The title is a translation of an idiom from both Hokkien (chiak hong) and Malay (makan angin) for going on holiday or relaxing. Suyin du Bois has Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage and feels that occasionally her identity is challenged when she just wants to enjoy her favourite foods, whether through a food stall giving her a fork for noodles or an aunt shocked that du Bois enjoys bitter gourd or petai. Despite this, food can feel like home, even when home is not anchored. In “Omelette or Nasi Lemak?” when the poem’s narrator is on a plane,

“assemble each mouthful just so
and, like that, it’s no longer plane food.
It’s the Sri Weld sambal my cousin Nicky jokes
is extra spicy whenever the hawker has a scowl on.
It’s pyramids from Auntie Lin we carry to the beach,
swinging plastic bags tight around our fingers
so we can scoop sheeny red-stained rice
with our backs resting on boulders – so lemak.
It’s breakfast with Joël at Ah Wang where stray cats
watch us for crumbs or kindness,”

The meal served on a plane is eaten the way the speaker ate it throughout her life. It invokes memories of family and childhood, transporting her to somewhere where she was loved and part of a family. But it also keeps her in the present where she eats with her husband, potentially forming a new branch on the family tree. The strays appear to be excluded from this, sharing neither food nor family. They are a reminder of her fortune in finding a welcome and family away from her original family. Food is not just fuel. It’s hard-baked in family social gatherings, in rituals and celebrations. Certain meals have the ability to transport us back to people we love or have loved. Feeding someone isn’t just about cooking but getting to know their tastes, their favoured food and nourishing more than a stomach.

That idea of nourishing re-surfaces in “Auntie Pixi’s Aga Agak” where an old jam jar labelled “Rhubarb and Mango May 2018” sits in a fridge. It remains unused because Pixi’s daughter has said it will be the last so “it becomes too precious to dip into.” On a visit to auntie’s care home,

“…………………………….I struggle
to believe you’ve only weeks left. To pre-empt

my regret, I fit in as many questions as I can.
When I ask for the recipe you say It’s just fruit and jam sugar,
no measurements or method. You trust I can figure it out.”

This is a jam the poem’s speaker has known since childhood. A jam her aunt makes every year from rhubarb she’s grown in her garden. So familiar with the method, the aunt no longer has a recipe to pass on. Experience and practice means she knows how much sugar to add, how long to boil the fruit, how to make minor adjustments according to how sour the rhubarb was that year. It’s so familiar, it doesn’t occur to her that her niece is a beginner deprived of the opportunity to make the jam alongside her aunt and develop the same instinctual abilities.

In “Chinese New Year at Sara’s” cousins meet up for dinner to welcome in the new year, but an aunt “scolded us for doing it wrong”

“We try not to take it as proof we’re not Chinese
enough, decide we make our own meaning.
May we be as well-fed as the pig we’re eating!
May our luck tower high as our steamers!
We layer on red to maximise our chances:
our jumpers, the lacquered chopstick rests
I gave you for Christmas, napkins to match,
my ang pow for your daughter, our ang moh
husbands, our blended blood.”

A child of mixed heritage can often feel they are not fully Chinese or Malay or whichever part of the heritage is currently at the fore. But the aunt’s scolding isn’t just about cultural identity. The aunt is concerned the cousins are not following the proper family tradition but breaking away and creating one of their own. The aunt is losing control. This might be a Chinese new year celebration, but it’s difficult for the cousins to ignore the other parts of their heritage. Ironically, the aunt is pushing them further away as the cousins feel if they can’t get it “right”, they may as well ditch the effort and create a new tradition that works for them.

“Eating Air” is a celebration of food and loving family connections. Du Bois has deliberately chosen a conversational, colloquial vocabulary that mixes Malay words and customs with English as a reflection of the poems’ messages. The use of food is not to separate but to combine and explore the possibility of new flavours and new traditions. A successful blend of mixed heritages.

“Eating Air” is available from the Emma Press.

“The Intentions of Thunder” is a collection of new and selected poems from Patricia Smith. It is deliberately substantial, both in terms of the number of poems and the depth of poetry. The collection draws from “Life According to Motown” (1991), “Big Towns, Big Talk” (1992), “Close to Death” (1993), “Blood Dazzler” (2008), “Shoulda been Jimi Savannah” (2012), “Incendiary Art” (2017), “Unshuttered” (2023) plus uncollected poems. It is nearly impossible to provide a flavour of the range of poems that the collection covers. Picking favourites is easy but would render this review far too long to read.

In “Annie Pearl Smith Discovers Moonlight” (Annie Pearl Smith is the poet’s mother) from “Big Towns, Small Talk”,

“She was not impressed.
After all it was 1969, a year plump with deceit.
So many miracles
had proven mere staging for lesser dramas.”

[…]

“My mother had twisted her weary body into prayerful knots,
worked for twenty years in Leaf Brands Candy Company,
dipping her numb hands into vats of lumpy chocolate.
She counted out dollars with her doubled vision
just so that a heavenly seat would be plumped for her coming.
Now the moon,
the promised land’s brightest bauble,
crunched plainer than sidewalk beneath ordinary feet?
And her Lord just letting it happen?”

There is a tenderness here: no one is making fun of the mother or trying to explain the moon landings in July 1969 were real. She is given space to come to terms with how her worldview is not the solid foundation she thought it was. A balance has to be struck between allowing the mother’s faith to continue and not allowing reality to shatter it since, surviving as a black working class woman in 1960s’ Chicago is hard enough without risking her loss of faith too. There’s no judgment, no ridicule, just recognition that sometimes the best way of moving a rock is to let time and nature do it.

