Tag: poetry

Review – First Rain in Paradise

Posted July 26, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – First Rain in Paradise

First Rain in Paradise

by Gwyneth Lewis

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 96
Rating: one-star
Synopsis:

First Rain in Paradise is a book about falling. Gwyneth Lewis's highly inventive poems trace an interior landscape carved out by the trauma of childhood emotional abuse through subsequent chronic ill health and towards a hard-won resurrection.

These accounts of living in and emerging from the dark wrestle with the angel of language. Suffering does not preclude humour and may, in fact, require it, in poems written from the shadows but committed to the light. This work refuses to keep pain a secret. Shame is a lurking presence.

Gwyneth Lewis has won wide acclaim for her versatile and varied writing across genres, most notably in her award-winning poetry in both English and Welsh. This book shows a deepening of her technical, imaginative and intellectual resources which are challenged and exercised to the full. The poems map uneasy terrains with realism and - most importantly - with joy.

I was very curious about Gwyneth Lewis’ First Rain in Paradise; I’m very interested in Welsh literature in English, and the fact that Lewis writes in both Welsh and English was also a draw. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy this collection at all, especially since the opening is poem is (on the surface) all about spiders and they recur as an image in several poems. Nooot ideal for me, ahaha.

But just beyond that surface level of using the spider imagery, I didn’t really find myself enjoying the style or choice of words, and the poems didn’t seem to sink in and hook me. I didn’t find anything I wanted to save to quote for the review, even, which I try to do.

Not a collection for me, alas, though I might try something else by Lewis if the National Poetry Library has another volume, just to see if the spiders threw me off.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)

Tags: , , ,

Divider

Review – Afonydd

Posted July 20, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Afonydd

Afonydd: Poems for Welsh Rivers / Cerddi Afonydd Cymru

by Sian Northey (editor), Ness Owen (editor)

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 111
Rating: five-stars
Synopsis:

Lleisiau hanner cant o feirdd yn llifo gydag afonydd Cymru. Pob cerdd yn Gymraeg a Saesneg, wedi'i chyfieithu o'r naill iaith i'r llall.

Fifty Welsh poets speak for and with the rivers of Wales. Every poem translated Welsh to English, English to Welsh.

I really loved Afonydd. It’s a great idea for a collection, put together by Sian Northey and Ness Owen, and bringing together various Welsh (and at least one ?English) voices to write about the rivers of Wales. Each poem is presented both in Welsh and English: whichever language the poet wrote in, it’s been translated to the other. The introduction, contents, everything is all in both languages.

The dragon has two tongues, indeed; Northey and Owen have been very sensitive to that, and I think it’s a really well-done project, even before we get to the poems.

I didn’t love all of the poems, as expected in an anthology, but I did love a lot of them, and I loved sounding out the Welsh (even though I don’t understand it) and just revelling in what is, in almost all the poems, a deep love for Wales. It’s probably a good thing that when I read it I knew I’d be visiting Wales for at least a couple of days within just over a month, or I think I’d probably have cried.

It’s quite hard to find this book on StoryGraph: typing the title gets you 25 other results first, and you have to add the editors’ names to get it to come up — with books like Rick Remender’s Deadly Class vol 11: A Fond Farewell coming up before the actual book with the exact title Afonydd. There are, as I understand it, no plans to remedy that bug in the search, beyond telling me to put Welsh as a language I read in (which adds insult to injury, naturally; I don’t speak Welsh, because English imperialism was and is a whole thing — and anyway, the edition I was looking for is listed as English on the site).

So if this book tickles your fancy at all, I’ll note that it’s available on Kobo Plus and is in the National Poetry Library’s collection, and has my recommendation, and that it might be nice to make it a little bit more discoverable.

Rating: 5/5 (“loved it”)

Tags: , , , , ,

Divider

Review – Night Sky with Exit Wounds

Posted July 4, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Night Sky with Exit Wounds

Night Sky with Exit Wounds

by Ocean Vuong

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 89
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

An extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other.

Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, Vuong writes about the most profound subjects – love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire – and attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, passionate and hungry in their tender, close attention: ‘…the chief of police/facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola./A palm-sized photo of his father soaking/beside his left ear.’ This is an unusual, important book: both gentle and visceral, vulnerable and assured, and its blend of humanity and power make it one of the best first collections of poetry to come out of America in years.

Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a rare book of poetry I’ve actually heard about/seen around elsewhere, rather than stumbling across. I’ve heard it might work a bit better if you’ve read Vuong’s other work, but I haven’t, so I came to this cold.

And… left it pretty cold, unfortunately; there are some amazing images, some sharp sentences, but the overall effect just… didn’t quite come off for me. Some of the poems felt scattered, disjointed, and not necessarily intentionally so: I just couldn’t follow the train of thought, or in a couple of cases, simply didn’t care to.

