Days 8 – 31 For the second week of the Sealey Challenge 2022 I didn’t have time to do a review summary as well as reading a poetry book each day. The following is my reading list from 8th to 16th August: Day 8: ‘Those Mothers of Gods’ by Rachel Bowers published by Fly on Continue reading

‘Passerine’ by Kirsten Luckins (Bad Betty Press, 2021) #7/31 The Sealey Challenge This collection is a memorial to friendship, a nature journal across a year from summer to summer and a series of epistolary prose-poems and poems all addressed to ‘Dear Sophie’, following her death. There are 51 poems separated into six sections: Pollen, Pyre, Continue reading

#6 The Sealey Challenge ‘The Room Between Us’ by Denise Saul (Liverpool University Press, Pavilion series, 2022) My mother-in-law, Mary, lived with us for the first ten years or so of our marriage at which point, on the birth of our fifth child, she said she’d had enough of the noise of our house and Continue reading

I chose to reread Bidart’s eighth collection (if you include the first collected and also Music Like Dirt) because it’s my favourite, I think. It embodies his history, aesthetics and high modernism in a way that gives the reader reassurance somehow about existential doom and human tragedy. Bidart is a poet with a deep sense Continue reading