The No Breath – John Goodby

“I think these are my favourite poems of [John Goodby’s]. They have some kind of indefinable charge. It’s like being in a calm dark room with little slots and windowlets opening just briefly onto brilliantly lit spaces out there and all over and then closing again before you can get a really good look. What you carry away is a sort of richly coloured composite many-layered image which seems to add up to something suggestive of the archaeological remains of what was once at various points in time and space something resembling a unified human emotional consciousness. I find them exciting.” – Lyndon Davies.

More here.

Tim Allen – A New Geography of Romanticism

“There is another England, a country not of Cameron, Farage and the house of Windsor, but of Lear and Carroll, Gasgoyne and Blake, a deeper, darker, stranger place. It is of this nation underground that Tim Allen is the cartographer. A New Geography of Romanticism stakes out this shadowy turf with prismatic, kaleidoscopic brilliance. Reading this book on another rainy afternoon in Albion is a beautifully startling experience, like finding a giant hailstone in the fireplace or a peacock perched on the sideboard. These poems are the potions of the maddest of scientists, a gift of sherbet lemons from the gods.” Tom Jenks.

Out now on The Red Ceilings Press.