Some beautiful language, that can’t be denied, but not my thing stylistically.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: , , ,

Divider

Review – Parallax

Posted June 25, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Parallax

Parallax

by Sinéad Morrissey

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 69
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

Capturing David Niven on a magical marble escalator to heaven in 1946, recording L. S. Lowry’s studio after his death, and peering into the illicit worlds of the Victorian Mutoscope, these poems document what is caught, and what is lost, when houses and cityscapes, servants and saboteurs are arrested in time by photography. Assured and unsettling, Sinéad Morrissey’s poems explore the paradoxes in what is seen, read, and misread in the surfaces of the presented world.

Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2013

I thought that Sinéad Morrissey’s Parallax was technically good — several moments of “ah, I see what you did there” or “that’s interesting”, but it didn’t really sink in for me somehow? I didn’t feel any hook in the gut or particular connection with the poems, even the ones that felt quite personal (though some of these were not autobiographical, to be clear: Morrissey tries on a few different voices, but that sort of thing can still feel personal!).

It was all… fine… but I didn’t pick out anything I particularly wanted to quote or save. I guess Sinéad Morrissey’s poetry isn’t quite for me, even though I found it technically good and accessible enough to read.

I’d maybe try something else by Morrissey in future, but I wouldn’t go out of my way.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: , , ,

Divider

Review – In the Hollow of the Wave

Posted June 18, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – In the Hollow of the Wave

In the Hollow of the Wave

by Nina Mingya Powles

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 96
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

In the Hollow of the Wave, the second collection by Nina Mingya Powles examines orientalism, art and artmaking in a time of ecological crisis. Engaging with the work of artists such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Yayoi Kusama, Etel Adnan and the fashion designer Guo Pei, these poems rework the notion of ekphrasis into something elemental and tactile, shaped by memory and landscapes of the body.

Nina Mingya Powles’ In the Hollow of the Wave is a bit of a multimedia collection, mixing poems with images of various bits of craftwork and images with words pasted onto them (a bit reminiscent of times of A Softer World, if anyone but me remembers that!). There are some interesting poem formats too.

I found it readable and there were some that stuck with me — the one about her grandfather(?) making quilts for her and her cousins was lovely. I didn’t get along with all of it, as ever with poetry (picky, I am, I know), especially some of the more experimental ones… but I’m glad I gave it a shot, and I am still left with the image of the retired biologist, making his grandchildren quilts. It seems like a lovely warm memory.

I wouldn’t mind trying other poetry by Nina Mingya Powles, either way.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: , , ,

Divider

Review – A Dress of Locusts

Posted June 8, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – A Dress of Locusts

A Dress of Locusts

by Safa Khatib

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 64
Rating: one-star
Synopsis:

Woven from threads of Aramaic, Spanish, Ancient Greek, Sumerian and Arabic, A Dress of Locusts is an unforgettable song cycle in which the living and dead sing back and forth to one another. Here, Safa Khatib journeys across the possibilities of language and self, asking us to dwell in the thresholds between the 'old' and the 'new'.

There are some very striking images and strongly expressed scenes in Safa Khatib’s A Dress of Locusts (including the image that gives the title!), and I’m kind of sad I don’t like it more. The poems are very readable and easy to follow (except for one or two where I found the layout slightly annoying), but I didn’t really find my way in.

A large part of that is the sexual content of the poems. I wouldn’t generally consider myself prudish at all, and of course sex has a place in poetry, but the way sex is treated in these poems — I don’t know. Each time it stuck out and felt like a surprise, an inclusion designed to shock and disrupt, and it didn’t work well for me.

Maybe reading it unprepared as a random choice from the National Poetry Library was part of it; sometimes I think poetry can benefit from a little context. That said, I don’t think it would ever have quite worked for me, though as ever I’m really glad to be able to explore poets I’ve never read before and broaden my frame of reference. I don’t regret reading it, even if I didn’t enjoy it.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)

Tags: , , ,

Divider

Review – An Interesting Detail

Posted May 28, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – An Interesting Detail

An Interesting Detail

by Kimberly Campanello

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 80
Rating: one-star
Synopsis:

An important and timely collection spanning time and space, pain and power, from an innovative poetic voice

The poems in An Interesting Detail confront our shared, layered past (both planetary and human) and its knotty relationship to the present, stretching from today to prehistory, in a voice that is knowing and yearning, sincere and sardonic, and at times defiant. Campanello's prose poems, brief lyric outbursts, and poetic sequences ludically navigate catastrophe and sweep us up in the minutiae of everyday life, which includes pain and illness, machinations of power and moments of suspended connection.

Kimberly Campanello’s An Interesting Detail was a random choice from the National Poetry Library’s catalogue, which I’m using to help me try out new poets and broaden my horizons a bit.

The collection is mostly made up of prose poetry, and unfortunately I’m not a fan of the style at all: there are some interesting images, linked by non-sequiturs, and I found that deeply frustrating. It felt disjointed for the sake of being disjointed, unintelligible for the sake of being unintelligible, and I just couldn’t get into it — in theory, I like prose poems (and have always liked writing them), but these just felt like they went nowhere.

