All About Our Mothers – Nine Series Anthology 1 – Vasiliki Albedo, Mary Mulholland & Simon Maddrell
GenderFux – Nine Series Anthology 2 – Jem Henderson, Jonathan Kinsman & JP Seabright

These books (price: £7.50 each) form the start of a series of pamphlets by Nine Pens, each featuring poems by three authors. United by a common theme, they give space to exciting new poems by newer voices, and are a thrilling thing to receive, each one a sliver of promise that jumps through the letterbox to sit like treasure on the mat.

The first of these pamphlets, All About Our Mothers, featuring work by Vasiliki Albedo, Mary Mulholland and Simon Maddrell, is impressive. The mothers in these poems exist like icons, with their “lipstick smiles” and “freshly-skinned coats”. They are beautiful and awful, powerful and flawed; abusive, neglectful, gorgeous, and troubled. The mothers might be reimagined as fish or waterlilies or news anchors, as the poets sift through symbolism, sharing their recollections and exploring their associations with, and understandings of, their parents. It’s powerfully emotive and incredibly affecting throughout, and I do feel that Nine Pens have worked a wonder, here, by bringing these particular, very talented poets together in print. Excellent!

GenderFux, by Jem Henderson, Jonathan Kinsman and JP Seabright, is a little different in its structure, as poems by the three writers are interspersed, rather than separated into sections of three, meaning that, until the end, the reader isn’t sure who wrote which particular poem. This gives the pamphlet a unified sense of voice, which works really well, not just because of the poets’ shared theme(s), but because they are all very lively and imaginative in their writing, offering the reader a balance brought about by the perfect poetic fulcrum (to my mind) of thought, feeling, and originality. Appropriated forms such as tables and biblical verses add to the delicious sense of experimentation, and also align with one of the pamphlet’s main areas of exploration – that forms can shift, away from perception, and hold a different content to what they are ‘supposed’ to contain. This is vibrant, vivacious writing that’s energetic, intelligent, and extremely original – a joy to read.

Deltas – Leonie Rushforth

Prototype are another press who encourage experimentation and support very different voices to make their way into print. To provide such a platform, and in such high quality books, too, is of course to be applauded. Deltas by Leonie Rushforth (Prototype, price: £12) is no exception. This is a collection which, as its title suggests, sifts and slides through real estuaries and edge waters in which “Ships shoulder the quays”, and those areas in our own lives where the rivers of our lives meet and converge, even if that interaction is unintended and brief – for example, in the book’s first poem, in which one person falls asleep on another’s shoulder.

This finite, temporary, impermanent sense runs throughout the book, although there is playfulness, too: for example, in the poem Gugong (“In the Room for Listening to Pleasant Sounds / I am attentive to the silence”), which presents a series of koan-like scenarios that are strange, surreal, and inventive; and in Pie Bird, in which a bird is baked in a pie, which ends with a stark final image of a yellow beak “ecstatic” as it pokes from the cooled crust. It’s not an image I’ve ever seen before in a poem, unless we count nursery rhyme, and the appropriation is outrageous, brilliant, and provocative, especially when set within a domestic scene.  In all, these are poems which can, in the imagination, go anywhere… And so, with verve and vibrancy, they do.

A Dedication To Drowning – Maeve McKenna

McKenna’s poems in A Dedication To Drowning (Fly On The Wall, price: £6.99) contain a fair assortment of visceral, anatomical and body-related imagery, from wounds and bruises to urine and blood, skin, sinew, and bone. This makes them visually very powerful, even as the body’s destructibility is made evident. It’s unsettling stuff, a reminder that poetry’s purpose isn’t to cosy or coddle the reader, but to pull them toward profound realisations.

In some poems, too, there are hunger, drowning, and death, as McKenna further explores our finite nature – “The body ticks its skeletal tock along skin” – yet in other poems there are marriage, “a couple arm in arm”, images of fertility. Birth and death therefore interweave and, in these fine poems, even sit side by side: “each day is a birth and a burial”.

