Popular bog-side reading this month; the highly competent and uniquely titled 'Smile the weird joy' (sounds like a slogan from a Japanese cult) from Ragged Raven Press.
Abi Hughes-Edwards, the new writer.

Going
Tony Petch

I remember you
in the distance
of what's left of your smile.

I can't stay with you.
The tide's going out.

I put a match to the edge of the day,
see it flare in the evening sky.

In the physics of loss
does flame have mass?
In the mathematics of bereavement
does two minus one equal zero?
In the geography of loneliness
do hills turn away?
Is solitude marked on a map?
In the language of longing
is love no longer a word?

Cards and flowers don't answer questions,
and it's easy to disobey orders like 'Get Well Soon'.
Had we a theory of everything
not even that would explain,
since we don't understand all we know.

What I know
amounts to a cargo of feeling.

Where we're blown, fair and equal,
full sail, I see it disturbing the air.
And it's here, at a shoreline, I find myself
watching you go.

...Editors Bob Mee and Janet Murch like their poetry tough-minded and intelligent. There's not a lot of prettiness here, but there's plenty of attitude.
The title poem is by John Robinson. His Red Hot Fiesta is a lukewarm town-centre charity event. He links it casually (but cleverly) with the blowing up of HMS Argent 'like a toyshopful of Roman candles' in Falkland Sound. Robinson is an easy-going dude, with a political agenda and a lot of chutzpah. I especially like another of his in which he finds that the cheap paperback he's chosen for his holiday reading once belonged to John Major.
Blitz [by John Statham] begins 'I ate tomato sandwiches under the stairs/while next door Pauline Potts and her twins burned to death' and continues in the same vein. Poems about being a kid during the war tend to be sweetly nostalgic. This one ain't. It confronts the almost unbearable with sassy, street-smart humour. If it doesn't find its way into future anthologies of war poetry then the establishment editors just aren't looking hard enough.
Another poem about childhood trauma - and my pick of the bunch - is Mal Perry's the pithead murder mystery. This is a poem of great thematic and emotional complexity. Perry's kid in a scrape finds a murdered woman's body and is at once frightened and seduced. This is a hell of a thing to pull off without ickiness, but Perry manages effortlessly and without ever compromising his lolloping, conversational (downright chatty) narrative voice. It is a measure of his assuredness that he can throw in asides about Kristellnacht and Auschwitz without this seeming in the least bit exploitative or excessive.
There are 28 poets featured in this anthology, many of them represented by more than one poem. Some anthologies are just miscellanies of one damn thing after another, but this is strong, tight and characterful. When I first picked it up I thought, 'Well, this is riding for a fall; it can never live up to its title.' But I was wrong. It does.
Tony Grist, New Hope International Review On-line

...contains an excellent collection of poetry...the majority of its contents are very readable, enjoyable and generally of high quality. Do make a point of getting a copy, it's worthwhile.
Paul Amphlett, Peer Poetry International

It is a nicely produced book coming, fittingly in a striking red cover...Many of the poets here are involved in education and the thriving creative writing scene, so it is no surprise that much of the writing is out of the top drawer, though I cannot detect a particular in house style. Most of the poets are given several pages each to exercise and show off their poetic muscles. The result is quite a challenge, and the reader will need time and space to concentrate, sometimes re-reading a piece a number of times. Elizabeth Gowing's Cornish stones opens the book and it is my personal favourite. Labor Day, Long Island by Rebecca Goss is both short and outstanding...Joan Davis, Andy Fletcher and Jane Rusbridge use the pages given to them to maximum effect.
Anthologies like this provide a useful and necessary platform for poets who could make a name for themselves in the competitive and richly varied poetry world in the future.
Christopher Allan, poetry monthly

The Nettles
Andy Fletcher

We're on the move
using moonlight as memory -
across an orchard, a railway yard,
a car park.

We're hated by you,
we're kicked, we're hacked,
we're set on fire by you.

Yet still we inhabit your dreams,
pushing out of a pillow, out of a mattress.
Our dark green heads thrust through a carpet, through floorboards,
through solid concrete.

You're too closed to be free.
You're even scared of your own protection.
Property and wealth are your units of measurement,
your luxury is faithless
and full of nothing.

But we have roots.
We're packed with gentleness and pain.
Our death feeds our children
in the exact moment of their beauty.
The loneliness of each stem
is overcome by our community, our sameness,
the tossing of seeds. Each season has its own dignity
and passes to the next.

