makes it clear that we have in fact been reading Gil fictionalising his experiences again. The only such device that didn't work for me was the Appendix to Gil's book proposal, which is a history of the settlement of the area in the form of notes.  The woman, reading this, gives up after 9 pages, feeling "it was too much to take in piecemeal". It certainly was; I had started skimming some time previous. In a history book it might have been fascinating, but one reads fiction in a different vein. The information it conveys is very relevant to the theme of story and how each narrator changes it, but I don't think it was best conveyed in this way at this length.

The other thing I must note is the many typos not picked up in proof.  For some reason, most of them involve missing definite and indefinite articles – eg "he stood for moment" (p143), "some of regulars" (p111), "she peered into room" (p191), but I stopped listing because there were so many, as if some compositor had a down on "the" and "a".  Odd. But it should not detract from an absorbing, many-layered and thought-provoking read in which no person, place or event turns out to be quite what we thought on first acquaintance.

Review of The Empty Horizon by Paul Terence Carney, pub. Live Canon Ltd

Well, this is organised so unlike most poetry collections that I think I'd better start by describing the premise. The introduction explains that the protagonist (who certainly voices most of the poems and may in fact voice them all) is a woman called Roisin, a writer and illustrator of children's books, who lives somewhat unwillingly with a dysfunctional family in Dawlish and is hindered in getting away because she has the progressive eye disease retinitis pigmentosa. Some of the poems concern the book she is working on, some the progress of her loss of sight, some are addressed to her editor Brian, whom she has never met but who has become in her mind a potential rescuer.

This feels exactly like being plonked down in the middle of a novel, so much so that I wondered if the material did not begin as one. The only other collection I've read which is anything like it in structure is Alice Notley's Negativity's Kiss , another narrative collection, which opens with someone trying to kill the protagonist. But Notley's characters are clearly allegorical and as such it doesn't really signify how they came to this point, nor do we need to feel for them as if they were real. Roisin is very much a real person, who actually comes alive pretty well and whose story is very easy to enter into, but it can be frustrating to feel that there are, as it were, whole chapters that happened before we came in. Those readers who demand closure may also wish to be warned that the end is as opaque as an episode of The Prisoner; it is not at all certain whether Roisin has escaped or merely dreamed of escaping.

However, there is no reason why all collections should have to be a series of tidy little lyrics or sequences and once one accepts that this one is different, the individual poems have much to please and interest the reader.  The deterioration of sight in an artist who relies on it so much is convincingly evoked.  Having a relative with Roisin's disease, I can recognise the anxiety about being out after dark that results from fading night-vision, also the enforced focus on other senses in "Pigeons After Dark:

With tennis-ball thuds,
clothes-brush sweeps,
pen-nib scratchings,

they punctuate
this ceaseless dirge
of sea and shingle

The transition from "when I could see across the lake" ("Bestiary for a Painted Earth") through faces that have to be plotted out geometrically by "a scaffold of lines" ("The Art of Self-Portraiture") to the point where she opens a familiar book and "every page/was white" ("A Room in the City") is subtle and skilfully done in a relatively brief space. The children's book she is working on also figures in the poems, and sounds intriguing – an Irish child on a mission to bring back the snakes Patrick supposedly expelled – but we hear tantalisingly little of it.

This is a short collection, 36 pages of poems, and I would, in fact, cheerfully swap the 15 pages of notes at the end of the book for more poems. I don't object to the idea of notes in poetry collections; I've used them myself and got a lot of pleasure out of reading others' notes when they give me knowledge that follows from the poems but doesn't belong in them. But in this case I don't think most of the notes are necessary.  A lot of them involve information one could easily enough look up if one needed to – a "Vargas girl pose", St Patrick's nickname "adze-head" – while others are clear from the context.  Reading "break the bars of Larsen traps and raise lost magpies to the sky", does one really need to know where and by whom these traps were invented? Some, like Branwen's starling, are literary references the reader is either going to get or not, and if not, reading it later in a note won't really help recreate the desired effect. Including a note describing Lego, just because the author once met a man who hadn't heard of it, is just OTT. And the note that says of one poem "Brian speaks. Or does he?" apart from sounding arch, comes too close to telling the reader how to read.  I'd already worked out that the poem, which appears to be in the editor's voice, could in fact very well be Roisin's way of imagining that voice; there are clues in it that point that way.  These notes, to me, indicate a lack of authorial confidence in himself to convey his meaning and in the reader to grasp it. It is a first collection; I'd hope that by the time there's a second, he will feel assured enough to trust to his skill in the poems and do without quite so much apparatus.