As ever, since this is poetry, it could be a defect on my part — failing to understand the poet, or what the poem in question was trying to do. Still, not my thing.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)

Tags: , , ,

Divider

Review – The Black Flamingo

Posted May 22, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – The Black Flamingo

The Black Flamingo

by Dean Atta

Genres: Verse Novel, Poetry, Young Adult
Pages: 416
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Michael is a mixed-race gay teen growing up in London. All his life, he's navigated what it means to be Greek-Cypriot and Jamaican--but never quite feeling Greek or Black enough.

As he gets older, Michael's coming out is only the start of learning who he is and where he fits in. When he discovers the Drag Society, he finally finds where he belongs--and the Black Flamingo is born.

Told with raw honesty, insight, and lyricism, this debut explores the layers of identity that make us who we are--and allow us to shine.

I’m not a big one for YA or for verse novels, in general, but I decided to give Dean Atta’s The Black Flamingo a try after discussing verse novels semi-recently on my blog as part of the Let’s Talk Bookish discussion linkup. I remember hearing a lot about it when it first came out, because it’s basically a British queer coming of age story informed by the author’s Jamaican and Greek Cypriot descent.

The verse part… I’m kinda shrug about it as poetry, in and of itself, but it works well to distill the story down to key moments and feelings, rather than lingering on details that ultimately don’t matter. It makes the coming of age themes and the teenage messiness a lot more palatable for someone who remembers being a teen and had quite enough of it, thank you: it condenses everything down and only lingers on what’s really meaningful.

As an evocation of black/mixed (this is the term the character uses, to be clear) identity, and of growing into queerness and experimenting with drag as a way of learning to really break out and express all that, it works well. The character’s path to that point makes a lot of sense, you can feel the emotional arc toward it, and the confused/confusing emotions and thoughts come across well through the verse format.

Overall, it’s still not my thing exactly, but I’m glad I gave it the time and enjoyed it, and would definitely recommend it more to those interested in YA and verse novels.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: , , , , ,

Divider

Review – Somewhere There Is A Sky For Us

Posted May 15, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Somewhere There Is A Sky For Us

Somewhere There Is A Sky For Us

by Joelle Taylor (editor)

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 170
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

This anthology gathers the many voices and textures of Language is a Queer Thing, a 3-year long poetic dialogue between queer voices from India and the UK, unfolding over three years of exchange, residencies and performance.

These poems are prayers, protests, lullabies, warnings, duets, sonatas and satires.

Somewhere There Is A Sky For Us is the product of a three-year project involving queer poets from India and the UK sharing their work, doing residencies and exchanges, etc. It’s an interesting spread of poems, and often plays with form (sometimes a bit difficult to read in print form, since they’ve turned it sideways on the page so you have to turn the book). It’s mostly in English, but other languages are mixed in here and there.

Overall it wasn’t quite my thing — I think I’m more of a traditionalist about poetry at times, and don’t love ones that play with shapes on the page or go very abstract. There’s a few prose-poems, which I can enjoy, but didn’t really stand out to me.

As ever, there are a few images and lines that stand out, and I’m glad I gave it a shot! Just not my personal cup of tea. Which is perhaps an unfair figure of speech, as I’ve never met a cup of tea I liked; rest assured that I didn’t read this expecting not to like it, as it’s a pretty cool sounding project.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: , , ,

Divider

Review – Felicity

Posted May 7, 2026 by Nicky in Uncategorized / 2 Comments

Review – Felicity

Felicity

by Mary Oliver

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 96
Rating: five-stars
Synopsis:

Mary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, celebrates love in her new collection of poems.

If I have any secret stash of poems, anywhere, it might be about love, not anger, Mary Oliver once said in an interview. Finally, in her stunning new collection, Felicity, we can immerse ourselves in Oliver's love poems. Here, great happiness abounds. Our most delicate chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver has described her work as loving the world. With Felicity she examines what it means to love another person. She opens our eyes again to the territory within our own hearts; to the wild and to the quiet. In these poems, she describes--with joy--the strangeness and wonder of human connection. As in Blue Horses, Dog Songs, and A Thousand Mornings, with Felicity Oliver honors love, life, and beauty.

Mary Oliver’s poetry is gorgeous. This was the first of her collections I’d read, though I’d undoubtedly come across her poems before, and I loved how readable and accessible it feels — she isn’t trying to mystify, and her poems share her joy in the world, sometimes even in moments that someone else could make into a tragedy.

It’s actually hard to pick favourites, but here’s one in its entirety that I loved, ‘Everything That Was Broken’:

Everything that was broken has
forgotten it’s brokenness. I live
now in a sky-house, through every
window the sun. Also your presence.
Our touching, our stories. Earthy
and holy both. How can this be, but
it is. Every day has something in
it whose name is Forever.

Definitely a poet I want to read more of.

Rating: 5/5 (“loved it”)

Tags: , , ,

Divider