Poetry from the UK & Ireland – serie

In The Arrow Maker, D.M. Black's sensitive attention to emotional states of mind, sometimes his own, sometimes those of others such as St. Augustine, Ezra Pound, Paul Celan or Jacques Brel, also extends to more public themes of war and climate change. As always, his forms are various, but there is a predominance now of poems spoken in a thinking voice that remembers the iambic pentameter without being subdued by it. In a final section, versions of two Dante cantos, from the Purgatorio and Paradiso, focus in particular on Dante's qualities of thoughtfulness and intellectual precision.

Curtis's humour and charm, ability to turn a poem with the seemingly simplest of images, and that understanding of how words will play over the listener's ear, are hallmarks brought to the fore on the page... His greatest skill is to make readers go 'yes, of course'; he reminds us of what we've known all along. Michael McKimm, The Warwick Review