We asked a collection of recent and future contributors to Poetry Wales to recommend their favourite poetry titles of 2019. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed. We hope you enjoy!
David Clarke
2019 saw the welcome return of the Salt poetry list, and a new collection by one of Salt’s best, David Briggs. Cracked Skill Cinema (https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/cracked-skull-cinema-9781784632076), his third, explores interior landscapes without ever losing sight of our collective situation. Displaying his trademark elegance and wit, Briggs ranges over subjects as diverse as Radio 4’s Today Programme, climate change and the mixing of a martini, writing poetry that is at once deeply moral and free of all easy moralizing. This collection, by turns perturbing, hilarious and beautiful, is the book I have recommended the most this year.
David Clarke’s second collection, The Europeans, is available from Nine Arches: http://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/the%20europeans.html
Tony Curtis
When the Tree Falls (https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/when-the-tree-falls-1216), from Bloodaxe, confirms Jane Clarke’s position as one of the most rewarding poets in these islands: she knows how to cut a line, how to shape words to the right instrument and then to make that thing sing. Her elegies for her parents are a personal tribute but also a sequential elegy for a rural life in Ireland that seems to have changed little in years. Her use of the vernacular and of place names is engaging and has a natural lyricism:
Winter mornings he was gone before dawn
to fairs in Ballyhaunis, Claremorris, Ballinrobe.
He came home with muck on his coat,
smelling of Shorthorns and Herefords.
From the Fortunate Isles: New and Selected Poems by Tony Curtis is available from Seren: https://www.serenbooks.com/productdisplay/fortunate-isles-new-and-selected-poems
Joe Dunthorne
I loved The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/298065/the-penguin-book-of-the-prose-poem/9780241285794.html), a brilliant and varied exploration of a great and under-appreciated form, with unforgettable contributions from Anne Carson, Chris McCabe and Carrie Etter. Two pamphlets I loved were Milk Tooth by Martha Sprackland (https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/martha-sprackland/milk-tooth) and Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity by Ella Frears (https://www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-press/publications/goldsmiths-shorts/). And I feel like I’ve told too many people how much I adored Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic (https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571351411-deaf-republic.html) but here I am, doing it again.
Joe Dunthorne’s collection, O Positive, is published by Faber: https://www.faber.co.uk/books/poetry/9780571342556-o-positive.html
Glyn Edwards
I’ve barely begun Zoë Skoulding’s Footnotes to Water (https://www.serenbooks.com/productdisplay/footnotes-water) but, having been hypnotised by hearing her recently read aloud from the new Seren collection, I am already enjoying the anthology as much as anything else I’ve read this year.
The opening poem ‘Adda’ is a stream of seven sonnets seeking out the peripheral, subterranean river in Bangor, ultimately concluding ‘no answer’ other than the ‘edges’ where the ‘pressure comes from.’ Skoulding is heavily motivated by the principles of phonology of verse and Footnotes to Water thrives for her adeptness with assonance and cacophony, with code-switching in and out of Cymraeg; she is always ‘listening’ to liquid, always pursuing the sound of it ‘escaping.’
While the water rushes past the need for punctuation in many poems of the collection’s first third, in ‘Observation Chamber’ Skoulding questions ‘what comes before a stop’ and the many lines break in parallel while the water disappears and reappears from view, from consciousness.
In further verse on the Adda – this time in a narrative poem, written in collaboration with members of the public – my favourite lines of 2019 surfaced:
You know the baby elephant in the Natural History Museum that came with the fair and died here? They rotted it to its bones putting it in a pond, and when they treated the water years later it was full of microbes that weren’t from round here. Overlapping lines.
For these brief reasons already, and until I find a dozen more, Footnotes to Water is my poetry choice of the year.
Glyn Edwards’s collection, Vertebrae, is published by The Lonely Crowd: https://thelonelycrowd.org/vertebrae-by-glyn-edwards/
John Freeman
What can we expect from a book of poems? With poetry as with music, it’s astonishing what a variety of things come under the same heading, and what different tastes some of them cater for. Among the new books of poetry I have been struck by this year are three remarkably unlike each other.
