Ragged Raven Poetry

Collections

the cook's wedding - John Robinson

The Invention of Butterfly - Christopher James

Kung Fu Lullabies - Chris Kinsey

the mile long piano - Andy Fletcher

People from bones - Bron Bateman and Kelly Pilgrim

Seven League Stilettos - Jane Kinninmont

Vanishing Point - Tony Petch

the cook's wedding

by John Robinson

Price: £6.99 (p+p free)

ISBN 978 0 9520807 8 7

Available from book shops or direct from 
Ragged Raven Press (postage + packing free)

To pay by credit card

or send cheques (UK sterling) or International Money Orders made payable to Ragged Raven Press to 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire CV37 0LR England.

I especially like the vim, the large-heartedness, the celebration of life, and locality. This is summed up for me in the cook's wedding, a masterpiece of fantasy and joie de vivre. Here is a poet who is fascinated by details (of all sorts) and who knows how to layer them together and make the pattern that is an important part of a poem. It's clear that much of Robinson's work comes, as he says, from local places and experiences. But this leaves out the essential element of imagination, and it should not, because imagination is what makes his work distinctive. 
U. A. Fanthorpe

Must say how much I've enjoyed the cook's wedding by John Robinson. Yes - enjoyed, it's accessible, visual and rich...his voice is resonant.
Abi Hughes-Edwards, the new writer

...His poetry ranges from sheer lyricism and clarity of style to the downright vernacular of the less articulate...Robinson has, for many years, achieved considerable popularity as a performance poet, and this directness of approach has effectively shaped both sytle and syntax in his developing verse...I was very much amused by B&Q, me and Edward Thomas...Another poem that greatly impressed me was If ever you're in Leros, in which he visits the grave of a Hull fisherman, buried near a small seaport in Greece. A very moving piece.
Here then, is a poet with immense talent, a poet at war with himself.
Bernard M. Jackson, Voice & Verse

A big bumper book of fun from a poet I'd never heard of. Where's he been? Well, according to his biography he's spent at least some time as a tripe dresser. I'm not sure what a tripe-dresser is but the word 'tripe' is the last one that comes to mind when you read his poetry. 
He has a poem called  Carrying Adrian Mitchell home on the bus in which he writes:

Adrian Mitchell stomps for peace in monstrous boots;
Adrian Mitchell lurks under your pelmet like a handgrenade

He says many other pertinent things about Adrian Mitchell and he celebrates his fellow poet in a piece that's full of energy and humour. Indeed, energy and humour pervade his work and in this respect, of course, Robinson's writing is similar to Adrian Mitchell's. There is a similar quirkiness and disrespect for formality and tradition. There is, often, a similar childlike innocence and easy surrealism too. Above all there is a similar love of words and images and a similar passion for combining these in ways which worry people who don't like poetry.
Paul McDonald, New Hope International Review On-Line

the cook's wedding
John Robinson

the cook is marrying the skilful cobbler

their house will steam and bubble
and hug like a dubbined boot
their table will groan with loaves
and roasts and casseroles
bangers and stirabout
cabbages scrag-end and brawn
with broths and panacklty
with tarts and barms and flapjack
their garden will show forth pies
they will net fish and grow oranges together
their chickenyard will cluck with plumpness
and their applecheeked pigs will roll in pomegranates
their sofa will be a masterpiece in brads and twine
their dumpling bed will seethe
their children will be a stitch in time
and mouths to tap a life into
at breakfast dinners and dripping teas
and at suppers with their exquisite slippers on
the guests of their household will be soled and heeled
their thirsts quenched
their renewals shaped to last
by this sizzling dabhand hobnailed artistry

so come celebrants
so come scoffers and bibbers
wolf down the cakes and gumbo
swig away at the walloping plonk
toast the cook's downright excellent fortune
wear out your shoes dancing

People from bones

by Bron Bateman and Kelly Pilgrim

Price: £6.50 (p+p free)

ISBN 978 0 9542397 0 1

Available from book shops or direct from 
Ragged Raven Press (postage + packing free)

To pay by credit card

or send cheques (UK sterling) or International Money Orders made payable to Ragged Raven Press to 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire CV37 0LR England.

