DUNDEE UNIVERSITY REVIEW OF THE ARTS

Kona Macphee’s approach to poetry is most accurately described as experimental. Macphee fluctuates between strict poetic forms and free verse, and aptly too, for her poems’ themes also range widely. This diversity initially appears to demonstrate her skilful shaping of individual poems to the detriment of the creation of a coherent whole. Yet, it soon becomes apparent that in its versatility, this collection essentially becomes an embodiment of life itself.

Pauline Stainer’s poem “Primrose Hill Druids”, evokes the dizzying sense of spiritual connection explored in her latest collection, Tiger Facing the Mist. Stainer is a gifted and prolific poet who works “at the margins of the sacred.” This is her eighth Bloodaxe title. Her fourth collection, The Wound-Dresser’s Dream, was shortlisted for the 1996 Whitbread Poetry Award and in 2009 she received the Cholmondeley Award.

No writer is well served by effusive or uncritical praise. If we are to believe the introduction to Sophia Wellbeloved’s four-part poem Praying for Flow, her handling of words is “[l]ike Neruda’s”. Her poetic voice “may not even be hers”, but her dead twin’s, or that of her grandmother’s dead child. We are in the presence, it seems, of countless “subtle waves”, of “emanations” to which we must be “sensitive”, and which are “vibrating”.

Curiously, and despite Francesca G. Bewer’s florid cover design, Andrea Cohen’s third full poetry collection is somewhat reminiscent of a Victorian stitched sampler. That is not to suggest that it is archaic or in any way imbued with a mannered and self-conscious charm – far from it. Rather, this wide-ranging selection showcases lines in so many forms, and loops around such a variety of subjects, that both thematically and stylistically it is hard to pick out a unifying thread.