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This Poem Here Rob Walton Arachne Press 48 pp ISBN 9781913665302 £8.99
have no business being real, reflections about toilet paper. Most of all, there is hope. Hope that next year Eve, Emily and Sarah will go travel, hope that we will These poems concern themselves with loss and grief, get through this. There will be pain, and sadness, but both on a personal level caused we will get through. The hope doesn’t end the book nor does it open it, but it’s sprinkled with judgment by the author’s father's death, throughout. Enough to keep us going, not enough to and on a collective level rose-tint the situation. analysing the Covid-19 pandemic. It is, at its core, a The collection asks itself why we miss what we miss, collection of reflections and and by highlighting the small things that have been unanswered questions that taken away gives them a new importance. The poet could only come out of 2020. walks into his daughter's room and sees a picture of It’s pandemic writing at its her and his father, and that simple and daily act finest, with frequent references brings profound sadness worthy of poetry. There is to Zoom, particularly in the lots of walking, and lots of looking for meaning in giggle-inducing One of the Very Worst Things, a that walking. The collection already has a taste of longing for pubs and waiting rooms, and the hindsight towards the pandemic, even if written in awareness that the next quiz is never too far away. the midst of it. It doesn’t let it take the wheel and What really shapes the collection however is the way drive the poems through anger and despair, but it in which Walton uses the pandemic as a looking guides the reader through all the feelings with the glass to address the most common of feelings. knowledge that everything is still uncertain, but if we This new outlook focuses political anger, so that when he asks ‘Are there any other countries you’d like to break?’ in the closing poem Prime Minister’s Questions, the weight of the question is backed by significant evidence. It also deepens the sadness, so that a poem about getting tearful over potatoes or waiting room magazines fits with the narrative of losing a parent or seeing your daughter have to miss graduation. These familiar ties and connections are what shines brightest through the collection, particularly in the connection with his daughters.
stop and feel the feelings it might be alright. FC This kilt of many colours David Bleiman Dempsey & Windle 50pp ISBN 978-1-913329-45-7 £8.00
David Bleiman’s pamphlet A kilt of many colours is a fittingly serious work about a serious subject – language as the bedrock not only of communication but of identity also, creating what the poet refers to as a double weight of significance. In a brief introduction, Bleiman references William McIIvanney’s description of Scotland, the poet’s current abode, as a mongrel nation, signalling the principal thematic focus of the collection, namely the rich diversity of language, the mixter-maxter of origins and influences. Walton in his poems observes his daughters and is The poet’s own background is Ashkenazi, a Jewish diasposurprised by them, by the way they held themselves ra population that was concentrated in areas of the Austro through the same grief that he is going through, -Hungarian Empire and one which suffered disproportionately missing not only their grandfather but their friends, during the Holocaust, leaving their lives, their entire world being stopped. And barely a family untouched by its Walton misses it alongside them. My favourite poem ravages. Born in South Africa, from the collection, Like in the Olden Days, is an ode Bleiman’s family moved to Britain to his daughter friends’ coming over for dinner. The when he was six, giving rise to poem is pandemic-specific, reflecting a time when the multilingual experiences that the most mundane of evenings, making pasta for permeate the collection, one findyour daughter and her friend, has become ing comic expression in the The impossible. But it is also permeated by that certain Trebbler’s Tale, a poem written in kind of sadness that comes with seeing your children lively couplets and in a reimagined version of Scots-Yiddish. growing up, turning it into a poem that transcends Add to the mix the Spanish, the specificity it was written about and becomes a which the poet is currently studying, and we have the mirror of the human experience at large. pamphlet’s varied soundscape, one replete with the alliterWhat keeps the collection so enjoyable is the ative force of Yiddish:
humour that constantly runs through it. There is sadness, and regret, and wishing for things to be more and other, but in all of it there is time for laughs and joy. The humour comes both in content and form. There’s rhymes and alliteration about disinfectants, Covid becomes covey, and there’s jokes about bread, discoveries about places in the UK that
He shlepped his shmatte aa through Fife, weel-kent by monie a lanely wife, whaur Yid and pekl war kenspeckle n ilka Fifan toun and shtetl. (from The Trebbler’s Tale)
