Offord Road Books – förlag

Nothing in the place meant nothing. The poems in Country Music are observant, curious, finding everywhere they look detail worthy of notice, determined in that ‘The falsehood is that there is little / left for us to know’. This same faith in the minutiae of the world acknowledges the cost of our decisions, however small – that ‘To feel the evening coming up / and to stream one way or another’ can be the difference between this life and that, ‘at once to feel / all these things change’. From the intimately personal – the choices that lead us towards, or away from, old friends, lovers, family members and their lost and vanishing stories, to the collective – humanity’s ‘bad choices piling up like debts’ – Burns is everywhere concerned with consequence and responsibility. ‘The bloody mess of individuals – / plastic stuff outside an abandoned tent’, tobacco packaging, dogshit, old newspapers, styrofoam, white goods, both blend into and stand out from the landscape. This is evidence of the human cost, the tent’s inhabitant existing at the margins. There are ‘rubber boats in the news / and no borders to heavy weather’, the patterns of migratory birds are disrupted, and a sequence of poems explores the poet’s grandmother, displaced after the war, like a castaway, to ‘some welcome or unwelcome or indifferent port.’ Quietly, insistently – against a ground of Chet Baker’s trumpet, a Texan country singer ‘on his second life’, beer and bourbon and Brêton cider, American primitive, Merle Haggard, Warren Zevon, marijuana and micheladas and the shimmer of pedal steel – the coded messages of the natural world show through. Here is an exhortation to remake, restore, ‘begging for you to build again – / this time something cool and that will last’. In its evocations of doubt and responsibility, music and memory, Country Music is a debut of immense power from one of British poetry’s most accomplished new voices.

Turning on the drawn-out thread of a relationship in freefall, the poems in Votive, the skilful and seductive second collection by Keiran Goddard, are small prayers uttered out of an ambiguous faith. They are dreams, visions, and hallucinations; the body is made a bonsai tree, the sea hisses into the spaces between the lines, the voice speaks invocations to the minute. These poems are ‘granular things / that flow freely when touched’.

Unapologetically yearning, this collection moves through three distinct sections, from the ‘scabrous hope’ of new love through painful eroticism and loss, and finally into the wide river of an open-ended spiritual question. These poems ask, rather than answer, their rhyme and rhythm creating something devotional, an unworldly interior that is ‘ruthless and summoned’.

Ella Frears’s debut is a collection of wry, vivid poems whose power lies in their intimacy. They are as insistent as they are circumspect, drawing close to the reader’s ear and bringing them into confidence. The engine of Shine, Darling is one of strength, of fortitude in confronting and surviving the world, of a lifted-chin audacity – ‘There was pain,’ the speaker allows, ‘but it was not new pain.’ Frears’s work is world-weathered rather than world-weary, delighted by service stations, fucking on bins in Cornwall, in constant communion with the moon. It lives for the power-play of people, of the pull of the sea, the smoky air – ‘Stormy, sticky with flies’ – and tangled underbrush where the land ends. Her characters test each other, experimenting with the boundaries of physical violence, of punishment, of traps, all the while drawing the reader into a complicity that gives these poems all their daring, electrifying muscularity. In Shine, Darling, the desire to expose and disclose wrestles with defence and defiance. The result is exhilarating, a ‘glorious full-bodied’ debut collection with the draw of an adamant tide.'These unsettling poems lean into irony and beauty with equal measure' - The GuardianShine, Darling is a Poetry Book Sociey recommendation and selected by Carol Ann Duffy as one of her 'Poems to Get Us Through' in the Guardian.