In his debut collection Vertebrae (The Lonely Press), Glyn Edwards channels a number of his predecessors from Shakespeare to Ted Hughes and adds his own sharp observation, emotional truth and gift for language to the mix, making everything his own. The bedrock of this collection is a tenderness grounded in empathy, starting with close family, and bringing that warmth and openness to other sentient beings, human and animal, past and present. The poems of the natural world empower the reader with the poet’s ability to see with clarity and steadiness. In an entirely laudable sense this is traditional lyric poetry of a kind Wordsworth and Coleridge as well as many of the twentieth-century greats would recognise.
A very different book from a more seasoned poet is David Clarke’s The Europeans (Nine Arches Press). If Vertebrae corresponds to Blake’s Songs of Innocence, The Europeans is a modern Songs of Experience, though the Romantic poet Clarke addresses in one of these poems is the witty and worldly Lord Byron. The Europe of this collection is seen from a British perspective, partly through the eyes of a boy furtively watching sexy continental films, and going on unsatisfactory school-organised exchanges with their French and German peers, such as ‘a snide Johann/or sporty Yves.’ Other poems distil a sense of the essence of the continental European past in a composite portrait, part history, part myth. The British world of these poems is even more dystopian than the continental one, a world of smoky pubs and provincial garages which are also all-night general stores. The people, like the décor, confront us with a world obstinately resistant to all the life-affirming gladness we might wish to find; and yet the current of that lust for life is present in these poems, so that they are not just sardonic and cynical but poignant. You want to believe in goodness and happiness, the book tells us, but this is the sorry reality in which you must play out your unpromising quest. I return to these poems as to a conscience and a challenge. Like a cold shower, it is bracing if you can stand it. It may leave you feeling better and stronger afterwards. It may not. But I shall continue to wrestle with it and be inspired by it. Any experience you have had with Europe and the seediness of Britain may be unlocked by it and start flowing into lines of your own poems. And of course, this is a book for our political moment. Yes, the B word is mentioned, once.
A book different from either Vertebrae or the Europeans is The Soil Never Sleeps (Palewell Press) (http://adamhorovitz.co.uk/blog/shop/the-soil-never-sleeps/) by Adam Horovitz, which first appeared in 2017 but has been republished in 2019 with substantial additions. Horovitz, a committed vegetarian, was embedded for a year, and then for another season, in several farms in England and Wales, at the invitation of the Pasture-Fed Livestock Association, with a commitment to environmentally friendly farming practices. Like Ted Hughes’s Moortown, The Soil Never Sleeps takes us deep into the reality of farming life and country life. The poems may tend to the workaday at times but poems they are, building into a book of cumulative force that can be read like a novel, and ends by giving us a deeper understanding of the natural world and what it is like to live and work close to it than most of us would ever come by otherwise.
This has been a good year for prose poetry, and The
Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (https://www.valleypressuk.com/book/120/the_valley_press_anthology_of_prose_poetry),
edited by Anne Caldwell and Oz Hardwick, is remarkably readable from cover to cover. The average length of the pieces is not much more than half a page, and it is refreshing to move from one to another finding parallels but also contrasts of sensibility, style and subject matter from several dozen writers, quite a few of them very well known, others, to me at least, welcome discoveries.
I mentioned Wordsworth and Coleridge earlier. Queuing up to be read on my shelf is The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels (Harper Collins), (https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780008126476/the-making-of-poetry-coleridge-the-wordsworths-and-their-year-of-marvels/) by Adam Nicolson. The year in question runs from the summer 1797 to the autumn of 1798, the year when the poets published Lyrical Ballads, a volume which is often seen as the book that inaugurated the poetic world we still inhabit. I always find it reassuring to know that the first edition sold very few copies. Take heart, poets! I have so far only dipped into Nicolson’s book, which quotes largely from the poetry as well as putting the lives of the poets in historical and social context, but the reviews have been ecstatic and I know I am going to love it. And so might you.
John Freeman’s What Possessed Me received the Roland Mathias Prize in 2017: http://www.worplepress.com/what-possessed-me/
Kerry Hardie
I would like to nominate Carnivorous by Moyra Donaldson, Doire Press (https://doirepress.com/writers/m_z/moyra_donaldson/). It is a wonderful book, speaks to the living and the dead, does not avoid the everyday but is equally unafraid of other realms. It is completely fearless, yet deeply reverent.
