The mingling of an unlikely, extraordinary outcome with ordinary beginnings forces our assumptions into a stark light. This doesn’t only happen semantically. It is also in the conjunction between different types of media, textual, rhythmic and visual – with source texts like newspaper clippings, medical case studies, and historical cast-off images woven into a story that melds chance, proximity, and banality into a cohesive poetics that is unsettling and oddly moving.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of The Galloping Horse by Petra White
The Galloping Horse encourages an exploration of complex emotions and experiences, offering a way to process the more challenging aspects of life with a deep authenticity combined with skilful use of language and the ability to resonate with the reader on a deep level especially with melancholic subject matter.
A review of Turn Up The Heat by Ruth Danon
Her writing appears to be straight forward. The language can be ordinary. It is simple in the best possible meaning of that word. Then, one reads more slowly or reads a lot in one sitting and finds one’s self looking for that other poem,
The Hand of Fate: A review of Unbound by Sinead McGuigan
A place of oceans and mountains, rivers and dreams, myths and a reality that references the nightmare of history and celebrates the wonder of being. Unbound takes readers on a journey. A journey of the self affirms the value of all selves—this journey, going from one place to another. The poems wander; they look in, they reach out.
A review of Indecent Hours by James Fujinami Moore
Indecent Hours, James Fujinami Moore’s inaugural volume of verse, makes me glad I occasionally have the decency to break bad habits. What provides Indecent Hours its thematic coherence are the specters of cruelty that haunt its pages, the major and minor traumas Moore documents with an economy of words as refined as it is brutal.
A review of What Start a Bad Mornin’ by Carol Mitchell
Ms Mitchell can take the lives of her characters forward, but to solve the mystery of Amaya’s past, Amaya must go into the past. That is why she recounts what happened as though it is happening. Again. Time is the biggest mystery. The stories are about Amaya Lin in particular, but Time and memory include everything. Even when you think you have forgotten, that lost time is still alive in you. I have already read it twice.
A review of Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
In the interest of full disclosure (and how seldom we hear of disclosure that is not full), I didn’t like the authorial voice of The Passenger from the first page. But we’ll come to Alicia and her troubles later. To continue with the discussion of signifiers, here we have an author steeped in Americana: the American story, as understood by America, and the cultural signifiers best known by Americans.
A review of Bright-Eyed by Sarah Sarai
Sarah Sarai is full of good humor, earned wisdom and sound advice, not just for her nephew and niece but for all of us. But as she wittily cautions at the start of “A Vegas Vegan,” “I never promised you a statistician.” Nor a rose garden either! But you’ll enjoy her poetry nonetheless, no matter how perplexed you remain.
A review of Tickets to the Fall of Icarus by James Gering
The variety of topics covered in Tickets to the Fall of Icarus is gripping and varied, including such things as family issues, love, political comments and sprinkles of humour. All the places mentioned are well described with vivid images. In some of the poems the many impacts of the Corona Virus on our lives are explored and readers will recognise themselves in the characters.
The Hero’s Folly: a Review of Shadow Dance by Martin Ott
The oft-mentioned shadows are less a motif than a thick overlay; they are attached to every chapter title and peppered liberally throughout the prose. Their frequent appearance constitutes not so much a choreographed “dance” than a densely-packed rave where the music is a single chorus on a thumping loop.