This review is taken from PN Review 263, Volume 48 Number 3, January - February 2022.
I Say Heart
Naush Sabah, Litanies (Guillemot Press) £8
Suzannah V. Evans, Brightwork (Guillemot Press) £6
Diana Hendry, Where I Was (Mariscat Press, 2020) £6
Naush Sabah, Litanies (Guillemot Press) £8
Suzannah V. Evans, Brightwork (Guillemot Press) £6
Diana Hendry, Where I Was (Mariscat Press, 2020) £6
I focus here on themed pamphlets. Each is very different but contains around twenty-five to thirty pages of poems: these are fairly sizeable publications, examples almost of a mid-length form between the book and what once would have been the ‘standard’ pamphlet, though of an increasingly common length for the medium. I do not favour absolutes, but too often, what might have been a successful themed pamphlet appears to have been bloated into a full-length collection with patently less successful poems, and increasingly I am convinced that around thirty pages is often the perfect length for such a volume. Here are three well-proportioned recent examples by way of testimony.
In ‘Litany of Dissolution’, on the first page of Naush Sabah’s debut full-length pamphlet (following a ‘double micro-pamphlet’ published by Legitimate Snack in 2020), we read:
The poem is a slaloming stream of consciousness, one of several here but at four pages the longest of them, and displays many of Sabah’s strengths: crystalline images and muscly enjambments, enriched by a mind at once subtle and forthright. At this point, though, you might be forgiven for thinking you’ve read it all before in a thousand self-indulgent poems. You haven’t: ‘now there’s day after day after day / disappearing’, she continues, ‘and no god in them / to hook the carcass of any hope from’, and the poem doesn’t compromise ...
In ‘Litany of Dissolution’, on the first page of Naush Sabah’s debut full-length pamphlet (following a ‘double micro-pamphlet’ published by Legitimate Snack in 2020), we read:
time has folded up into me
I’ve been thrown by it
like a child down a hill
standing up and brushing off grass
to find herself a woman
The poem is a slaloming stream of consciousness, one of several here but at four pages the longest of them, and displays many of Sabah’s strengths: crystalline images and muscly enjambments, enriched by a mind at once subtle and forthright. At this point, though, you might be forgiven for thinking you’ve read it all before in a thousand self-indulgent poems. You haven’t: ‘now there’s day after day after day / disappearing’, she continues, ‘and no god in them / to hook the carcass of any hope from’, and the poem doesn’t compromise ...
The page you have requested is restricted to subscribers only. Please enter your username and password and click on 'Continue'.
If you have forgotten your username and password, please enter the email address you used when you joined. Your login details will then be emailed to the address specified.
If you are not a subscriber and would like to enjoy the 285 issues containing over 11,500 poems, articles, reports, interviews and reviews, why not subscribe to the website today?
If you have forgotten your username and password, please enter the email address you used when you joined. Your login details will then be emailed to the address specified.
If you are not a subscriber and would like to enjoy the 285 issues containing over 11,500 poems, articles, reports, interviews and reviews, why not subscribe to the website today?