Posted November 18, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Lost Words
Genres: Poetry Pages: 112
Rating: 
Synopsis: In 2007, when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary -- widely used in schools around the world -- was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon noticed that around forty common words concerning nature had been dropped. Apparently they were no longer being used enough by children to merit their place in the dictionary. The list of these "lost words" included acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow. Among the words taking their place were attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail. The news of these substitutions -- the outdoor and natural being displaced by the indoor and virtual -- became seen by many as a powerful sign of the growing gulf between childhood and the natural world.
Ten years later, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris set out to make a "spell book" that will conjure back twenty of these lost words, and the beings they name, from acorn to wren. By the magic of word and paint, they sought to summon these words again into the voices, stories, and dreams of children and adults alike, and to celebrate the wonder and importance of everyday nature. The Lost Words is that book -- a work that has already cast its extraordinary spell on hundreds of thousands of people and begun a grass-roots movement to re-wild childhood across Britain, Europe, and North America.
Like The Lost Spells, The Lost Words is a collection of poetry by Robert Macfarlane, illustrated by Jackie Morris. This one is specifically aimed at children, and tries to bring a little magic back to how we relate to wild creatures, and save some of the words children don’t seem to care about any more (like “conker”).
Both books feel like the poet was having fun; though I didn’t universally love the poems (sometimes a rhyme is too obvious, or a particular word just stuck out as wrong), it was a fun read. And the illustrations are, of course, gorgeous — maybe I even prefer the ones in this book a tiny bit more than the other, though the scale in the library book I borrowed helped to let me study the detail (it was huge!).
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Jackie Morris, poetry, Robert Macfarlane
Posted October 27, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Undying: A Love Story
Genres: Poetry Pages: 144
Rating: Synopsis: How can you say goodbye to the love of your life?
In Undying Michel Faber honours the memory of his wife, who died after a six-year battle with cancer. Bright, tragic and candid, these poems are an exceptional chronicle of what it means to find the love of your life. And what it is like to have to say goodbye.
All I can do, in what remains of my brief time,
is mention, to whoever cares to listen,
that a woman once existed, who was kind
and beautiful and brave, and I will not forget
how the world was altered, beyond recognition,
when we met.
Michel Faber’s poetry collection, Undying: A Love Story, is composed of poems mostly written while his wife was dying and in the months after her death. It’s an intimate and pained portrait of a relationship and love that he idealises, and his grief is plain throughout the poems.
I didn’t love all of them, but as a collection, they do a lot — and there were definitely several that gave me serious pause. There’s some vivid imagery and some lovely phrases, but most of all, there’s a lot of tenderness and appreciation of what the poet had, as well as grief at the passing. That more than the exact words is what sticks with me, as a reader.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Michel Faber, poetry
Posted October 11, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment
The Lost Spells
Genres: Poetry Pages: 240
Rating: Synopsis: Since its publication in 2017, The Lost Words has enchanted readers with its poetry and illustrations of the natural world. Now, The Lost Spells, a book kindred in spirit and tone, continues to re-wild the lives of children and adults.
The Lost Spells evokes the wonder of everyday nature, conjuring up red foxes, birch trees, jackdaws, and more in poems and illustrations that flow between the pages and into readers' minds. Robert Macfarlane's spell-poems and Jackie Morris's watercolour illustrations are musical and magical: these are summoning spells, words of recollection, charms of protection. To read The Lost Spells is to see anew the natural world within our grasp and to be reminded of what happens when we allow it to slip away.
The Lost Spells is a lovely little volume containing poetry by Robert Macfarlane, illustrated by Jackie Morris. The illustrations are really the focal point for me, but Macfarlane’s poetry is lovely too: not all of the poems are to my taste, but I can see him playing with words and sounds, and that each poem really is meant to be read out loud and to have a certain rhythm, a spell-binding power. There’s a lot of enjoyment in that, even when I don’t totally agree about a particular rhyme or sound.
You can also see this in the project that grew up around Macfarlane’s words, the Spell Songs project. I became aware of it because I like Karine Polwart’s solo work and enjoyed her collaboration on the Darwin Song Project, and I think listening to the songs really adds something. Two of my favourites are “The Snow Hare” and “Selkie Boy“.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Jackie Morris, poetry, Robert Macfarlane
Posted March 10, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Tell Me The Truth About Life: A National Poetry Day Anthology
Genres: Poetry Pages: 192
Rating: 
Synopsis: Tell Me the Truth About Life is an indispensable anthology which celebrates poetry’s power to tap into the truths that matter. Curated and introduced by Cerys Matthews, this collection draws on the wisdom of crowds: featuring poems nominated for their insight into truth by a range of ordinary and extraordinary people: from Britain’s first astronaut, Helen Sharman, to sporting heroes and world-famous musicians, teachers, artists and politicians.