Kerry Hardie’s new collection, Where Now Begins, will appear from Bloodaxe in June: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/where-now-begins-1240
Paul Henry
Hugo Williams’s Lines Off (https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571349753-lines-off.html) is a book of heart-breaking stoicism that builds in intensity. He wears his craft so lightly. The deeper cutting poems, reflecting on a life-threatening illness, are off-set by a wit and brightness of tone that leave you with a sense of rising. I also enjoyed Paul Farley’s latest, The Mizzy (https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/paul-farley/the-mizzy/9781529009798). I’ve yet to read new collections by Oswald, Hofmann, Rees-Jones, Pugh, Fisher, Doshi, Allen, Maris… Argh. So hard to keep up!
Paul Henry’s latest collection is The Glass Aisle: https://www.serenbooks.com/productdisplay/glass-aisle
Hanan Issa
My nomination is Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/567051/american-sonnets-for-my-past-and-future-assassin-by-terrance-hayes/).
Hayes’ collection pulls you into a riptide of
masterful wordplay and gut-punching truth. I found myself sighing with
satisfaction after reading each poem (all have the same title). Hayes’ work
fills you with an urgency to pick up a pen and attempt to write something half
as devastating.
Hanan Issa’s My Body Can House Two Hearts is published by Burning Eye Books: https://burningeye.bigcartel.com/product/my-body-can-house-two-hearts-by-hanan-issa
Patrick Jones
Glyn Edwards, Vertebrae. Distilled. Emotional. Accessible.
Illya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic. Powerful. Pertinent. Brave. Beautiful language.
Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise (https://www.joyharjo.com/book/an-american-sunrise). A kick against Trump’s America.
Patrick Jones’s latest work is Renegade Psalms: http://www.patrick-jones.info/shop
Vanessa Lampert
The Caiplie Caves by Karen Solie. (Picador) https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/karen-solie/the-caiplie-caves/9781529005325
It is the story of an Irish missionary, St Ethernan who went to live in the caves of Fife in order to choose whether to establish a Priory on the island of May or pursue a life of solitude. Solie juxtaposes this story with more personal poems. The whole is a lyrical masterpiece which addresses the nature of being alone, the hardship of that landscape, its bleak beauty and how one must let go of grief in order to move forwards.
O Positive by Joe Dunthorne (Faber).
It is a book of absurd surreal humour delivered brilliantly and economically. The poems feel unlaboured; natural as if he is simply stating what is on his mind. This ease of delivery makes the book an absolute delight.
Her Lost Language by Jenny Mitchell (Indigo Dreams) (https://www.indigodreams.co.uk/jenny-mitchell/4594685475)
A sharp, critical stance – yet an intensely poetic voice – on the history of black Caribbean peoples, their travails of slavery, grievous violation, and sickness in the islands and subsequent emigration to the UK. Some brilliantly inventive formal work with an unflinching eye (an often over-used term, but not here)!
My shrink is pregnant by Katie Griffiths (live canon) (http://www.livecanon.co.uk/store/product/my-shrink-is-pregnant-katie-griffiths
Each of the poems has a title which begins; ‘My shrink…’ It shifts the gaze from client to therapist and is quirky, insightful, funny and beautifully illustrated.
Vanessa Lampert is a second year student on The Poetry School London’s MA programme. https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/bridges/2018/12/05/vanessa-lampert/
Anna Lewis
The Protection of Ghosts by Natalie Linh Bolderston (V Press pamphlet) (https://vpresspoetry.blogspot.com/p/the-protection-of-ghosts.html).
This substantial pamphlet explores the poet’s relationships with her mother and maternal ancestors through crisp, careful, and visually-rich depictions of the family’s life in Vietnam and subsequent flight to the UK. There is a sadness to the poems as they strive to reach into the minds and memories of others, but also a wiry strength. An exceptional debut from a young poet.