“Blood Dazzler” was a sequence written in response to Hurricane Katrina. From “Prologue – And Then She Owns You”

“You s-s-stutter.

New Orleans’s, p-please. Don’t. Blue is the color
stunning your tongue. At least the city pretends
to remember to be listening.
She grins with glint tooth,

wiping your mind blind of the wife, the children,
the numb ritual of job and garden plot.
Gently she leads you out into the darkness
and makes you drink rain.”

This was before the storm was upgraded to a hurricane, when Katrina is personified as playful and seductive, like a scarlet woman may tease a man into some fun before he realises that he’s wreaked his family. Later poems in the sequence highlight the destruction, unpreparedness and lack of compassion from the authorities who seemed to have failed not only to grasp the danger but also fail to understand the communities they needed to work with, opening old wounds of colonialism and slavery as well as contemporary racism.

I have reviewed “Incendiary Art” and “Unshuttered” as individual collections.

Towards the end there’s “How to Find a Missing Black Woman” which starts with “First, you’ll have to notice she’s gone” and continues,

“Walk backwards till you find a jukebox that still
swallows old money, listen to every record skip
from trying so hard to save her. You look behind
and beneath everything and see nothing. That chunk
of swine she had on the back boil was strolled away
from and burned to firework, leaving behind a smell
like a backhand, leaving behind ashy babies with
unpicked hair and baffled bellies, leaving behind
a postdated rent check and a ’frigerator crammed
with souring, leaving behind her good job, leaving
behind her people staring into the void of where
she last laughed, leaving behind everything she had
to her name. Leaving behind her name.”

This was a woman overwhelmed with responsibility and trying to hold it all together. Even so, she left a postdated cheque to cover the rent so the household could keep going. There was food too, beginning to go off before anyone noticed it was there. That image of a stocked fridge that no one took any food from while it was fresh is also a image of her: she stocked that fridge and cooked the food so no one else in the household had to think about their next meal to the extent that no one thought about opening the fridge to see if food was there because the labour of preparing, cooking, serving and washing up afterwards was invisible and taken for granted. Just as it was taken for granted she would do the invisible labour. She may have asked for help but most probably had long given up asking for help because none was forthcoming. People expected her labour but never paid attention to the person doing it. Never checked in on her. Until they noticed the food was burnt or going off. It wasn’t her presence they’d noticed, but her absence when the labour stopped.

It ends,

“You see the so-what of her, you see the ain’t
of her. You see her gone girl. She’s gone, girl.
What? No alert on X, not on FB, not on your IG.

Is someone missing?”

She’s gone from the virtual life on socials as well as in real life. Now the people who’d became so used to taking her for granted without seeing her are wondering if she was there at all.

Patricia Smith is a poet of witness, determined not to let her community go unheard or unrecorded. That doesn’t make her worthy or dull, on the contrary, she has a playfulness and a deft control of form, whether that’s a ‘choose your own adventure’ choice of sonnets on Emmett Till or recording the aftermath of Katrina without letting politicians off the hook. “Intentions of Thunder” is a book to return to, each visit bringing a new reward. It’s lazy to describe her as heir to Gwendolyn Brooks. Smith has long stepped out from that useful mentorship and found her own strong, compelling voice. But it’s useful to let Brooks have the last word, writing that Smith’s work is “direct, colloquial, inclusive, adventuresome.”

“The Intentions of Thunder” is available from Bloodaxe. If you’ve not read any Patricia Smith, this is an excellent place to start.

Kate Maxwell’s “Thistle” takes an arc from childhood to middle age, exploring experiences of growing up and maturing with the necessary discovery of resilience. An ability to marvel at the thistles as well as the cultivated high maintenance prized flowers. “The Forest and the Trees” where the subject of the poem has a “milky film of memory/lost”,

“When she’s finally found
……….not like this
……….not this
……….constant loop of looking
ever searching, ever trying
to recall the question
……….she can’t answer
…………………………muddled
in the mists of what she thinks
………………..she knows
and what she thinks
………………..she knew.

I cannot see the forest for the trees
……….she sad laughs
……….on her better days
……………….that’s when going
……………….isn’t ending
……………………but a sad return.”

Someone muddled by memory loss and confusion, left trying to remember the things she knows she ought to know or knew once, jokes about a poor focus. She’s someone who can’t see the bigger picture because she’s too concentrated on details. When she’s trying to remember where a possession she knew she had is, she fails to see that can’t be important otherwise it would have been put in a obvious place or in a line of sight. When she struggles to remember a past memory, she forgets life has moved on and the people involved in that memory have also moved on, so, in the grand scheme of things, it is probably better to let go and turn her focus to the present, to the people in front of her.

Some memories, however, are impossible to get go of. In “Cold Hard Truths” a polar explorer is giving a presentation to a group of school children (I had to look up that Year Six meant 10-11 year olds), showing grainy photos of penguins,

“The Year Six class had been forewarned—
no fidgeting, no calling out, and show your best
St Michael’s manners—but they couldn’t stop
squealing at the annotated photo
of a shrivelled ‘ex-husky’

rotting slowly into snow, its paws still bent
in tummy-rub position: ribs, a crumbling
hollow cave, where the chest and stomach
should have been. And their foreheads
slowly crumpled when he showed

slide after slide of rusted oil drums, cartridges
and carburettors junking up the pristine shore
abandoned metal, plastic piles littering line
of Narnia white as their fantasy of flawless cold
melted in the dawn of adolescence.”

