Rupert Loydell Watching a Train Wreck in the Distance smoke and spark over there impossible to intervene or interfere sound out of sync with suffering instinct for calamity and survival dazed distress impossible to infer others' screams      hurt silence now more than ever because and despite   Heretic Chapel (Albert Oehlen) exploding eyeball sudden shout big moustache an emphatic NO and the coloured doorbell finger pressing hard little sense of quiet only a scrawled mouth saying anything nothing now sideways confusion negative shapes and caricature full steam a head ship shape dribbled monotone no shimmer of silence no layering of paint fairground delirium she rises from the water limbs awry limb less patterns stacked up depthless 'not as good as it thinks it is'   Newbiggin Seaweed, shells, smooth glass, and pebbles are no longer enough for my girls but my pockets are stuffed full. I hope to polis

Steve Spence "Forty Four Poems and a Volta " by James Davies pub. The Red Ceilings Press I had to check and remind myself what a Volta was half way through reading these texts and its relevance to this intriguing short collection is still only partly clear. Humour is a major element in Davies’ work though, that and a strong inclination towards ‘defamiliarisation’, a term which explains quite well what he’s up to here, as although these short poems, one per page and each composed of two short sentences or stanzas, if you prefer, are made up of language which is syntactically pretty clear, the meanings are fragmented and infused with puns and linguistic ‘turns’. That, perhaps, explains the ‘Volta’ though the title is still a tad puzzling.      Take the following, for example:           what am i now but someone standing next                                           to a lids                     (three examples:        on

Robert Sheppard Two Bards with One Stone : a review of Alan Halsey and Kelvin Corcoran, Winterreisen. Newton-le-Willows: Knives Forks and Spoons, 2019. £14. This collaborative text is a co-authored dialogue. The indicative, but informal Ks or As before each verse or section, tell us who is speaking. However, Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey don’t adopt the practice of their former co-authored volume, A Horse That Runs (2015) , where they address one another. Nor is there an attempt to fabricate a ‘third voice’, which is apparently the aim of some literary collaborators; they have no need to. Their exchanges (I assume via email) during the winter months of 2015-18 (the title Winterreisen points us to winter travels) accumulate to create around 80 pages of this ping-pong discourse. By the winter of 2016-17, just halfway through, they establish a formal rule (as they had in A Horse That Runs , which is tellingly subtitled ‘to and fro’): each poet writes an equal number of l