I used to think that legal language was the opposite of poetic language. In her latest poetry book, The Heart of the Advocate, Angela Costi shows that this dichotomy is a false one. Drawing on her experience as a legal advocate, Costi combines legal tropes with poetic techniques to powerful effect, reclaiming what she calls “fossilised legalese” in ways that concatenates the poetic themes of memory, migration, and nostalgia with activism, injustices, and trauma.
Category: Poetry Reviews
The Witnessing Poet: a review of Water & Wave by Eugene Datta
In the end, Water & Wave succeeds by telling the story of the poet’s own evolution as a witness to experience. From the poems early in the book that treat memory and the writer’s capacity to evoke it with few caveats, to the final title poem in which the distinctions between mind and body, thought and experience, are stark and unable to be overcome, Datta brings us to the present moment.
A review of The Years of Blood by Adedayo Agarau
Everyday African life, as depicted in Agarau’s debut poetry collection The Years of Blood, is a concrete space where “God is somewhere withering in his envelope of silence” – but how to overcome both God’s silence and the West’s speculative consideration? Infliction. In a style diagonal to Ocean Vuong’s arcane confessionalism and Charles Reznikoff’s documentarian ache, Agarau aims to inflict the griefs and hopes of life in Ibadan, during “the years of blood.”
A review of A Yellowed Notebook by Beth SKMorris
While mainly a tribute to her father’s memory, Beth SKMorris’ A Yellowed Notebook also fondly (and sometimes not so fondly) recalls the rest of her family as well. Bookended by two haiku set seventy years apart, the poet lovingly reviews her father’s life and the lives he affected. The overweening picture of David Kaplan, her father, is of a confident and caring man deeply engaged in life.
A review of The Making of a Poem by Rosanna McGlone
The Making of a Poem has consistently excellent poems, worthy of emulation and worth buying for the selections alone. Being able to follow the transition from rough draft to finished poem provides fascinating insight. It’s isn’t some ineffable genius that creates such works, but hard yakka combined with a crucial sense of what does and doesn’t work which only comes with extensive reading and years of practice: the long apprenticeship that the poets featured here have clearly had.
A review of Roads to Stroud by Noel Jeffs
As with previous poems I have read by Jeffs, there is a sense of quickened pace created by the lack of formal scene-setting and there is a direct apprehension of feelings and objects. The poet’s persona is established sympathetically so that the reader wishes him well and hopes that his difficulties, whether physical or metaphysical, are resolved.
A review of Amanda Chimera by Mary B. Moore
As Joseph Brodsky put it, “to the poet phonetics and semantics are, with few exceptions, identical.” And one can see this in Moore’s poems that are so marvellously, deliciously musical, locating their meanings like an orchestration rather than a thesis, a wondrous symphonic search to understand the dimensions of a dual self.
A review of My City is a Murder of Crows by Nikita Parik
Language is given the incisive treatment as Parik describes consonants and vowels in the speaker’s mouth, finally describing how the consonants are bound together like bread in a sandwich. However, the deeper principle is that although dark moments are inbound to our existence, we will overcome difficulties such as Covid collectively. This volume records the poet’s experience of Covid through poetry.
A review of The Haunting by Cate Peebles
When working on a collection that relies so heavily on intertextuality, less is often more. The Haunting draws upon over twenty different pieces of media, ranging from nineteenth century novels to contemporary horror films. While many of these allusions feel at home, the sheer volume an at times feel overwhelming. Peebles’ ambition to capture the full spectrum of what it means to be haunted is admirable, but sometimes, attempting to encompass every possible reference dilutes the potency of the haunting itself.
Poetry for the Looming Past: A review of House of Jars by Hester L. Furey
I must admit that when I encountered this text for the first time, I was flung far out of my realm. House of Jars is brilliant in so many ways, and though I have long been an intimate friend of poetry, I was at first daunted by the intellectual challenges that this work presented. The opportunity to explore this work served doubly as another step forward along my academic journey, and once I learned to speak its language, I found House of Jars to be a delightfully rewarding challenge, to which I hope I rose valiantly.