These children had been taught the Antarctic was a landscape of pristine snow, like the fictional Narnia in the grip of the Ice Queen. But this explorer is showing the litter of previous expeditions and the wash of refuse dumped at sea. There’s a loss of innocence as the children realise that the stories they have been told don’t measure up to reality; and the cause and effect of irresponsible littering. Although it’s not just about the litter, but also death. Life has an end as well as a beginning. A husky, a working dog, was left to rot or be scavenged. There may have been practical reasons to leave it behind and there’s no suggestion the death was unnatural. The dog lies in a curled, paws tucked in so was not defending itself. I’m wondering how many of those children went home to fuss over their own pet dogs that evening. It does seem as if the explorer felt that the children needed reality and didn’t think about the consequences of what he was showing them.

A later poem, “My Golden Friend”, focuses on the necessary ease of letting responsibility slip, just for an evening. A glass of wine is a treat “All week denied” to “ensure that I can take the wheel at a/ moment’s notice”,

“A sigh of sweet surrender to the lull and hum
of its nerve-softening song that tempers all the tensions of the
working week, each compromise and hassle on the street, each
forced smile and weary offering of self.”

Self-care, particularly if a parent or caring for elderly parents or even both, becomes reduced to a few hours away from demands from others. A snatched chance to spend some time alone and hold one’s own thoughts before returning to the bustle, emotional labour and stress on being on call for others.

“How to Prosper From the Fall” takes a different view. It uses a quote from Elon Musk from 2025, ‘the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy’ and extrapolates, that it’s

“So much easier to plough and fell, take
a chainsaw to the trunk; its fifty spreading
branches, and hollow out an age-ringed
constitution. Pay no heed to howls

or splinters, crack and cleave of living
timber, swarms of soft blind parasites
that scuttle from the hacks. Inhale, instead,
the musky scent of smoking blade,”

Imploring people concentrate solely,

“on the price and yield a righteous raze
and replant wields. Hold up your bloody
dirt-stained hand, high as a kite, in vile
salute to make yourself feel great again.”

It is always easier to knock down something, than build something and a tree that’s taken decades to mature, is not just a tree but also a home for insects and other wildlife. An eco-structure in its own right. Taking out a diseased tree is sometimes necessary, but there’s nothing here to suggest the tree is beyond hope. Just a lack of compassion for a fellow living thing. The living things the tree supports are written off as “soft blind parasites”. The person chopping the tree down is seen in heroic terms, “the musky scent” could be a play on Musk’s name or could also be exuding favoured musk pheromones inducing others to give the man holding the blade increased status. At the end of the poem, people are implored to be proud agents of a “righteous raze”. The “vile salute”  and “make… feel great again” are a satirical nod to political slogans. Readers are indirectly asked to hold on to their empathy and avoid a future that destroys ecology and favours selfishness.  

As the earlier poem “My Golden Friend” considered self-care, “Warm Brew” is about connection and friendship,

“the simple brew
brought us to the table
with a reason to stop
and sip, give minutes,
hours to each other”

The poem concludes,

“And even
though, after each visit
I would drive off, bloated
as a toad, I could never
refuse the offer of another
cup. It would be like saying
no to a piece of your heart.”

Despite being full, the invited friend feels she can’t refuse the offer of another cup of tea because it’s not about the tea but the conversation and connection that comes with it. There’s a reason “spilling the tea” has become an idiom for sharing gossip. Gossip isn’t necessarily malicious, there are times when gossip is a way of letting a person know what’s going on in someone else’s life so the person doesn’t make a bad situation worse or doesn’t ask someone going through a break-up how the person who is dumped them is getting on.

In “Thistle” Kate Maxwell turns a compassionate focus on daily interactions and familiar scenarios. Her poems don’t judge. She illustrates how vital acts of empathy and humanity are in healing connections with others and how to stop short of overdoing it and becoming overwhelmed. Readers are invited to see a thistle not as a prickly weed, but a sign of endurance and resilience. Something that grew where it wasn’t invited but made the best of a hostile environment nonetheless.

“Thistle” is available from Recent Work Press

“Impossible Paradise” is a selected poems taking from Chen Yuhong’s collections “Half-Light” (2022), “Trance” (2016), “In Between” (2011), “Bewitched” (2007), “A River Flows Deep in Your Veins” (2002), “In Truth the Ocean” (1999) in English translation. She has been influenced by poets such as Louise Glück, Anne Carson, Margaret Atwood, Alice Oswald and Carol Ann Duffy whom she has translated in Chinese. However, this is the first time Chen’s own poems have been translated into English. The selections are gathered by collection in reverse order, with the most recent poems first. She relishes in the everyday and natural experiences. “Mammogram”, at one point, could be a weather forecast,

“X-rays, she says,
will show any shadows.
Cloudless good.
Cloudy not.

False positives an OK mistake.
False negatives less so.
I imagine someone gauging
shades within my breast.

Maybe as careful as I myself
judge a poem shortlisted, coolly
gauging its metaphors, its images
plain as my own breasts.

X-rays are precise,
she says, her tone professional
and moderate. You may dress
while I read them.”