Their choices include contemporary work by Yrsa Daley-Ward, John Cooper Clarke and Kei Miller alongside classics by W H Auden, Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas. Here you will find poems to revive the spirit, ballads to mobilize and life-lines to hold you safe in the dark.
Compiled for National Poetry Day’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Tell Me the Truth About Life is a book that reminds us we are never completely alone in our search to glimpse the truth.
Containing nominations from a number of high-profile poetry lovers and poets, including Michael Morpurgo, Mark Gatiss, Dolly Alderton, and Helen Sharman, among others.
The poems featured in
Tell Me The Truth About Life, edited by Cerys Matthews, are a bit of a mixed bag. Some are the type you come across in every single similar anthology, the famous ones that people like my grandmother have memorised. There were also a few surprises, poets I’d like to read more of.
I didn’t find that the little introductions written by various other readers were that helpful or added much, sadly: sometimes, reading someone else’s interpretation of a poem or what it means to them opens a poem right up, but the descriptions were too brief to offer much, and not very insightful.
What it did remind me was that I’d like to read more poetry again; it’s been a long time since I did, but I do have some favourites. Here’s one of them, while we’re here — Derek Walcott’s “Love After Love”:
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, poetry
Posted January 25, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
The History of Wales in Twelve Poems
Genres: Poetry,
Non-fiction Pages: 127
Rating: Synopsis: Down the centuries, poets have provided Wales with a window onto its own distinctive world. This book gives a sense of the view seen through that special window in twelve illustrated poems, each bringing very different periods and aspects of the Welsh past into focus. Together, they give the flavour of a poetic tradition, both ancient and modern, in the Welsh language and in English, that is internationally renowned for its distinction and continuing vibrancy.
M. Wynn Thomas’ history of Wales in twelve poems taps into one of my favourite genres: giving a history of a time or place through objects or similar, using them as a window to look around at their context and what produced them, how they fit into it. It’s a pretty brief volume, presenting each poem alongside its translation (where necessary, since they’re not all in Welsh), and adding in the art of Ruth Jên Evans for illustration.
The art is all black and white, with thick lines — it’s pretty striking. The choice of poems is something I’d find difficult to comment on, but Thomas’ notes on each use them exactly as I’d hope, giving something of their context and trying to unlock what they say about Wales (sometimes intentionally, sometimes as a side-effect of the poet’s main intent).
I enjoyed it, though I wouldn’t view it as a full history or as having a very strong sense of continuity from poem to poem — it’s more like twelve poems were chosen as little windows to illuminate a topic of interest, rather than them showing a consistent line of developing a theme (though they are given in chronological order).
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, M. Wynn Thomas, non-fiction, poetry, Ruth Jên Evans
Posted March 2, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Beautiful Librarians, Sean O’Brien
I’ll confess… I didn’t get it. I picked this fairly randomly from the library’s selection of poetry, because I had a reading bingo prompt for a poetry book, and I wanted to give something new a try. It’s been a while since I’ve read poetry, so I’ll admit I’m out of practice. Nonetheless, it was hard to follow these through to the end, to get past the images and clever rhymes and half-rhymes and structures to see what he was ever trying to say.
In the end, I’m not sure I ever actually got anything out of any of these, beyond some very brief sense-impressions (several of them disgusting). There were a few funny lines and a few images I liked (“the compass gathered like a rose/into its bud” — clever!)… but overall, it just wasn’t for me at all.
Rating: 1/5
Tags: book reviews, books, poetry
Posted December 16, 2016 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Cold Night Lullaby, Colin MacKay
Flashback Friday from 25th December, 2009
I asked for Colin Mackay’s Cold Night Lullaby for Christmas 2009 because of Karine Polwart’s song, ‘Waterlily’. It’s a beautiful song, and one that has been known to make me cry — based on Colin Mackay’s writing about his experiences in Bosnia, about the woman he loved, Svetlana. I couldn’t tell you about the really technical merits of the poetry right now, but the images are so vivid, searing. I doubt I can ever, ever listen to ‘Waterlily’ again without crying. Especially when I know what Colin Mackay went on to do — how he killed himself, so very, very methodically.
Reading around a little, I can see that there are some questions about geography/chronology in these poems. I wouldn’t be surprised by some fictionality, or inaccuracy due to how confusing and bewildering living through something like that can be, how destroying, but I think that Colin Mackay probably believed every word he wrote — and that’s what matters.
