The Song She Didn’t Sing
The past, as Neil Young declares, may be ‘no fit place to inhabit’ (too much poverty, too much war and its aftermath), but it is fertile ground for poetry for this son of Belfast. On show is a dry-eyed (and sometimes dewy-eyed) nostalgia for the (far from) ordinary lives that history overlooks, including a mantlepiece of family photographs and a mother’s collection of ‘buttons, badges, stubs/of dance-hall tickets’ stashed in a ‘childhood biscuit tin.’ Neil Young realises that we are all keepers of myths and in its way, this collection is a book of heroes – the famous and the (almost) forgotten who show us ‘what history looks like when it’s the last place to look’. By questioning the past there’s a chance we’ll forge a future worth the effort of making.
(Chris Powci)
£12.00
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WTF is normal anyway?
If you want your poetry as a lulled accompaniment to whatever you happen to be doing - don't read Jo Gilbert. If you like your Doric couthie and couth, paired with a wee sepia photo - don't read Jo Gilbert. But if you need poetry that makes you 'Get aff that fuckin horse. Now!' , and opens your 'kohl clarted eyes' to garr ye greet and laugh aloud...then read Jo Gilbert. And what a titular poem. Three lines, punching hard with every word. What a debut.
(Beth McDonough, writer)
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Jackdaws
In this superb collection, a pair of Jackdaws build a nest and hatch their young in a ‘gash in one of the window panels’. Fulton unfolds events with deadpan humour, some visceral descriptions, and an unerring eye for concrete detail in this series of short lyrics. He expertly weaves in detail from everyday life, and uncanny observations from the streets of Paisley (‘a sparkly unicorn in a high window’) and beyond (‘a flattened dragonfly/in the centre of a road’) and never once assumes the affection that emerges for ‘Jack and Jill’ is reciprocated. (‘they don’t give a toss/if I’m here or not’). Indeed, Jack’s voice is not one to be messed with. These poems explore the relationship between humankind and nature in an urban environment with wit, craft, profundity, and warmth in an immensely satisfying and positive evocation of nature and new life.
(Andy Breckenridge, poet)
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Mongrel
Donna Campbell’s first collection may be called ‘Mongrel’ but it is purebred poetry. Her use of words, especially in the Glaswegian vernacular, combine with images to form brutally beautiful poems about aspects of life that less fearless poets might shun. (Lesley Benzie, poet)
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