Bron Bateman and Kelly Pilgrim are from Perth, Australia.
This is their first collection of poetry and it comes highly recommended by Australian poet, Alan Wearne.

Bron Bateman's work is centred (though not exclusively) in the world of love, sex, procreation, birth, death: the essentials of both family life and all living. Every word is carefully placed in position, every thought/idea/concept/image prowled around and thoroughly contemplated. Kelly Pilgrim's world seems to keep on expanding. Already it includes cows, dogs, frogs, cats and fishing; what a dead man's dressing gown tells us and Toulouse-Lautrec;  relationships that succeed against all odds and those doomed before they begin. Her work, both tough-minded and tender, has sympathy and wit, anger and love. I enjoy the poetry of Bron and Kelly very much.
Alan Wearne

How refreshing…to find poetry that has been worked, and reworked into something quite unique. This collection is fresh and interesting, funny and thought-provoking and very, very good… I highly recommend it.
Ruth Wykes, Women Out West  

It’s a risky business, bringing out a joint collection; often the reader much prefers one poet’s work to the other, but I think in the case of these two very interesting Australian poets, a joint venture succeeds. Bron Bateman writes extensively, and intensively, on the body, particularly the ways in which marginalized bodies are inscripted and read. It is a difficult area, because it seems such a familiar theme in contemporary poetry, but she does it, in most cases, with clear-eyed honesty, compassion and a refreshing lack of sentiment. I particularly liked The Colour Purple – I learnt to listen/for your silence;/ the hiss of breath/that comes before blood;/ the hot crack of ribs.//You punish with such grace/I close my eyes/ and see angels. Kelly Pilgrim’s writing is wider, more eclectic, and at her best her imagery is stunning; her writing is energetic, witty and sensuous. On dark blue sheets/you are spread out like a starfish//You never notice me slide sideways/pouring my body out of bed.
The Frogmore Papers

This is a beautiful book which I very much enjoyed reading and I can recommend to anyone who loves poetry. The two poets are well chosen and fit naturally together in one volume. They are both Australian, both studying degrees, but it is more than that. They also share a similarity of approach to writing poetry which links their work into a unified whole. Their poems are quiet, but combine an apparent simplicity with statements which have a universal ring. So Bron Bateman offers such disturbingly powerful lines as Bruises are the truer skin (Epicanthus) and Darling/there is no colour in war (Not a Love Letter) and Kelly Pilgrim gives us the restrained and yet very strong last poem in the book Today – You died today/and it’s true what/they say the sun still shines/- merciless. The success of these poems is also based on a combination of tenderness, as in Kelly’s If I should go before you and Bron’s I held him rocking, and an attention to tiny details. Bron notices the way a friend rubs a thumb in the hollow of his wrist and Kelly sees initials carved on a pencil case. They have their differences of course. Bron’s work owes much to images of the body and Kelly explores many areas but they both write sensitive and deeply emotional poetry which is a joy to read.”
Jenny Hamlett, Poetry Monthly

An appealing publication containing the work of two up-and-coming Australian women poets. Bron Bateman’s offerings are centred mainly on the world of love, sex, procreation, birth and death; essential ingredients of an ever-changing life pattern… Kelly Pilgrim’s poetry clearly indicates an assured base of a more traditional background; her poems are endowed with cogency of detail and reflective, succinctly drawn conclusions. Both poets employ a variety of free-verse settings – lovers of contemporary verse will find much here that truly appeals. 
Bernard M Jackson, Voice & Verse

This book is the work of two poets who tackle life with wit and sympathy. Bateman and Pilgrim make an excellent double team… (Bateman) is a brutally honest poet… these are very much female oriented poems but with a universal sensuality that demands attention. Pilgrim’s poetry has a piercing, almost painterly quality firmly bedded in a down-to-earth realism… these two poets have created an excellent collection and deserve a wide audience. 
Polly Bird, New Hope International

The Watcher
Kelly Pilgrim

On dark blue sheets
you are spread out like a starfish

You never notice me slide sideways
pouring my body out of bed

and I am pleased

because if you woke
what would happen to these
moments of quiet

my early morning silent films
where you're the star?