Clear days are considered good, overcast days bad, positivity good, negatives bad. There’s not much room for nuance or lack of clarity. The poem’s speaker considers someone looking at the x-ray and making judgments with the emotional distance required to judge poems as a radiologist or judge attempts to be objective about something the poem’s speaker or poet can only be subjective about. The woman operating the mammogram is being dispassionate when speaking to the narrator, expressing certainty and confidence that her x-ray will not give false results. Yet there are hints it’s not that straightforward. Weather forecasting is still not an exact science, and the second quoted stanza suggests there is a risk of the mammogram results being imprecise. For the narrator, who has just been intimately manipulated the instruction to get dressed might feel dismissive, as if she’s being discarded while the mammogram operator gets on with her job of interpreting the x-ray. There’s a lack of closure as the poem finishes before the results are given, inviting the reader to feel the same dismissal as the narrator. There’s a sense of disconnect; the mammogram operator not showing compassion towards her patient.

Disconnect is a theme picked up in “That Day, Fog” from “Trance”, in a valley below a volcano,

“Fog rose to eye level,
the chant in Sanskrit
drifting from a temple.
We hear,
we listened,
not seeking its source.”

It’s not clear if the “we” in the poem knew any Sanskrit or understood the chant beyond it being a prayer. Yet the narrator and person she was with stop to listen to other humans as the fog isolates them. It is enough to hear other voices without a need to walk to the temple and greet those within. The sounds act as a reminder the fog is not a solid barrier, but can be overcome, and sometimes that’s enough.

In “White Moth Orchid” (gatha in Buddhist practice can be a verse uttered silently in the practice of mindfulness), a bloom drops,

“its beauty fled,
yet these fleshy petals hardly smudged.
If this yellow pistil went untouched
by one proboscis
would there be disappointment?

How life can pass
beheld at sunset’s window
the moment it leaves the stem,
the sound a faint
gatha of one word, tidy and final.”

The flower is not yet dead but dying. The poem’s speaker speculates on whether the flower was pollinated and, if it wasn’t, the flower has had an unfulfilled life, failing to do its one job. The act of a life ending can catch someone by surprise while they were busily focused on something else. If the poet had not acted as witness, the falling of the flower would have gone unobserved.

In “Inkstone” written, ‘on seeing a Duan inkstone from the Qian Long period, Qing dynasty’, the stone is “ineloquent”,

“yet from it soundlessly
flow mountain waters, birds,
insects, flowers, fish, people”

When the inkstone is used for its purpose, it opens up to possibilities of stories and connections.

Chen’s poetry is quietly compelling and concerned with connections between people and between people and the natural world. It’s an empathetic, measured plea for compassion and understanding. The poem’s rhythms feel prayer-like, pointing to a space for mindfulness and focus. This collection and English translations are long overdue.

“Impossible Paradise” is available from Carcanet.

Arthur Sze is an observational poet with a focus on the natural world and the cycle of seasons. He sketches scenes, allowing readers to colour in the finer detail or interpret what they are looking at. Even when looking at humans, the focus is on the natural, in “Spring View” three runners wait for the starting signal while flowers bud,

“When the pistol fires, the runners

contort in their hundred-yard dash;
in slow motion, their faces
and limbs express a lifetime.
Though a lifetime may be ten seconds
each second becomes a lifetime
of here, now, be, becoming
yours when you see how
once lines converge, lines diverge.”

The runners are not picked out as individuals because nothing distinguishes one from another. In motion, “contort” could suggest something unnatural about moving at speed, a lack of grace in their movements. Everything focused on getting from the current moment or step to the next, and the next and the world shrinks accordingly. Readers never get told the outcome of the race, whether it was won fairly, by the favourite or an outsider. It’s about the span of the race, a group with the same goal, until the race is over. Meanwhile, in the background, nature gets on with spring at a different pace. The budding flowers given a grace the runners don’t have.

In “Drought”, a tanka, deer flicker their ears towards the sound of a man moving, briefly stopping to look at a tree that’s late to leaf. He thinks of his own yard,

“with weeds; another apricot twig snaps when bent; after a rat
burrowed into the outdoor sofa, he had it hauled to the dump.
In the dark, a gleaming flatbed truck transports large cylinders of
waste down a mesa, along city limits, to an underground salt bed.
At three a.m., while he sleeps, ‘Holy shit!’ erupts out a doorway;
flames rise in an apartment complex, and alarms sound.

……………………………….…………….Reddening pear leaves –
…………………………….……………….opening spigots, he drains
…………………………….……………….the last drops from tanks –”

He’d taken a sofa to the dump to prevent a rat nesting in it, even though he’s fighting a losing battle against weeds. The “large cylinders” suggest chemical waste rather than regular waste and the implication of “city limits” and the dumping in the dark is that the waste isn’t being disposed of legally. There’s no direct causality between the dumping and the fire, but a sense of carelessness, of shifting the problem elsewhere until it comes back to bite you. The fire is a human-created problem with consequences for humans. The natural world will regenerate and reclaim the problems humans create. The pear leaves in reflecting the fire’s light, look like flames and the fire is big enough to need all the water stored to fight fires. Unless humans change their ways, they will lose.