Rating: 5/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Flashback Friday, poetry
Posted November 13, 2016 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments
Poems: Three Series, Emily Dickinson
I read these poems via Serial Reader, which actually turned out to be a good way to make sure I really paid attention. Sometimes, if I try to read a book of poetry at a single sitting, I find that they start to just blur past me. This way, I had more concentration for each individual poem, which helped me appreciate them more. Emily Dickinson isn’t my favourite poet, and I really wanted to give her work a chance.
I did enjoy some of these poems, but for me the regularity of the poems is a downside. I do enjoy highly structured poetry at times — I love villanelles, for example! — but with a simple form and those constant rhyming couplets, it felt almost trite to me. Possibly because Dickinson’s poetry is quoted a lot, but even the ones I didn’t know at all… I don’t know, simple a/b/a/b rhyme schemes really bore me. Alas.
Rating: 2/5
Tags: book reviews, books, poetry
Posted July 5, 2016 by Nicky in General / 6 Comments
This week’s theme is ‘Top Ten Underrated Books’ — books with less than 2,000 ratings on Goodreads. Some of these only have a handful of ratings, though some are more popular; I tried to pick a range, because if I just picked the most underrated books it’d all be Welsh fiction, and y’all probably wouldn’t be that interested. (But if you are, go forth and read Kate Roberts, Rhys Davies, Menna Gallie, Margiad Evans…)
- The Man Who Went into the West, Byron Rogers. A biography of R.S. Thomas, this was a lovely mix of fact and rather chatty character portrait: it makes R.S. Thomas come alive, as a man of contradictions and contrasts.
- The Hidden Landscape, Richard Fortey. Or any of Fortey’s books, really; something about his style made even geology fascinating to me, and I’m not actually that interested in geology. There’s a poetry to the landscape and the long shaping of it which Fortey sees and communicates very clearly.
- Cold Night Lullaby, Colin Mackay. Only read this collection of poetry if you want your heart to be ripped from your chest. It covers the poet’s experiences in Sarajevo as an aid worker, and inspired Karine Polwart’s song ‘Waterlily’. The video here includes Polwart’s introduction to Mackay’s life and work.
- Dead Man’s Embers, Mari Strachan. Painful in a different way, this book follows the recovery of a man returned to his Welsh village after the Great War. There’s a touch of magic realism, but the emotional heart of the story is very real.
- A Sorcerer’s Treason, Sarah Zettel. I haven’t read this in ages, and in fact need to reread it, but I remember it very fondly — and remember passing it round to various friends and relations, hence why my partner has a stack of this series tempting me to reread now…
- A Taste of Blood Wine, Freda Warrington. I really didn’t expect to fall so in love with a gothic vampire romance, but it’s so unapologetic about examining the effects of the vampires and the way they choose to live on the people around them that I fell for it all the same. I think fans of Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel books would probably be a good fit.
- Iron and Gold, Hilda Vaughan. A classic fairytale situation, in a Welsh setting; it humanises the fairytale, making the pain of it really hit you, while also examining human relationships and how they work.
- The Complete Brandstetter, Joseph Hansen. I’ve been amazed at how little I’ve ever heard about these books since my housemate wrote a dissertation on gay detectives in crime fiction. It deals with so many issues — AIDs, racial issues, homophobia, and beyond that into aging, relationships in general… and also delivers solid story after solid story.
- Exiled From Camelot, Cherith Baldry. I read this for my own dissertation, which probably accounts for how fond I am of it. It’s not perfect, but the bond between Arthur and Kay is painfully real (and something often neglected in other modern fiction). It’s also an interesting mixture of materials, with stuff straight from both the Welsh sources and the much later Continental tradition.
- The Fox’s Tower, and Other Tales, Yoon Ha Lee. I love microfiction, and this is one of the few collections I can think of which I would fairly whole-heartedly recommend. Yoon Ha Lee gets the art of the really short story.
I’ll be interested to see what other people have picked out this week — especially if you talk a bit about why. Link me!
Tags: Arthurian, books, poetry, SF/F, Top Ten Tuesday, Wales
Posted May 15, 2016 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
The Bread We Eat in Dreams, Catherynne M. Valente
If you’re a fan of Catherynne M. Valente’s work, then you probably know what to expect: prose that touches poetry at times, often an influence of Japanese folklore, strange dream-like logic… This is a wide-ranging collection which includes some stories I read elsewhere, or could’ve read elsewhere, like the Fairyland novella about Mallow. The writing is generally beautiful; that’s never really something I doubt with Valente. The choice of stories is also generally good, even though I have encountered some of them in multiple other collections.
It’s probably most worthwhile for the pretty cover and for people who either haven’t read much Valente and want a sampler, or people who read everything she writes and don’t want to miss anything.
Confession: I mostly skipped the actual poetry. I prefer the lyricism of Valente’s prose to anything about her poetry.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Catherynne M. Valente, poetry, SF/F, short stories
