REVIEW: JOHN MCCULLOUGH’S ‘PANIC RESPONSE’

REVIEW: JOHN MCCULLOUGH’S ‘PANIC RESPONSE’

REVIEW: JOHN MCCULLOUGH’S ‘PANIC RESPONSE’     By Stella Backhouse   John McCullough’s 2022 collection Panic Response is a delicate and moving evocation of grief, mental breakdown and eventual re-emergence. Although primarily a frank and deeply personal memoir,...
REVIEW: ELIZABETH MCGEOWN’S ‘COCKROACH’

REVIEW: ELIZABETH MCGEOWN’S ‘COCKROACH’

REVIEW: ELIZABETH MCGEOWN’S ‘COCKROACH’     By Stella Backhouse   There are a number of reasons not to read Elizabeth McGeown’s 2022 collection Cockroach. If slugs, snakes, maggot-infested dead birds, creepy-crawlies in general and the titular arthropod...
REVIEW: JULIAN BISHOP’S ‘WE SAW IT ALL HAPPEN’

REVIEW: JULIAN BISHOP’S ‘WE SAW IT ALL HAPPEN’

REVIEW: JULIAN BISHOP’S ‘WE SAW IT ALL HAPPEN’     By Stella Backhouse   Say out loud the title of Julian Bishop’s new collection We Saw It All Happen and a ghostly question hangs in the after-silence. We saw it all happen….but what did we do? A former BBC...
REVIEW: LEWIS BUXTON’S ‘BOY IN VARIOUS POSES’

REVIEW: LEWIS BUXTON’S ‘BOY IN VARIOUS POSES’

REVIEW: LEWIS BUXTON’S ‘BOY IN VARIOUS POSES’     By Stella Backhouse In Lewis Buxton’s 2021 collection Boy in Various Poses, two strands of poetry converse with each other across the divide of the spine. On the left-hand pages hang short rectangular prose poems whose...