Mostly the vocabulary is familiar and contemporary. The world observed and recorded. In “Venn Diagrams”, scientific terms creep in,

“X-rays, muons, ultraviolet radiation—
X-rays can diagnose fractures
in the skull; muons can map spaces
inside the pyramids at Giza;
ultraviolet radiation kills bacteria
in well water—in a Venn diagram,
circles overlap. An array of sharpened
pencils in a cup; cars parked
at a casino; along a trail, small
puffballs—these clusters manifest
chance; and, pondering three
who furthered you on your way,
you grieve, yearn, hope, make lines
against a void, the void, in an at-one-go.”

X-rays can show bones that otherwise can’t be seen allowing for healing, muons can expand human knowledge without causing damage to ancient monuments and ultraviolet radiation can eliminate bacteria making the water safer to drink. Yet radiation can also kill. The world needs to be navigated with care and respect, otherwise it could become a void if humans lose sight of that respect. Used wrongly, the natural world can fight back.

Sze writes measured, considered poems with a focus on the natural world and nature’s ability to for re-growth after winter or human-made disasters. Humans here are ciphers, following orders or keeping to a narrow path without deviation. Nature follows different rules with respect for natural cycles, seasons and the ability to bloom after loss. There’s a quiet assurance here too. The tone is unjudgmental, even when observing that humans are the authors of their own misfortune.

In “Material Witness” Edward Ragg turns his forensic eye towards material details often overlooked or taken for granted, e.g. rock formations, coral reefs, bower birds, an old photo, and what these artefacts might show or reveal. The specific details of a small starting point widens out to a relationship, family history or connection to the natural world, giving an universal appeal to a personal starting point.

In “The Tap Dancer”, a photo of a dancer “with a Nazi stamp on the back” is revealed to be the poem’s speaker’s mother.

“My father recalled bright-faced GIs breakfasting.
So enthusiastically polite. How they’d throw kids
sweets from their jeeps (candy they called them)
before most girls and boys knew to brush their teeth.
My father wept for those pearl toothed men until
his death. My mother remembered tap dancing
and often said: I was always so lucky, so lucky.”

The poem shows the different attitudes towards the war. The father remembering candy thrown at children from soldiers facing going to war. For him, the war is a tragedy of these men who never returned. The mother, the girl in the photo, focuses on memories of tap dancing. She is not being flippant, however, as she considers herself fortunate to survive. Her attitude is one of fortitude and survival. The war is something she’s put behind her.

The next generation become the focus in “Diving Bell Spider”, post coital, the woman combs,

“your hair as I begin to write this poem, checking
the integrity of our anchored space line by line.
I will never let us drown. And we will eat
your favourite seafood poached from the sea
by my bountiful embrace. Somehow the fish
never see us, not believing in miracles. For this
is how we love. From the depths in plain sight.”

An open, enduring love that can still fire up the initial flame of romance. A love that pays attention to favoured meals and ensuring happiness. Later in “A Dance of Feet”, the Chinese phrase in the last line translates into English as “I love you”,

“O let me learn, my love, how
to pronounce the closest words

in your sounds. Or merely
never cease to feel this dance

of feet which says for real
我爱你”

The poem starts by referencing “Let’s Call the Whole Thing off” written by George and Ira Gershwin and sung by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald and explores how music might help or substitute for communication where two languages are involved. While both people in the poem are fluent in each other’s language, there are times when one person just wants to speak their mother tongue.

A theme picked up again in “For a Quieter Mind”,

“There are times when words
should be spoken and times

for otherwise. As, perhaps,
there are statements of the time

on which the quietest mind
reflects, attending to its own time:

the rhythms of breathing, the peace
of morning and evening.”

Its gentleness appears to lean towards solitude yet acknowledges the need for companionship and connection.

“Material Witness” invites the reader on a journey of reflection alongside the poet. Ragg creates quiet, crafted poems that nudge readers to look again and contemplate their environment, those everyday objects that get taken for granted, and asks what we are without connection. There’s a meditative guided feel to the poems’ rhythms and vocabulary.

“Material Witness” is available from Cinnamon Press.

Janie Greville studied art and art history, the first in her family to go to university, lectured for the Open University while holding down a caring job to pay off her loan used to pay for her MA degree. She trained as an art teacher while under family pressure to marry as she wasn’t “getting any younger”. Her husband to be “liked my red permed hair, my funky fashion, and my slightly arrogant public persona. He was a loveable man from Yorkshire, and he was crazy about ‘me’. Of course, the ‘real me’ was not even confident, let alone arrogant, was shy, was dark blonde, and at most, wavy-haired. So it wasn’t me he loved. The me he thought I was scared him, I later heard, so perhaps he didn’t love my alter ego either, though he married it and lived with both of us for fourteen years”.

Before that marriage, in 1989, came a breakdown, a severe and prolonged depression. Four years later came marriage and two children, and then a sectioning due to a lost grip on reality, not entirely psychotic, which resulted in a label of manic depression and a traumatising experience of psychiatry. Now Janie Greville’s condition is managed, she has published a volume of her poems, written earlier in life. The title poem feels a little magical,

“In the gas fire, a
Swimming pool swirls, licking galaxy chocolate along
A blackboard of jam.
A splash of settee appears on the stairs, and then
Turns like a rolling pin
Into a carpet, a crowbar, a chestnut tree.
I turn away, bite some cheese, spread grass
On my face cream and ring the doorbell
For a prospectus.”

Someone staring into the flicker of a gas fire can being to imagine all sorts of shapes in the flames. There’s a surreal touch. Images flicker from safe, “carpet”, dangerous, “crowbar” to wise, “chestnut tree” that may also reflect an unsettled mind. But turning away from the fire doesn’t bring any sense either. Small wonder the magician narrator feels as if their nose, or their instincts, are broken. The request for a prospectus suggests a wish for someone else to take control.