Anna Lewis’s second collection, In Passing, is published by Pindrop Press: http://www.pindroppress.com/books/In%20Passing.html
Arjunan Manuelpillai
For me, Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky was a ground-breaking piece of pure genius. Not only was it a highly-charged political piece based in a far-off land, it was also discussing deafness, uncovering the power of speech and the importance of listening. This book, written with so much delicacy and subtlety moved me and made me look at poetry in a completely different way. It is the sort of book I want to give to friends, poets or non-poets.
Arjunan Manuelpillai is a Jerwood/Arvon mentee. https://www.arji.org/
Sophie McKeand
Tsunami Vs. The Fukushima 50 by Lee Ann Roripaugh (https://milkweed.org/book/tsunami-vs-the-fukushima-50).
From the deceptively prosaic-yet-emotive dialogue of Fukushima survivors, to the utterly sublime, irreverent, often anthropomorphised tsunami flooding the pages of this bittersweet (and occasionally sharply hilarious) collection, the reader’s journey tumbles through language in awe at nature’s devastatingly wild and untameable expression, into the very human fragilities of hubris, stoicism and grief.
Sophie McKeand’s Rebel Sun is available from Parthian: https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/poetry/products/rebel-sun
Christopher Meredith
Confession: I don’t read many collections as soon as they come out so I’m no judge of the year’s books. I tend to leave them to get over the launch traumas and tremors and settle in the landscape. The best don’t stale; we’re building cathedrals, not baking bread. So several of the books I might have mentioned have already been around a little too long to figure, but I’ll mention two anyway by not-so-well-knowns: Robert Walton’s lively Sax Burglar Blues (Seren) (https://www.serenbooks.com/productdisplay/sax-burglar-blues) and Katy Giebenhain’s tough and accomplished Sharps Cabaret (Mercer University Press) (https://www.mupress.org/Sharps-Cabaret-Poems-P935.aspx).
From 2019 there’s so much yet unread, but I’ll pick Jeremy Hooker’s Word and Stone (Shearsman) (https://www.shearsman.com/store/Jeremy-Hooker-Wood-and-Stone-p138168084). Late in his eighth decade Hooker continues to be an explorer of felt ideas in poetry of resonant clarity. This book deepens his connection with his adoptive south Wales in work equally engaged with the natural world and the productions of other artists and writers. And then there’s Sheenagh Pugh’s Afternoons Go Nowhere (Seren) (https://www.serenbooks.com/productdisplay/afternoons-go-nowhere), combining erudition, understated technical brilliance, precision, quirky humaneness, and a unique way of seeing the world.
Christopher Meredith’s Air Histories is available from Seren: https://www.serenbooks.com/author/christopher-meredith
Jessica Mookherjee
Threat by Julia Webb (Nine Arches) (http://www.ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/threat.html).
I picked this book because it’s unsettling and is the voice of those small town forgotten places that most of us who grew up outside big cities have somewhere inside us. Webb gives us bus stops, gropey old biker men, nasty pubs, pre-loading before a night out, casual domestic violence, petrol stations and she does it with owls, bears, horses and the music of the flat Norfolk language. The poetry is menacing, mythical and hits us in our guts as poetry should. Webb writes an epic poem of dirty England under your skin.
Jessica Mookherjee’s Tigress is available from Nine Arches: http://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/tigress.html
Vicky Morris
Love Makes a Mess of Dying by Greg Gilbert (Smith/Doorstop) (https://poetrybusiness.co.uk/product/love-makes-a-mess-of-dying/).
Heart-breaking, brutal, raw and vulnerable – and somehow life-affirming in the face of death.
Tea with Cardamom by Warda Yassin (Smith/Doorstop) (https://poetrybusiness.co.uk/product/tea-with-cardamom/).
A tender love song to Somali culture, customs and people against the backdrop of the North of England. An insightful, lyrical and authentic new voice.
Vicky Morris is a Jerwood/Arvon mentee.http://www.vickymorris.co.uk/
Kate Noakes
Mimi Khalvati, Afterwardness, Carcanet (https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784107994).
Mimi
presents a book length sonnet sequence with her usual wit, elegance and sleight-of-hand.
As you read it, and you must read it straight through in order, such is her
skill that you barely realise you are reading formal poetry. Brava!