In SpoilsJames Brookes advances a lyrical, frank and unsparing consideration of the England in which we find ourselves. While retaining the historical interest and folkloric reinvention of his spectacular debut Sins of the Leopard, Brookes has clarified his poetic concerns into the less comfortable questions of freedom and liberty. In this new book his praise of the achievements of one figure is necessarily tempered by a curt frustration at the lives not lived as a result of that achievement, of the successes not ever to be and, again and again, the suppression of women’s achievement. But these poems do not preach or lecture; rather, they plumb the deep well of history and language and come up each time with a glittering fragment. Here is the weirdness of heraldry, the intrigue of politics and war, finely drawn by a poet with an eye for texture and material; from time to time, in Brookes’s bestiary, we glimpse something dazzling in the corner of our eye. Everywhere in Spoils there is struggle, conflict, but the pantheon of strivers that Brookes employs assert his skill as a poet of high humanity, unshakeable conviction, and a consummate talent.

***"[A] dazzling and immensely readable collection." Andrew McMillan‘never say / the best of summer’s gone’, the poem asks, a plea for permanence that sustains throughout Fondue, the second collection by A. K. Blakemore. In these louche, candid poems, bearing the marks of Mary Ruefle, Emily Dickinson and The Smiths, the inner life prowls, smoking a cigarette, as the fantasies of sex and violence allowed to play out in the subjugations that have long been the poet’s concerns. Here they are exposed, interrogated and attacked with a fierce melancholy. These lines understand their power to manipulate: ‘this is a poem about my mouth / intended to draw attention / to my mouth’, the title poem instructs.This is what I like; this is what I don’t like – ‘i want you / like a scorpion down my shirt’ – there is a plaintive charisma in the ability to ask for the things a body needs. And for all of Blakemore’s defiance, the savagery and storm, this world holds a prismatic, surprising beauty, the beauty of rain-washed streets, of comedown mornings, of the potential for tenderness in the brutality of love and play. The poet who can strike so fiercely at the times when ‘truth is just a sharp thing you stand on in the night’ can also conclude ‘but god i love the world. the things you do’. Tigerish, impetuous, quick-witted and never self pitying, Fondue reaffirms Blakemore’s place on the barricades.

Knowing This Has Changed My Ending is an approach to and mastering of a specific domestic. The poems stand by windows, obsessed by and yet strangely insulated from the world through the glass – a world in which objects cluster together for warmth, for the friendship they need as proof against life lived in the exposed and raw places. Matters of shapeshifting and disappearance recur and reinvent themselves, often within a single poem, the reader increasingly subject to their movements. ‘Days become a series of rooms’, and the waking up inside them is variously stultifying, frightening, hopeful, enclosing and obsessive. MacDonald’s structures are electronic in their linking of source to expense, and the close wiring of this pamphlet pulses with energy and focus. These are warnings ignored and passed over, of forecasting strange new weather, of the transformative power of boundaries – at the day’s cusp, in the reflective glass, in thresholds stepped over and confessions made or unmade. ‘I want to wake up very early’, MacDonald writes, ‘to see how the day changes’. And then he does.

These are poems of tidal ebb and advance, of the drift of sand blown along the beach and into caves, where secret things click and scuttle. Things are not always what they seem: ‘traditionally hourglass sand wasn’t sand / . . . traditionally the material was / powdered marble and burnt eggshell’; things smell ‘unfamiliar, sulphurous’. This is an unsettling, anxious landscape – ‘how colourless a beach in the rain’ – and it is mapped onto the body in uncertain ways:

my heart washed up

in the shallow waters

of the grey beach

much changed

or

her stomach has become a beach

or

i, a perfect stranger to

the curve of their wet backs

am a dirty grain of sand

There is longing for a sort of permanence, a structure, some shelter, for ‘a house on stilts’, for a ‘gilded ceiling’, but it is not as simple as that. The house is also a threat, a trap, a confinement, ‘large and dark / with narrow rooms’. There is an intimation of grief, though the picture is unstable, like a seabird bobbing and vanishing behind the crest of a wave on the horizon.

beaches is a tideline strewn with complicated, intricate poems, though deceptively forthright, with a powerful undercurrent that will take you off your feet.