We climb mountains.
We wave from the tops of the highest buildings.
We sting the sky
and bring out a rash of stars.

I was delighted to come across Stephen Steinhaus and his two wonderful poems, Baths with Katie and Got Nuthin’. They’re original, masculine and very edgy. There are names you’ll have come across turning in some impressive work, Mike Parker, Geoff Stevens and Diana Syder to mention just three. Ragged Raven are fast gaining a reputation as serious, committed publishers of quality contemporary poetry. Jump on the bandwagon. 
Roz Goddard, Raw Edge

This is one of those anthologies where you don't look for what's good, but what is exceptional. Kelly Pilgrim's vivid, repetitive Toulouse-Lautrec is Dead, and Geraldine Roberts' Huer's Hut, where the bride and her bridesmaids have a wicked time, were best for me, and John Robinson's Lying Drunk and Naked, and Terry Stothard's Blitzed also topped an excellent collection.
Purple Patch

a high quality publication featuring an excellent selection of current mainstream poetry taken from submissions to the publishers and their competition over the past year… this anthology wins out because there seems to be real discernment in the choice of poems: the poems are not just of their type, but are good of their type… far better than the run-of-the-mill poems that appear in too many current small presses. Fine poems from Mike Parker, Geoff Stevens, Stephen Steinhaus, Andrew Detheridge, Thachom Poyil Rajeevan, Carolyn Garwes, Brian Connell, Katy Darby and Eric Smith.
Tim Allen, Terrible Work

This is the contemporary poetry of the twenty-first century! The fourth anthology in the current series, compiled by Janet Murch and Bob Mee, presents an intriguing showcase of real life stills and vignettes in a sparkling variety of mood, colourful imagery and colloquially attuned word and phrase. Several writers of note are featured: Andrew Detheridge, John Robinson, Gordon Simms and promising Australian writers Bron Bateman and Kelly Pilgrim…. Superbly edited anthology.
Bernard M Jackson, Voice and Verse

This is an exciting collection of modern poetry.
Fay Eagle, Poetry Monthly

One of my favourite presses, I have a Ragged Raven imprint in lounge, study and loo.
Abi Hughes-Edwards, the new writer

This anthology arrived on a sunny day of leisure when I was set to walk and laze. Had a quick peep. An inviting cover and as meticulously produced as I've come to expect from RRP. So I took it with me to the ponds of Roskilly, the ancient strands of Lowland Point, the harbour pub at Coverack. Couldn't put the bloody thing down. Don't you hate it when that happens?...I reckon you should buy this. You'll read it time and again. And you'll read some aloud to others to get that glow a good poem gives you.
Ronnie Goodyer, bluechrome  

...If there is a single theme dominating the book, and it is certainly not ever-present, then it is of one of reminiscence. One of the most touching examples of this - touching because it IS so aware of its mode, and the ironies that problematize recollection - is a piece by Pat Watson called From the Archives... The poem begins by acknowledging the artificialities of just such an experience of recalling the past and attempting to fix it in time, carries on, mixing the observable with the sense of time lost and time regained, feelings never wholly readjusted to the changing circumstances, until it concludes laconically: Have you got all you need? It's been a pleasure talking about old times. Somehow both the question and the statement here sum up the problem to which many of the 37 poets represented in this collection address themselves. That is, there is, for the speaker, almost always a sense of pleasure in the telling of a tale not known to her or his auditors, however painful the recollection of the circumstances contained in that tale may be.  And, at the same time, the lingering sense, that however much is told, those auditors will never have all they need to understand even the basics of the tale they've heard. It is a situation frequently repeated in Dress of Nettles, yet its unending diversity, its self-generating pace, keep it from ever becoming cloying or repetitive. Compare, for instance, the sensitivity of Clive Gilson's evocative Into the Walled Garden, which explores the loneliness of old age through the endless tasks of a gardener (with) Pat Earnshaw's poignant reworking of childhood's limited understanding of pride and frustrated dreams in In My Next Life I'll Have a Big House and Dogs and Music. In time or outside it, the poems in this anthology are written very much on a human scale, with values and attainments shared in appreciation of the wider community. It brings together a cross-section of views which allows each to be seen and enjoyed in co-operation with the present, rather than in competition with the past.
J D Ballam, Cold Mountain Review