On Seventeen (for Mark)
Bron Bateman

We measure our years
in cups of tea
and soft, familiar kisses.
I cannot inscribe
your secret places with
Here Be Dragons,
for long ago
I mapped the coast
of your body.

I have danced
my fingers
in those parts
reserved for lovers;
planted my flag and
staked my claim
to your flesh.

Yet
 - and here's the joy -

near sleep and falling
towards you
like water,
memory is sluiced clean.
Your dear face
seems new;
as if I had closed my eyes
and slept all winter.

Vanishing Point

by Tony Petch

Price: £6.50 (p+p free)

ISBN 978 0 9542397 3 2

Available from book shops or direct from 
Ragged Raven Press (postage + packing free)

To pay by credit card

or send cheques (UK sterling) or International Money Orders made payable to Ragged Raven Press to 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire CV37 0LR England.

I didn't find this a swallow-in-one-go book. More a nibbler. Anything rushed here is to miss something, perhaps a little gem, such is the depth...It's easy to see why Tony Petch is so respected, his poems often twist unexpectedly and take you somewhere surprising or by surprise...One minute barbed, then surreal, then all-too factual...The personal poems invited you in without making you feel intrusive and if you like your poetry with a bit of an edge, humour a little off-the-wall and the descriptive, well, descriptive, then buy this...this will take you down many a good road but never lose you. I've had many return journeys already.
Ronnie Goodyer, bluechrome 

While this is Petch's first full collection, he has been performing and publishing his poems for more than thirty years, and there are signs of hard-won self-assurance and verbal grace on nearly every page of this outstanding volume. It would be hard to select a favourite poem from such an altogether pleasing book, and no short extract can do justice to either the dramatic poise or experienced raconteur's easy delivery that Petch's poems uniformly exhibit...throughout the book there are flashes of genius as insight combines with surprising expression...there is something very personal, local, lived and necessary about the words Petch uses. It's a kind of forthrightness that should be a model to younger or less-experienced writers. Anyway, I don't know how many more he's got in him, but I hope there's plenty where these came from.
J.D. Ballam, Suite101.com (Cold Mountain Review, USA) 

You know when you invite friends round for an afternoon in the garden on a warm, summer Sunday. There’s plenty to drink, nice things to eat, and some good company. We smile, laugh and talk about this, that and the other. That’s how I felt when reading this collection. Warmly recommended. 
Geoff Lowe, Psychopoetica

In the last year I’ve started exploring the British Small Press. Time and funds are limited, so I’ve only read a dozen zines and one anthology, but from that brief exposure Tony Petch stands out. In his 50s, Petch has been writing 30+ years, and it shows in his well-rounded Vanishing Point, a collection which offers straight narrative pieces, allegories, whimsical symbolism, pithy minimalist shards, and even a couple of limericks. The poems take different shapes to match a range of topics: a father’s death, the end of a relationship, the violence of the world, the constant loss we live with. Time and loss are sometimes in these lines, reminding us it’s important to touch what’s gone... 
Michael Kriesel, Small Press Review , USA

Apart
Tony Petch

Now I've left
no longer do you have to keep the knives so sharp.
I won't be writing, calling or popping up in your herbaceous borders.
Lettuce, jewellery, the morning mail,
all undergo your inspection to ensure nothing of mine,
not a freckle, not a frown or ruckle should remain or appear.

Does laughter slip on soap?
Not any more.
Even the hyena's given up on our show.
Broadway's looking for more lustre these days.

Latterly, I was so jumpy
the clothes I was wearing ran ahead of me.
My dirty washing had to be harpooned.

Now I've caught up with all my shirts and trousers
I've time to whistle and throw out my arms
without feeling I should be rolling pastry
or pumping up tyres.

No outfit could have mended the puncture between us
but out here on my own I can speak Italian badly,
and if I want, use my fingers to eat sausages
even if it's not done in Rome.

