Posts By: Heidi Williamson
Review: ‘Letters Home’ by Jennifer Wong
‘Home’ is a contentious word. Both personal and political, ‘home’ implies belonging, and not belonging. In Robert Frost’s ‘Death of the Hired Man’, ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in’. But is that place where we live, where we were born, where our family…
Heidi Williamson
Review: ‘Scare Stories’ by David Clarke
Causality and chaos. These could be our governing gods at present. They are certainly the governing gods in David Clarke’s Scare Stories – a 25 poem sequence in the third person plural set in ‘possible near futures or versions of the present’. The poems cover horribly recognisable ground: consumerism, refugee crises, despot generals, video-game violence,…
Heidi Williamson
Review: ‘Incarnation’ by Clare Pollard
In this, her fifth collection, Clare Pollard engages with how we navigate our ethical way through the modern world, with its treacherous wonders. The poems in Incarnation (Bloodaxe) explore contemporary crises and question whether it is possible to transmit understanding and compassion effectively to others, particularly the young. Incarnations – of self-hood, motherhood, and ‘other’…
Heidi Williamson
Review: ‘The Number Poems’ by Matthew Welton
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight. John Berger, Ways of Seeing The Book of Numbers is like an artist’s sketch…
Heidi Williamson