The Filthy Quiet by Kate Noakes is available from Parthian: https://www.parthianbooks.com/products/the-filthy-quiet
clare e. potter
naming bones by Joanna Ingham, ignition press (https://shop.brookes.ac.uk/product-catalogue/faculty-of-humanities-social-sciences/poetry-pamphlets/naming-bones-by-joanna-ingham).
An impressive twenty poems. Ingham’s language is so striking and exact that it feels four-dimensional. In ‘Autumn, East London,’ is a man with an armful of ‘seventeen apples,’ ‘green suns,’ ‘bee dreams,’ offering them as food, as scent and memory; a clever turning-on-the-head of the biblical fall. Each poem in this pamphlet is equally precise and masterfully draws us in layer by layer, the rich and ordinary details bringing us to wider and surprising truths.
Ten Poems about Trees, Selected by Katharine Towers,Candlestick Press (http://www.candlestickpress.co.uk/pamphlet/ten-poems-about-trees/).
Rufus Mufasa gifted this pamphlet to me. I took the poems to the forest, sat under a beech tree and read them over and over as the wind travelled through the leaves of all the treetops. It was a sublime experience. These poems were like psalms to the trees, made me look up and think below the surface at all the trees on the page and those around me in unison gifting grace and beauty and perspective.
Eighty Four: Poems on male suicide, vulnerability, grief and hope, curated by Helen Calcutt, Verve Poetry Press (https://vervepoetrypress.com/product/eighty-four-poems-on-male-suicide-vulnerability-grief-and-hope/)
A courageous anthology inspired by anguish and the desire to create a space to shape grief and offer hope. The title draws attention to the fact that 84 men a week die by suicide, and each contributor has been impacted in some way by male suicide. In the introduction Helen Calcutt says ‘start talking, and keep going. Live through, and voice your vulnerability. Speak and live your humanity.’ The poems in this book speak through pain, are saying we need to talk more. We need to listen.
clare e. potter’s spilling histories is published by Cinnamon. https://clareawenydd.com/
Di Slaney
Carole Bromley, Sodium 136, Calder Valley Press (https://www.exploreyork.org.uk/event/launch-of-carole-bromleys-pamphlet-sodium-136/).
I would recommend this wonderful, understated pamphlet for anyone who has experienced being in hospital, or who has a loved one who is ill. Carole Bromley’s ability to talk directly and with humour about difficult personal issues that we don’t often like to face is exceptional, and also very moving. Closely observed, wry and self-deprecating, but also finding beauty in unexpected, awkward places, this pamphlet offers something really rather comforting to the reader. I’d give a copy to everyone coming in through the doors of A&E if I could
Di Slaney’s second collection, Herd Queen, will appear next year from Valley Press. https://www.valleypressuk.com/author/30/di_slaney
Jeffery Sugarman
Self-portrait as a diviner, failing by Michelle Penn (PaperSwans Press) (https://paperswans.co.uk/product/self-portrait-as-a-diviner-failing/).
Distinctively voiced and formally inventive poems of a Jewish family’s migration from northern Europe to South Africa, and hence the USA; the poems focus on dislocation and ‘degrees’ and kinds of discrimination/racism, the ways in which they can be familiar, or similar, and not. The modes of observation and comment are striking and various but consistent to the voice and times of each poem, and effective in the conjuring of a family’s long life.
Shadow Dogs by Natalie Whittaker (Ignition Press) (https://shop.brookes.ac.uk/product-catalogue/faculty-of-humanities-social-sciences/poetry-pamphlets/shadow-dogs-by-natalie-whittaker).
Sharp, short poems with jolting, apt insights into coming of age, and living, in our whippet-quick and changing times. Poetic observations come through the eyes and voice of a wary, even perhaps jaundiced, but never dispassionate observer. Distinctive indeed!
The Unquiet by L. Kiew (Offord Road Books, 2019) (https://www.offordroadbooks.co.uk/the-unquiet)
The ‘Unquiet’ of these poems is beguilingly quiet: restrained and formally controlled; enacting the experiences of a Chinese-Malaysian poet who came to be educated in the UK. Perhaps as only poetry can do this through unique and vivid language from different places, cultures and traditions. There is unexpected joy in these poems born of a hybrid life. Ingenious and haunting!