A different kind of control surfaces in “Picture This:” which starts,

“A man marries a woman
At a time when (and because)
A slow and painful death
Seemed a better option than
The quicker kinds.
He made his vows, to
Love, Honour and Perish,
And kept them faithfully,
Albeit gracelessly”

The poem’s speaker has replaced “cherish” with “perish” in the marriage vows. It seems the speaker, the wife, felt marriage was better than being left alone. She also seems to have entered the marriage knowing she didn’t love her husband. However, he doesn’t appear to have loved her either, honouring his vows, but not her. While readers already know she was pressured into marriage by family and women have less societal freedom than men, it’s only later there’s a sense of him,

“Quietly, he hated her,
But he would not break
The marriage. He would
Not take his children’s
Chance of growing up
Whole, in contented hell,
Away from him.”

There were no arguments, no blazing rows, just a disquieting sense that things were not right. He, however, insists on staying married rather than seeking divorce and letting his children grow up in a happier household. The potential chaos and poverty of a single household may make the children worse off materially but will allow them space to become content. The children will no longer have to walk on eggshells around their parents’ unspoken dislike of each other. Staying together for the sake of the children invariably back-fires. The children know something’s wrong even if they don’t have the vocabulary to talk about it and discovering your parents didn’t split up, because they felt that better than divorce, is one hell of a guilt-trip.

“Today” starts

“Today we have the washing of floors.
Not the jumping into pavements and
Landing in a penguin waltzing dazzle,
Not standing in a line of seven to meet a nun,
Not flying on a bed with a mangy cat,
But a bucket and a mop, and a washing of floors.”

It has echoes of Henry Reeds’ “The Naming of Parts” which form a series of lessons of war in how to clean and care for a gun. Here, the cleaning is a necessary chore with echoes of Disney film images. An acknowledgement that imagination may fly but the chores won’t do themselves. This poem had a discipline and was less free flowing than the others and strongly benefited from that structure.

In “Spillong Prembles”, words seem to breakdown,

“There are spieling problems
Leching in the forests,
Speeling mash takes highflying
A mung the sages of
The Chamber Pots. Wers:
Deep deep Dow n in the
Hewmann whole seethes
The Pollyvice of spilling
We call ‘languish’

And so much languages there.”

It echoes a depressed brain that is searching for words to communicate with but missing its targets. To an outsider, the poem’s speaker appears lazy, indulging in “languish”. Whereas internally the poem’s speaker is a swirl of inexplicable emotions, locked in by a frustration at the failure to find the words to explain.

“The Magician’s Broken Nose” is at its strongest when language is useful playfully but given a scaffold or a specific task. When Janie Grenville focuses on a specific image, e.g. the quiet anger in a failing marriage or chores getting in the way of fairytales, the poems lift and sing.

“The Magician’s Broken Nose” is available via Amazon

“Afterlife” is a selection of new poems and poems from previous collections, “Kiss” (2000), “Take Me with You” (2005) and “Farewell My Lovely” (2009)”, in that order so the newer poems start the collection. The opening poem in the new poems section, “Sculpture” starts

“Michelangelo to this lump
of cold relationships, I persist
without commission, chipping
for years at life shortening angles.”

There’s ambiguity here, the “cold relationships” could be a reference to marble, the specific relationship or wider relationships, while the poem also implies that the sculptor worked through compulsion, not by direction from a patron. This piece of work became an artist’s obsession, even through it effectively shortened the artist’s lifespan by compelling him to neglect his own health. The poem ends,

“How beautifully we slot together,
not lip to lip but cheek to cheek, body to body.
For years in the studio, I will carve this moment,
over and over, though you have forgotten me.
We are living, somewhere, deep in this work.
It’s what I’m made for, though I longed for more.”

This wasn’t a fleeting love of romance, but an enduring companionship. Although the end also hints at dissatisfaction. The artist doesn’t feel the work is complete, merely that he can’t do anymore to it. It’s that point where a poet needs to walk away from a poem before she cuts an image that is perfect or disrupts a rhythm that needed to flow. Art requires a judgement of balance and letting go. Something that’s revisited in “My Mother’s Hands” which “were neatly folded, like the Queen’s on TV”, a line that encapsulates duty and external appearances, become

“At Gran’s funeral, my mother’s hand
slid towards mine where I sat beside her

on that hard front row with everyone missing.
I held it because I am her daughter.

It was not the hand with her old wedding ring –
the ring she tore off and threw at me –

but the other, with nails bitten raw.
My mother’s face screwed up like a little girl’s,

her hand in mine sweated and writhed.
And afterwards, it shed me like a skin,

recoiled to sculpted perfection,
preparing to touch no one ever again.”

In a moment, at a funeral for her own mother (“Gran”), the mother fears letting her public image slip and reaches for her daughter, the poem’s speaker. The choice of couplets is deliberate. Although the reasons for “everyone missing” are not elaborated on – the ex-husband didn’t show, the daughter is on her own although readers don’t know if she might or might not have a family of her own – which suggests the reasons aren’t important, but their absence is. The mother is forced to rely on her own daughter. The “nails bitten raw” symbolise grief, the mother returned to a child-like state when confronting her loss. But, once the funeral is over, the mother retracts her hand, restores herself to the calm, unflustered image she wishes to project. There’s an echo in “sculpted perfection” that could be a reference to Plath’s “Edge” where a marbled mother lies in perfection.