One reason this has happened, I think, is that having in effect created a novel-heroine about whom he already knows a great deal, and introduced the reader in the middle of her narrative, Carney feels obliged to bring us up to date on a lot of back-story, like what books she read as a child.  But what we need of this is already coming through her voice, and it is when he trusts this voice that the poems come most alive, as here in "An Hour from the River":

And after, when I cannot climb the oak
you climb it for me, as I feel my flesh
against the cragscape of its bark. You speak
from your all-seeing height, about the rooks
above the fields, the hedges and the haystacks,
the ream of something swimming fast below
the middle arch of Humpy Bridge. And last,
you even see and tell about the mayflies

rising. I close my eyes to picture them
the way I've dreamed them – coloured lithographs
in library books, made tiny, multiplied
a hundred thousand times, all swirling up
and up into the burning blue and white.

It's a change from the usual unconnected lyrical moments to read a collection with a narrative thread and a developing character voice (and incidentally, this male author does a female voice very well, mostly by not falling into the trap of thinking of her as a different species).  I'm all for collections that are not quite the usual thing. This one does feel in some ways fragmentary, like reading a part of a story rather than the whole. But better for the reader to come away wishing there were more of a book than feeling there has been more than enough.

 

Review of Unforgivable by Mike Thomas, pub. Zaffre 2017

   He smiles. Calmer than he thought he would be. Shrugs off his rucksack and places it on the ground. Reaches inside and pulls them out. One, two, three. Enough for now.  Digs out his lighter, sparks it. Watches the dancing women, the happy families. Taps his foot and nods his head in time to the beat from a nearby sound system.
   Lights one of the fuses and tosses the IED into the crowd.

An IED is an Improvised Explosive Device (until fairly recently, Thomas was a policeman and still speaks the lingo).  The question haunting this book  - quite apart from whodunit and will the police catch them before they do it again – is what sort of person attacks a crowd of innocent strangers with such a deadly thing, and the answer is more various and more complicated than the police initially think. The usual Twitter assumptions – racist, extremist, loner, loser – crop up and some have a degree of truth in them, but none, in this novel, is a full answer.  One could point to likely motivations, yet these very factors also exist for other characters in the novel who do not react in the same way.  This is the sort of novel where a reviewer really does not want to commit spoilers, because not only is it a page-turner, it has at least two genuinely surprising twists midway when we, in the person of DC Will MacReady, realise something that wasn't obvious at first.  So I'll go no further down that road except to say that anger, and the various possible causes of anger and reactions to it, are key, and that in this respect, as in others, it is a very contemporary novel.

DC MacReady first appeared in Thomas's last novel, Ash and Bones, and though it is perfectly possible to read this one as a stand-alone, myself I would recommend reading Ash and Bones first (it's no hardship; I reviewed it here) because you'll then be more immediately au fait with our Will's complicated personal life. His wry, jaundiced attitude to his life, job, senior officers and fellow humans in general provides the trademark humour Thomas's fans already know:

Penarth didn't do sink estates. The closest it ever had – the Billy Banks flats, a failed sixties development of dog-turd-encrusted grass patches and pebble-dash the colour of smog – had been demolished at the tail end of the noughties to make way for stratospherically expensive apartments and townhouses. replete with private security patrols and a propensity amongst the occupants to wear sailor hats and shorts, possibly because at least three of the buildings offered a glimpse of the Bristol Channel.

This brings me to one of the stand-out features of this novel, its sense of place and time. I lived many years in Cardiff, and it may be that I reacted more strongly to it because of that. But I honestly think that even to readers who don't know the city, a sense of its vibrant multiculturalism, its consumerism, the contrast between its rich and poor areas and above all the effect of a hot summer on its mood, would come over.  Thomas's re-creation of it has the vividness and detail of someone who has not just walked and driven its streets, but done so with real observation.

