After the FirePenny Fearn, Erbacce Press, £4.50
Penny Fearn‟s poems are genuine. She‟s got some great lines (“the water that tasted metal the first day/tastes of nothing now” and “the island of bleak existence; so green it was black”) and there‟s a wholly convincing uneasiness throughout the book.
If I have a small downer, then it is that she occasionally lays on the adjectives a bit thickly. “Depressed goldfish flap in unquestionable waters” doesn‟t quite work somehow, there‟s the shadow of the schoolroom hanging over it, and, from the same poem, “an ugly mirror suspended at ill angles over a blocked fire”: is it just me or is that clumsy?
Having said which, these are very minor points, maybe even mean points to pick on given the huge genuineness of the poems. The motor of the work, that which sends the poems out into the light of day, is in first class order. Penny Fearn has much to offer, I hope we hear more from her.
J. BROOKES
The Old BolsheviksPhil Knight, Green Arrow Publishing, £3.99
There is almost everything to like about Phil Knight‟s The Old Bolsheviks, from the booklet‟s unpretentious lay-out, via the matter of its subkect, to the neat and readable poems themselves.
From an air-brushed-out Trotsky, “a white shadow”, arriving by train in Moscow to contemplate “a Russia/ that was never to be”, to a Lenin, “drenched in formaldehyde”, still doing his bit for the revolution from a glass box, The Old Bolsheviks asks questions that British poetry usually steers clear of.
If I had to have one small cavil, it would be that the poems sometimes end slightly disappointingly – but then, given the subject matter is the collapse of dreams, perhaps that is intentional…
J. BROOKES
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