Not any more are spots of fat on my tie open to scrutiny
and my sentence can be as long and as muddled as I wish.
I can take out a loan on a bunch of carnations
or, to add to the millions of bits of information that litter the un tidy mind,
look up the definition of carbide before the end of the quiz.
Since I've gone, friends can't help noticing how white your sheets have become.
No longer are you afraid to hang them in the garden to dry.
Were we to write to one another
how clean both sides of the paper would be.

Seven League Stilettos

by Jane Kinninmont

Price: £7.00 (p+p free)

ISBN 978 0 9542397 6 3

Available from book shops or direct from 
Ragged Raven Press (postage + packing free)

To pay by credit card

or send cheques (UK sterling) or International Money Orders made payable to Ragged Raven Press to 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire CV37 0LR England.

Seven League Stilettos is a first collection by a young poet keen on cats and clothes. And, if her poems are anything to go by, keen on life and love. There is, in her free verse poetry, a freshness, a love affair with language, and a willingness to dive into waters of uncertain depth. In Sweetheart she sees in a sleeping lover's hands 'tiny question marks around the duvet' and in Totalitarian Love she borrows from Joe Stalin and projects a lover's face 'gigantically onto the sky'. But her poems are not all bliss, lovers sometimes leave, leaving the poet to 'darken the sky, slam shutters across every star-hole'. Death and despair also intrude: the death of a young friend in For Lee; the old woman in a room where 'the face of the clock is dimming'. And there is room for irony: Oxford Street, where 'the streets are paved with plastic'; and the jaded sensitivity of the traveller, forgetful of past aviation endeavours, and soon to 'move to Mars and moan about the weather'. An exuberant poet bursting with words. I can't see her being satisfied with a first collection. She'll be back and being a modern young writer we can monitor her progress on her website: www.janeswriting.co.uk 
John Plevin (Pulsar, March 2005)

There is much good poetry in Jane Kinninmont's first collection, the style and rhythms of some poems seem to lend themselves naturally to performance poetry. There is also a good sprinkling of personal poems. So many are refreshingly full of youth and vitality, often highly imaginative and great fun to read, but there are also some impressive more serious pieces. Jane Kinninmont's poetry is often strong on imagery, describing buying breakfast for her lover in Sweetheart she gazes at 'all the fortune-wheel of life/for one half-awake and inclined to fairy tale./ Simple sweet desires, spelt out in sugar./ The bakery bursting with melt-in-your-mouth metaphor,/ Romanced with almonds, drenched with honey.' The book's title comes from the poem Bedtime Story another romantic poem I also like. This contains some good images and is written in couplets... 'and I can cross any distance in no time at all/ striding continents in love's seven league stilettos./ The miles between us crumble, embarrassed./ Shamed into submission, they step discreetly aside./ I slip like moonlight through the crack in your window,/ Steal under your door on the back of a spider./ I cut through your walls with the edge of a whisper,/ And I come to you'... But by no means are all the poems personal ones. In To Bring It Home To You the poet contrasts the homecoming on leave of her granddad early on in the war, a homecoming marked by high spirits and optimism, with his final homecoming at the end of the war: 'When he came home, later, for good, they gave him a hero's welcome, flags everywhere. He sneaked round the back / Into the house, his head full of screams/ He would carry for sixty years.' Something of a traveller, she has performed poetry at Byron Bay, Australia, Jane Kinninmont knows her London - I was amused by Dismal Thoughts From Archway Road, which describes this dismal area so well, and was particularly impressed by Millennium Bridge which has some brilliant images - a few examples: 'My favourite spiky bridge/ Crowbars the city open./ Lines of buildings unfold like huge stone arms./' And later. 'The crazy bulk of the Tate Modern,/ A battering ram knocking at the sky/ A giant finger raised at the city.'... Perhaps I have tended to over emphasise the fun and youthful outlook of the poems. There are indeed plenty of more serious and thoughtful ones like the longer Four Salesmen of the Apocalypse and Fantasia in Apocalypse Minor. But my overall impression is of a poet full of vitality and a love of life... I enjoyed reading this collection, particularly for its refreshing, youthful outlook and vigour and look forward to reading more of the same. If she has this quality of writing in her early 20s Jane Kinninmont should have far to go in the world of poetry. 
Ron Woollard (New Hope International.)