“Snow” is in the selection of poems from “Kiss”, and imagines works falling like snow. The you the poem is addressed to is not named and the relationship between you and the speaker not revealed,

“I walk home in a blizzard
of everything you have said to me;

and not only words, your touch
babbles warmly on my skin; syllable
by syllable you’re obliterating
the dark needles of the fir trees; a crow
is trying to scythe himself free
of the fragments cohering
into one great white word.”

There’s a strong sense of protection. Whoever “you” is, they are whitening the world, hiding the dark trees and crow. The consonance of “l” sounds soften the rhythm adding to the sense of the snow/words being welcome.

Relationships surface again in the selection from “Take Me with You”, in “Domestic Science” an ex disrupts a current relationship, “My attempts to boil you/ out of him failed”, other approaches are needed,

“Our life was a bloody mess:

filleting you out was our only hope.
His pain rang like breaking glass.
My tears made no difference.

He stopped mentioning you at all.
We talked of the palace that lies
beyond all this. He cooked supper

and opened a nice bottle of wine
while I laid everything in a circle
to make sure we got there.”

The speaker wants her partner to stop thinking about his ex, but her partner doesn’t seem ready yet to let go, or perhaps he isn’t as invested in the new relationship as she is. The three line stanzas reflect three lives intertwined. Even though he agrees to stop talking about the ex, the current partner knows he’s still thinking about her. The solution it seems is to talk about the fairytale of the current relationship. Although that reference to “circle” suggests that the path to that palace is not straightforward, no one makes progress while circling around a subject. It could also point to the relationship being more equal with a common goal: at a circular table no one gets to sit at the head.

In the selection from “Farewell My Lovely” the title poem does evoke Raymond Chandler’s novel. The poem ends,

“…………as I’m dusting the mirror
I glimpse her, smart as a rat
in the company of rocks –
but the day’s slammed shut
and it’s time to file the file.
This is a face to be turned over
for answers from now on.

She’s left nothing behind her
to show what was between us.
Always meticulous,
……..I find she’s slipped
like a last dram into my dreams,
hunched at the scene, wiping fingerprints,
knowing that it’s over, that it’s time to go.”

The private detective is closing the file, dusting the mirror to move on but the woman at the heart of the case is living rent free in his mind. It suggests how experience shapes us and some memories can never be left behind.

Polly Clark has a skill for taking apparently ordinary moments, working on a piece of art, attending a funeral, finishing a job, and invests them with layered depths, showing how these micro connections shape individuals. She asks readers to look again, challenge their knowledge of how they might think this scene pans out and asks what if you focus on the less obvious, what if you were less complacent? It’s a fine balance between a relaxed, colloquial tone and a thoughtful, darker undertone and invites a reader to re-read the poem. If you’re not familiar with Clark’s work, “Afterlife” is an excellent place to start.

“Afterlife” is available from Bloodaxe.

Related Article: Reviewers Deserve Better Than The Gutter

Based on a true, local to me story, Sarah Fitzgerald’s novella explores the facts through fiction. In January 1569, Agnes Bowker gave birth to a feline in front of female witnesses.

There are also sections that consider women’s roles in history. One likens them to “a hessian curtain that hangs at the back of a stage”, going onto explain “We once had breath – bodies too – though our short time on earth went unrecorded and unremembered.” The conclusion, “Only a few left a trace: some moment that meant the days of our lives were set down for the record. But posterity doesn’t make us the lucky ones. It can mean the opposite, because of what it is that makes you stand out: the moment you become the snag in the curtain.” It becomes a warning for women to stay in their lane, fade into the background and don’t venture into the limelight.

What did Agnes Bowker do for the infamy she received? She grew up in a small village outside of Market Harborough with a twin brother. While Agnes survived birth, her brother was disabled – there are references to a limp, a weakened arm and possibly a learning disability. At the time he was only useful for labour around the home, developing the kitchen garden to feed the family. Their father died when the twins were aged five. Of what, readers don’t learn, suggesting the mother never spoke of it. Agnes therefore becomes the family breadwinner.

She goes into service at a nearby large house and becomes pregnant. Her lover is a stable boy, but he fails to propose marriage. He, as becomes apparent later, finds employment elsewhere, possibly to protect his own reputation. Disgraced, Agnes is sent home.

Usually women in her situation were either packed off to the local herbs woman who would know which concoction of herbs would trigger a termination, or sent away to a distant relative until the baby was born and given for adoption. Agnes has no distant relatives and the one time she went to London for work, she gave up and returned as her twin brother couldn’t manage with her so far away.

Agnes talks of how her twin is the good one, fair-haired and fair-hearted, whereas she is the dark, the yang to her yin. She is unschooled, which doesn’t necessarily mean she lacks intelligence, but lacks reproductive education and knowledge. According to custom at the time, it was down to her brother to track down the father of Agnes’s yet to be born baby and demand recompense for her, but he “is a cripple and an imbecile”.

Agnes visits the local herbs woman but is told she is too late. A termination is no longer an option, too many people know of Agnes’s pregnancy and it would be too suspicious. The herbs woman herself is in a precarious position on the outskirts of the village and needs not to antagonize the villagers. Instead she offers Agnes a prophecy that her pregnancy will last longer than usual and she will give “birth to a monster”. Agnes has no choice but to return home, terrified of what is inside her.