McKenna might write a poem about a cat or a bookmarker, but this life/death sense never dissipates, and these poems, too, are far from cwtchy, transmuting the everyday into something far more urgent, and profound. What could perhaps be comfortable, isn’t, very often, although the poems are often very lightly composed, so that there’s a gossamer sense to them, even when detailing gore. A very interesting book indeed, and one that stays long with the reader after closing its covers.

My Bodies This Morning This Evening – Eve Esfandiari-Denney

The body comes to the fore once again in My Bodies This Morning This Evening by Eve Esfandiari-Denney (Bad Betty, price: £6). Bad Betty produce very striking books, set within highly tactile black and white covers, that are a pleasure to have and hold. Despite their well-designed uniformity, however, you never quite know what you’ll find inside one. I was struck by the uniqueness of Esfandiari-Denney’s style, which doesn’t just look at other bodies, but fully inhabits them, including the mind within that form. At one point, a poem even takes off into what feels like a dream or an astral trip, or perhaps even a science fiction vision of the future, with swans and Smurfs in attendance, in the poem – This Is Medium World 7 –.

Along the way, the poet deftly imagines and reimagines, ending with an image of possibly the poet herself lying unborn inside her mother’s uterus – “and to think / I had once been live in her belly, a sack of organs / inside one of hers”. And so, the collection comes back to birth, in a very intriguing ending that, in a way, also isn’t. Boundlessly clever and full of creative juice, this book gives a very enlivening reading experience.

Cliff Notes – Kathryn O’Driscoll
Love Beneath The Nails – Kat Lyons

Cliff Notes (Verve Poetry Press, price: £10.99) comes with a list of content warnings that extends onto over three pages at the start of this volume by Kathryn O’Driscoll. Rape, suicide, loss, and ableism are just some of the subjects evoked, and so this list at the start of the book makes sense. It’s noteworthy because this is the first time I’ve seen this in a poetry book. It promises unflinching honesty, and in this the book most certainly it delivers. However, the style is still elegantly rendered, often employing deft analogies rather than making a point bluntly, as in the poem Collapse – “All cracked foundations, subsidence, / sagging plasterboard… / the ceiling coming down, / caving in…. / I am not a safe place”. This metaphor extends perfectly to create a brilliant poem, and it’s just one in an equally brilliant collection.

Another point of interest are the interspersed pages, here and there, that hold words or short sentences in large, overlapping fonts. These add not just a concrete, visual element to the book, but also act rather like a Greek chorus to wail, lament, or sing out something of importance within the poems. The visual element of these refrains are powerful indeed, as are the poems themselves, and in all Cliff Notes is an accomplished, daring, and very affecting book.

Also from Verve (price: £9.99) is Kat Lyons’ Love Beneath The Nails. It opens with a poem entitled After The Funeral, which is the title, too, of one of my favourite Dylan Thomas poems. This poem here, and various of the others in the section it sits in, deals with grief, with grief personified, as if it’s an accompanying person, giving this emotion a great, gripping sense of ‘always there’. This imaginative act is just one in a book that’s choc-full of them. My favourite flights of Lyons’ enviable imagination are in a poem in which bears leave their usual Arctic terrain to join us in our human world, with so brilliant and perfect a final stanza that I’d like to reproduce it here:

now they slope in alleys, cadge a fag, suck on chips. 
they’ve shrunk to fit. waning moons, heading towards 
eclipse. watch them 
shuffle under streetlights, hunch in cafeterias. 
cry over the ice-cubes in a coke.

and another in which Eve meets Isaac Newton and they share their experience of apples / falling. I think the poet’s wit is stunning, although the poems themselves are warm, full of heart, pithy and unpretentious despite their cleverness.

A poem sequence, catcalled, details experience of everyday sexism, but it’s done, again, with a pitch perfect sense of how to intelligently engage a reader, exploring unsettling and personal subjects without ever overloading or lecturing. This was another poem I wished I had written. A truly excellent writer, and a book that I highly recommend to you all.