Daily Archives: December 15, 2013

Pelt by Sarah Jackson (Bloodaxe)

Poetry, Review, , , ,

Pelt by Sarah Jackson“Today, I find I can see through my eyelids.” Which is a good thing, as I need to read Jackson’s debut collection (published by Bloodaxe) with my eyes shut, and I can’t put it down. Her poetry is deliberately unheimlich (the opposite of what is familiar), it profoundly disturbs at the same time as it draws us in. We can hear “The Ten O’Clock Horses” coming down the street, we can feel the “devastating wind” in that deserted hotel in Bulgaria. We reach the end of the book and realise we have to ask ourselves the same terrifying (yet exciting) questions about ourselves and the world around us, which are not quite explicit in the poems but at the same time shout clearly in our minds. And then we start reading again. Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and winner of the Seamus Heaney award for a first collection, this promises great things to come from Sarah Jackson.

Pippa Hennessy

Bohemians, Beats and Blues People by Jim Burns (Penniless Press)

Beats, Review, , ,

Bohemians, Beats and Blues People by Jim BurnsThere are two things I know about Preston. One is that Preston’s Brutalist bus station is a Grade II listed building, and the other is that it is the hometown of Jim Burns. Jim is one of those writers you will only hear about if you read small press mags. The smaller the mag the more likely you are to find him. Jim Burns probably knows more about small mags than anyone else living, and writes in them and about them, covering and reviewing poetry, and jazz, and the beat scene. Typically, his collections of essays are published by Penniless Press. With three Penniless volumes to choose from, I had to pick the one with a chapter “In Praise of Booksellers” where he gives brief introductions to forgotten booksellers, selling forgotten works to customers who’ve probably forgotten they went there. These include the Turret Bookshop in London, presided over by the late Bernard Stone, from Nottingham.

One of Burns’ other chapters is, indeed, “The Names of the Forgotten”. Of course some Beat writers could not be more public – Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso – but Burns stretches further back, to “The Origins of the Beat Generation” and to (mostly American) journals – the Evergreen Review, The Masses, and to other American writers, James T. Farrell and B. Traven, author of The Treasure of the Sierre Madre. Literary archaeologists will enjoy all his books.

Ross Bradshaw