In Ash and Bones, children and people's attitudes to them were extremely important and potentially redemptive. They figure in this novel too, but in Unforgivable it becomes clear that no factor in life – the presence or absence of children, being in a relationship or steering clear, getting on with one's parents or avoiding them – is a guaranteed panacea for anything. The frequent parallels between the habits, pursuits and problems of the law-abiding and the ungodly raise, again and again, the question of why people go one way and how easily they might go another.  The novel's ending illustrates this quite graphically, and in a way that may well raise a laugh, albeit a wry one.

The book's title might be taken to refer to the crimes it describes, but that depends on your viewpoint. For most of the time, we are in Will's point of view, but every so often – four times, to be precise – we go into another, and it is then that we see how things that most of us might put down to bad luck or our own fault become, in more damaged or twisted minds, "unforgivable", with dire consequences. I found this point-of-view shift really effective and convincing.

This taut, pacy, atmospheric account of events over five hectic days is as engaging and convincing as has become usual for this author. No doubt his police background is what makes him sound so in control of his material, but he is not content just to write what he knows; in this novel he is interested in what we can never wholly know, the inside of others' heads, and if we first read the novel as a page-turner, wanting to know "what happens next" (which I certainly did), it is the "why" that will be more in our minds when we re-read.
 

Review of The Hill by Angela France, pub. Nine Arches Press 2017

how adults must live
between wage and want, and want and need (Trails and Ways 1)

People who write about poetry often have a terrible habit of squeezing it into boxes. Mainstream poetry. Confessional poetry. Urban poetry. Experimental poetry. These boxes are seldom an exact fit, and can be very deceiving, especially since two or more frequently occupy the same space.

Two boxes that are often, and most mistakenly, thought of as incompatible are "landscape/nature poetry" and "political poetry".  I've seen many a pundit equate "political" with "urban" and assume that any poetry which is rooted in a rural landscape, conscious of its history and alive to the natural world cannot possibly be politically aware or "contemporary" in its concerns. I can well imagine these gentry noting that this collection's focus is Leckhampton Hill, that it commemorates past events and that some of the poems are voiced by an adder, a badger and a fox, and filing it tidily under "landscape: mainstream, non-political, non-controversial".

This couldn't be more wrong. The possession of land, after all, is the point of almost all wars and at the back of this collection lies the contention that land does not "belong" to whoever currently happens to own the title deeds. It commemorates a quarry owner's attempt in 1902 to enclose the land, and celebrates those who resisted the attempt and maintained their rights of access to land they had walked and used for generations.

This is the point of the accumulation of detail about the species that inhabit the hill – "Slow Worms Common Lizards Adders Buzzard Sparrowhawk Kestrel" (Voices found on the hill), the history, the named and used paths, the human witnesses – "Trye, Tilling, Hiscock" (Calling the Witnesses), some of whom will later add their own voices.  The more you read of this, the more ludicrous is the notion that any one man could "own" it. The most he could be is its tenant, with responsibilities to its present, past and future and all those, human, animal and plant, who inhabit them.  The poet does not deny the lure of undisturbed possession, the longing to have the enjoyment of a place to oneself (often justified by fears of overcrowding and damage to habitat).   But it is telling that the poem which expresses this is entitled "Greed":

I want to walk away from the main track
and hear no voices. I want a lonely dawn
or to sit at the top and watch the creeping dusk.
I want to be selfish, greedy, alone.

It seems fitting that poems with such a strong sense of geography should also be conscious of space on the page and what can be done with it. Some poems are conventionally left-hand justified (and several of these are shaped as loosely vowel-rhymed terza rima), but there are also prose testimonies from the "aged witnesses" and some fully justified pieces in which the resulting uneven spacing of words is used to good effect, notably in the piece about the demolishing of a cottage by the landowner:

it   was   submitted   that   to   be  a  riot
someone must be terrified                 the
Cratchleys ran                       the cottage
walls lay in heaps of stone                and
the Cratchleys ran               outbuildings
burned to ash           clothes smouldered
in the trampled garden                       the
Cratchleys ran            but there were no
unnecessary circumstances of disorder.