A midwife sends for Agnes. She’s aware Agnes needs work if the family are not to starve and her offer of a housemaid role has the added advantage that Agnes will have a midwife when the time comes. As Agnes goes into labour, the midwife fetches a couple of assistants and a second midwife. The events of that evening become famous enough to have a commissionary despatched from London to investigate.

He dismisses the evidence of the midwife who delivered the monstrous cat on the grounds she is a Papist (Catholicism was outlawed in England at the time) but accepts evidence from the second midwife who states she was present to assist but did not actually have sight of the crucial moment due to Agnes’s skirts. However, she did intimately examine Agnes and something within bit her enough to draw blood from her finger. It emerges that the stableboy had worked out he could not be the father, since Agnes was already in the very early stages of pregnancy when they started courting. Agnes is forced to admit that when she was in London, a schoolmaster told her she had a devil inside and her black moods needed a child who would remove them on birth. Although not spelt out, due to Agnes’s ignorance, it becomes clear he was the father and it wasn’t by consent.

The commissionary, in part due to not wanting to go into too much detail on Agnes’s delivery, and in part wanting to wrap this up and get away, agrees on the evidence it seems Agnes did give birth to a cat. Agnes is left to merge “back into the fabric, subsumed into the weave as we all are: another unnoticed thread in a dull canvas no one pays attention to.”

Sarah Fitzgerald doesn’t entirely leave Agnes’s story there. It’s not just Agnes’s story, but one about the morals of the time which saw women as chattels with no rights and blamed for men’s actions. The schoolmaster escapes. Sympathy for Agnes draws her back into her circle of women and twin brother, unstained. Just another woman taken advantage of. Fitzgerald hints, however, there is a separate story, the real story of the offspring Agnes delivered, and why she went into labour eleven days late. No spoilers: you’ll need to “The Woman who Gave Birth to a Cat” to find out.

“The Woman who Gave Birth to a Cat” is available from Amazon.

“Cherries on a Pomegranate Tree” wears the weight of bureaucracy lightly and uses satirical humour to make a serious point. Fanhua – translator Dave Haysom uses pinyin for her name rather than rendering it in English as Florence or the literal translation of ‘blooming flowers’ – is the only female village chief in Xuishui County and battles the associated bureaucracy on top of managing her extended family household while her husband is working away. Or, at least, she thinks he’s been working away. He’s returned to home but isn’t ready to share his news with her yet and seems to have acquired a fixation on camels.

Most of the bureaucracy Fanhua faces is linked to China’s one child or family planning policy. Although country residents are able to have a second child if the first was a girl, any subsequent pregnancies have to be terminated, or the pregnancy would be hidden until too late to terminate and then pay the fine. Qingshu, head of family planning is supposed to monitor women of child-bearing age who have to submit to a regular pregnancy test at the local clinic with results reported to him. However, a man may not have been the best choice for the role when Fanhua discovers, via village gossip, that Xue’e, who already has twin girls, is pregnant and trying to hide it. Qingshu plays dumb and goes through the motions of trying to find Xue’e’s hiding place, by visiting extended family. The other members of the village council, men hoping to boost their own business interests or use the status to boost their egos, don’t give her much help. She has to balance how much to share with them without allowing them to steal her election campaign to oust her.

Fanhua knows he’s wasting everyone’s time. She figures Xue’e must have been pregnant at the time of her last test, so perhaps the clinic is where she’ll find her solution, because the clinic should have flagged it up. Meanwhile, Xue’e’s husband is cooking up a scheme to earn extra money through hiring out his wolf, Grey, as a stud male. This gets Fanhua thinking about a potential use for the derelict paper factory, if only to make it less attractive to romantic teenagers. Mother to a daughter, Fanhua can’t even think about extending her own family, although she theoretically could, as her political rivals will use it to their advantage.

While everyone is throwing their problems, rather than solutions, at her, leaving Fanhua exhausted as it takes even more creativity to balance conflicting interests and stop rivalries becoming feuds, treacherous in a village, she wonders if the young woman she began to mentor, Xiaohong, could take on more responsibility.

Fanhua gets to think on her feet and often surprises her audience with her decisions. Occasionally she seems hard-hearted, but ensures that people are fairly compensated for work they do on behalf of the village council. She cares but also has to stay one step ahead of both those who resent a woman in charge and those who think she’s a little too good at her job and may need taking down a peg or two.

But pride comes before a fall. Just as she thinks she’s got the hang of juggling pomegranates, a cherry slips under her radar, in shape of a very much alive Xiaohong falling into an empty grave and Fanhua realising the person she needed to keep an eye on wasn’t the people she’d been watching. Bureaucracy, or bureaucracy in error, might just provide the solution to what Fanhua thought was her biggest problem. And camels, those obstinate, tenacious, hard-workers, call.

There’s a cast of characters, as there would be in a village setting, each with a distinctive voice, even when the odd one’s stupidity might inspire violence. No one’s perfect, not even Fanhua, in whom Li Er has created an engaging character readers root for. Ultimately all the cast want to work towards the best solution for the village. However, just as there’s more than one way up a mountain, getting all of them to agree a route is where Fanhua blooms. It’s a book that can be read by only looking at the flowering jokes or you can read the stems and figure out the intent and the path each character takes to attempt to blossom.

“Cherries on a Pomegranate Tree” is available from Sinoist Books.