Hannah Lowe’s The Kids and Gerard Woodward’s The Vulture represent strikingly different approaches to poetry and offer complementary pleasures. Their very titles hint at the way in which in one the world is a fundamentally familiar place, felt as such by both poet and reader, and in the other it becomes rather frighteningly and chillingly strange.

The Kids focuses on what are presented as the poet’s own experiences as a teacher in an inner London sixth form college, as a schoolgirl, as a bereaved daughter and as a mother. Addressing us intimately and confidingly, with apparent trust in our ability to … Continue Reading

You can read my review of these two chapbooks from Arc in London Grip by clicking here.

Tua Forsström’s I Walked On Into the Forest almost defeats commentary – the writing is so pure, transparent and direct that saying anything to or around it can seem worse than redundant. The whole book records the poet’s trying to come to terms with the death of her granddaughter, Vanessa. Almost all the twenty-one short, numbered poems of the first section address Vanessa in language one might use to a child. Three lines from one called ‘3’ can illustrate the sheer beauty and effortless resonance of the language, in David McDuff’s translation:

There are dreams that are more transparent … Continue Reading