The animal voices – adder, fox, badger, hawk, rabbit – are given the necessary alien feel via Old English vocabulary:

niht-time is mine   evenleether
with brock and nadder
      leafworm and wanderlight
my wif is a bale-fire at swart-time
   calling wellstemned.  (Fox)

I like this idea for rendering animal voices; I do think that some here work better than others.  But what they unquestionably do is add to the diversity of the hill, its variegated and ever-changing life:

I could call this place timeless but I'd be lying.
The land wears time as a mantle, bending briars
over paths, growing trees to fill a slope, change
encoded in every seed and speck of earth.  (Timeless)

I have, incidentally, nothing against pure landscape poetry for its own sake.  I can think of few things more vital to observe closely and describe vividly than the place we live in, and any poetry that gives us phrases like "the metalled litter of beech leaves" is fine by me.  I just think it necessary to stress for the "meh, nature poetry" brigade that actually this is a collection celebrating trespass, civil disobedience and complete disregard for property rights. And a hill.




               

Review of Incendium Amoris by Steve Ely, pub. Smokestack 2017

Those who have read Ely's two previous full-length collections, Oswald's Book of Hours and Englaland , will be familiar with his themes and preoccupations: place, and people dispossessed of it, history permanently alive in landscape, religion, politics. They will also be aware of his techniques, particularly the delight in the multifariousness of words, the use of forms, and the dense texture created by constant allusiveness.  There are generally a lot of things going on beneath the surface of an Ely poem, so much so that end-notes are needed, but up to now, this has never, to my mind, been a problem. The technique arises from his consciousness of past-in-present; he cannot look at a landscape and see only what it is now. Rather, everything that has ever happened there comes together to shape it.

The ground of this book is the story of Richard Rolle, 14th-century mystic, prolific religious writer, unofficial preacher and spiritual adviser to nuns, with one of whom, Margaret, he seems to have developed a relationship close enough to raise eyebrows. At one point she became an anchoress, only emerging from solitude when informed of his death, after which she was active in promoting his cult.  Whatever the historical truth of the matter, it is strongly hinted, especially in the poem "Richard lay a-weeping", that the Richard and Margaret of this collection are indeed lovers, and torn between their vocations and temptation.

This is potentially an absorbing and moving situation, and it does become so in some of the early poems in Richard's voice, where he emerges as a character, notably "To Mega Therion" and "Banquet of Virgins":

I am your Father and you my monkish girl.
We sit knee to knee, handfast in yearning.
You confess you are often tempted,
as am I.

Much of the time, though, Richard and Margaret seem to me to disappear behind the crowd of disparate characters who elbow their way into these poems: Pound, Blake, Catweazle, Agricola, Robert Aske and various friends and relatives of the poet. Some of these, sometimes, do have the effect of the allusiveness in Oswald's Book of Hours, making the poems deeper and more layered by adding an historical consciousness. But sometimes I felt they were not so much adding layers to the narrative as getting in its way.

 It is the first time I have felt the level of allusiveness might be a problem, that some of the allusions were lying about on the surface of the poem rather than being absorbed into its fabric, and that Ely was perhaps trying to cram too much into one poem. Notably, this happened in a five-part non-Rolle poem, "The Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram". The note to it begins with the sentence "In (1), the unravelling of creation is explored with help from the Genesis creation story, the legend of the Golem, Gnosticism, the allegory of Adam Kadmon and Gawain and the Green Knight". After that, it gets a bit complicated.  I found this particular poem all but unreadable. Another allusive poem in several parts, "Little Saint Hugh", exploring the long history of anti-Semitism in Europe, is far more powerful, communicative and focused.

If there is a problem, it is one of over-ambitiousness, which, goodness knows, is better than having poems aim too low and attempt too little. But to me at least, it robs the poems of some of the drive and momentum that were so evident in his two previous collections.  Some associations, maybe, should be like the seven-eighths of the iceberg beneath the surface: the writer knows they are there, and his writing is influenced accordingly, but the reader need not.

In the final poem, "Æcerbot" ( a charm designed to restore fertility to a field) Rolle reappears to conduct the rite, as does Ely's ability to dazzle with the richness of words:

Slit-light splayed in shafts cross
chancel, limed walls lucent, linen bright.
Bated breath of bell and Bible,
batflit dust mote, transepts still.

And in two adjoining poems, "Je te plumerai" and "The White Hart", Ely again shows the skill at playing one poem off another, to the benefit of both, that surfaced so often in Englaland. Both are set in the 14th century, both involve hunting, the first by nobles, the second by poachers in rebellion against government and its tax-collectors, and while each is complete in itself, together they are more than the sum of their parts. There is much to enjoy and think about here, as always, and most when he gives music and narrative their head.