Wonderfully inventive, full of vivid descriptions that are often both comic and tragic, but always surprising and magical... truly inspiring. 
Aoife Mannix (This Is It magazine)

Jane Kinninmont, describes herself as ‘short, noisy, fond of cats and obsessed with clothes’; she has been the editor of four magazines, and has worked as a ‘cheerful but incompetent bartender’. Now candour and self-deprecation of this kind in an author, especially one so young (she was born in 1981) is as winning as it is unusual. Not least because none of these qualities of shortness, fondness, obsession or incompetence distracts from the clarity or finesse of the poems included in her first collection, SEVEN LEAGUE STILETTOS. In fact, much of the work here is filled with surprise and unlooked-for verbal artistry... Reading SEVEN LEAGUE STILETTOS is like attending the first night’s performance of a new diva – not every note is perfect, but the voice is strong, original and full of natural grace and vivacity.
John Ballam (Cold Mountain Review)

"...The whole feel of the book had a spark of something that was special. They were not 'instant' poems but poems that I went back to time and again. I'm glad I did because they are worthy of the attention. I loved the eccentric humour in Magician. And from there I just kept finding gems that had eluded first time around. The wonderful imagery in Ice... There are poems that show an awareness of others' lives. Veteran, the touching To Bring It Home To You, and For Lee: some that put you in her picture such as Like A Shot, Call To Arms and Sweetheart. There were some that even after my many readings still evaded me. The Rhetoric Generator could have been omitted altogether for me and the experimental Stage Fright seemed oddly out of place... For me the highlight poem of this impressive collection is Like A Shot. A complete poem in every sense, one that most people would wish they had written. Fleeting memories, essential minutiae that form the whole that you become. The pictures that could not be caught with a camera... Beautiful. There's something about the feel of this book, the many sentiments and, indeed, the picture and cover notes, that made me want to like Jane Kinninmont.
Ronnie Goodyer (Reach)

There is a sense that something cheerful is going on all the time just beneath the surface of Kinninmont's work. I refer not only to the sequences that are weak at the knees with love, or to the poems echoing with the ooohs and aahs of a firework display, or the happy incongruity of the Buddha taking a psychometric test; indeed all of these, and many others, left me smiling. But at the other end of the scale, when your lover has deserted you and the only things that can come near to expressing your anger and your pain are thunder and rain and darkness, does this poet eschew the pathetic fallacy, as the well-behaved writer ought to do? No, she does not. She goes right ahead with the bad weather, facing out the critics by entitling the poem Pathetic Fallacy. This sort of defiant cheerfulness pervades the collection. Some of the poems have more enthusiasm than style, and some overstretch themselves, going where they do not need to go, as when the word mysterious intrudes unnecessarily in Bedtime Story, a competent poem that is mysterious enough without the telling of it. But on the whole, the writing is clever and funny and original, adventurous with vocabulary, playing around (and I mean playing) with form and style. The Rhetoric Generator is a circular prose poem of strangely compelling rhetorical nonsense, which ends only with the page does, otherwise it could go on for ever. Always observant, Kinninmont can be introspective or objective; in Looking at You, she is both, I think: 'When it's not nicely symmetrical,/ the uncanny, obsessive strangeness of love/ stands out in bare obscenity.' There are writers whose technique is flawless but who have nothing to say that I want to hear. I like what this writer has to say. As a poet, she has made an impressive start.
Frances Thompson (The Journal)

The day I no longer felt pain
Jane Kinninmont

I danced tarantella on a bed of upturned nails
I tattooed a picture of my face onto my face
I swallowed Japanese puffer fish whole
                                                            with porcupine soup
I stripped in the fire and tangoed with the flames
I covered myself in honey and ran naked through the beehive
I tore out my eyes and replaced them with permanent fireworks
I lay in the snow and drew maps with my blood
I wove myself a dress of nettles
I wore it to your wedding and smiled and smiled

Kung Fu Lullabies

by Chris Kinsey

Price: £7.00 (p+p free)

ISBN 978 0 9542397 7 0

Available from book shops or direct from 
Ragged Raven Press (postage + packing free)

To pay by credit card

or send cheques (UK sterling) or International Money Orders made payable to Ragged Raven Press to 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire CV37 0LR England.