The Protection of Ghosts by Natalie Linh Bolderston (V. Press, 2019)
Experiences of a Anglo-Vietnamese woman, and her family disrupted by war, spoken frequently and with great strength, through the voices of women. Many unforgettable and searing evocations of loss and the unceasing search for healing.
Elastic Glue by Kathy Pimlott (The Emma Press, 2019) (https://theemmapress.com/books/the-emma-press-poetry-pamphlets/elastic-glue/)
Beautiful – and beautifully controlled – poems of contemporary urban life in Soho, London. Pimlott traces her neighbourhood’s transformation from a place of domestic life – schools, vegetable allotments and kitchen work, gossip over fences – into a playground for largely disconnected bodies, seeking connection through the sensed. She vividly captures the sounds, textures and emotional upheaval of such changes, with great formal control and exceptional, evocative diction.
Dodo Provocateur by Anita Pati (https://www.therialto.co.uk/pages/product/dodo-provocateur/)
Winner of The Rialto’s pamphlet competition and short-listed for the 2019 Michael Marks Prize, Pati’s work is inimitable: linguistically inventive but not for its own sake, at once beguiling and disorienting; poems that can elicit laughter even as a honed-blade of discrimination, personal and/or social, cuts deeply. These are beautiful poms despite their project of revealing the darker side of human nature and culture.
So Many Rooms by Laura Scott (Carcanet, 2019) (https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784108496)
Exquisitely crafted lyric poems – quiet and confident, but also freshly voiced and surprising. Often explores the creative impulse – in broad terms, whether it be as painter, novelist, poet, mother… The narrative of a creative moment, be it with JMW Turner or Tolstoy, or a family saga, is captured with startling fluency and veracity.
Flèche by Mary Jean Chan (Faber, 2019) (https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571348046-fl-che.html)
A singular, personal but remarkably poised poetic evocation of ‘otherness’ – geographical, cultural and emotional. A young Hong-Kong Chinese woman educated in the US and UK finds her ‘voice’ and ‘embodied’ self through these poems: here is the muddied, inescapable struggle to accept same sex desire whilst making peace with a damning culture, dramatised especially in the persistent, unavoidable interrogation of the speaker’s relationship with her stern, ‘unexpecting’, but loving mother. These poems’ pulse is emotion and intelligence; stabilised by intellect but always grounded in a lived, intellectually curious life. The ‘mother’ of these poems is at once strongly personal and archetypal. A brilliant debut collection.
Jeffery Sugarman is a Jerwood/Arvon mentee. His pamphlet, Dear Friend(s), is published by The Emma Press. https://theemmapress.com/shop/dear-friends/
Marvin Thompson
My favourite poetry audiobook of 2019 was Jay Bernard’s Surge (https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Surge-Audiobook/1473570239). When I listen to Bernard’s poems, the words fill my chest and rest there. Much of the book focuses on the New Cross Fire of 1981, also known as the New Cross Massacre. Bernard’s focus on British history and Caribbean aesthetics has been an inspiration!
Marvin Thompson’s Road Trip, forthcoming from Peepal Tree Press, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2020. https://www.peepaltreepress.com/books/road-trip
Steve Whitaker
Baldwin’s Catholic Geese by Keith Hutson (Bloodaxe Books) (https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/keith-hutson).
At the crossroads of the comic and the tragic, Keith Hutson’s poetics bask in irony, but not in
introspection; they look outward in heartfelt commemoration but they do not wallow in
sentiment. They are a tonic – a fizzing celebrant of unremembered comedy and Music Hall
lives. The terrain of his imagining feels as warm and as appropriately ersatz as a glass of
sarsaparilla, and in his easy demotic delivery, Hutson has found a consonant medium for
commemoration. The improbably-titled Baldwin’s Catholic Geese is an absolute original, an
unalloyed gem.
Steve Whitaker is Literary Correspondent for The Yorkshire Times: https://yorkshiretimes.co.uk/article/Poem-of-the-Week-Home-by-Deryn-ReesJones