Tuesday 17 May 2011

Three new reviews of The Son (Oystercatcher, 2009)

are now up at Sphinx, a magazine wonderfully dedicated to pamphlet reviews. Here are my favourite passages:

"The events of 9/11 are alluded to only in poems dated five years before and after, but the questions posed by mingling notions of private and public loss give this 16-poem pamphlet an emotional range that many full collections get nowhere near."

"What impresses me is how complex ideas have been made so enjoyable to read. The narratives are fluent, intriguing, somewhat surreal, and often humorous. They seem simple, yet strange, and are deeply affecting. They mine the deep pit of memory and expectation, and are haunted by what they don’t know, what isn’t said, what remains lost or unfathomable."

--Rob A. Mackenzie

"This is a moving collection of texts: some are prosy and some are lyrical. It is not like anything else I have ever read:


How did you let him go?

Who hangs a birdhouse from a sapling?


How that hurts!"

--Helena Nelson


To read the whole, go here.

1 comment:

  1. Of course, I meant "fifteen years before and five years after"! Must email Ms Sphinx to sort that one out...

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