An array of miscellaneous, very enticing poems exuding originality. A most rewarding experience to read. 
Eric Radcliffe (New Hope International)

  There is a spontaneity about many of the poems here which, when fused with the gentle elegiac tone characteristic of the book as a whole, makes for some lovely reading. One of my favourite pieces is entitled, Just Once which, even in this shortened version, balances direct declarative sentences with a wistfulness that is wholly indicative of childhood recollections: 'Dad took me out to the field. […] When we lay still and watched the sky/ he said: This is where we’re coming to live./ Years after we moved,/ I searched for that meadow,/ that sky.' Elsewhere Kinsey shows a real talent for reading the lives of others with an excitement that infuses the experience with vitality and vicarious joy, yet without ever becoming voyeuristic. For example, there is a celebratory tone underwriting these lines from In the park: 'Free from exams/ a couple are learning love.// Legs entwined in lotuses,/ they rise from their own star// to a single-pointed kiss/ then shift, divide.// […] Later they’ll light a fire/ to bring down the starlight.' Or contrastingly, there can be a sadness filled with wonder, as she glimpses an acquaintance not met for many years, in these lines from Late shopping: 'Ten shuffles along/ your shoulders look familiar/ but wrongly set. It’s your voice though// requesting, Cheapest whiskey./ Clinking the change you turn to give me/ a prodigal smile.' I suppose what gives these poems their power is the manner in which they invoke a really humane spirit, unwilling to treat a mood, observation, memory or sensation as simple, but rather seeing it as a mixture of often conflicting impulses. It’s an ability to see all the factors motivating her feelings, regardless of their disparity, as well as her willingness to accept this complexity without enforcing some kind of closure on her thoughts, that makes me respect Kinsey’s narrators. Real or imagined, her subjects inhabit a world as confused and as confusing as the one I recognise, and I admire her ability to treat the inexplicable dimensions of that world with candour and justice. 
John Ballam (Cold Mountain Review)

Her first book. A quiet voice and a sure one. No desperate writhings, no crippling doubt, no basking in uncertainty. Moreover a voice, damn her, achieved without apparent agony of effort. A blithe spirit, serene and unhurried in her way but maybe, beneath the surface, paddling like fury. Nothing shows but calm, wry, interested observation, a quirky sense of humour. No politics, little religion, no deep spiritual yearnings, no rage. Above all, no moralities, no polemics, no solutions. Her poems are not self-contained or forbidding. She doesn't insist. Rather she invites participation. Some ten poems take us back to childhood. Dad was a welder (master of the indigo flame). In Blacksmith, she visits him in his workshop. Other poems see her observing teenage behaviour with intense, almost jealous detachment, filled with the memory of her own adolescence (but also with a teacher's love of youth)... She has a genius for creating an image to encapsulate a feeling. She is unsentimental, unpretentious, never mawkish, never the slightest bit swamped with self-pity, nor ever less than clear. Only in one poem do the floodgates open, in the first three verses of Elegy for a Bird.  
Frances Uhlman (Dreamcatcher, 2005)

Chris Kinsey's first collection of poems has the feel of a manuscript that has been put together and worked on over a number of years. It shows the poet experimenting with themes and forms, and more importantly, has a sureness of touch that only a poet serious about the craft can achieve. Her confidence is displayed whether she is casting an eye over contemporary relationships in all their intimacy and oddness or in the thread of playfulness apparent in a number of pieces, which jump off the page and tickle you. The poems display a sharp mind at work, her images and stance surprise us, as all good poems should. There is nothing 'steady as she goes' about the pieces, the narratives crackle yet have been tenderly brought to life. Chris is a poet who cares, each poem has the ghost of myriad revisions lurking in the drawer. She is a particularly good starter, the first lines pull you in, or gift an image which means you can't pass it over. Take Late Blackbird Singing: 'A handful of April hail/ grazes glass./ We break from our meal,/ see the window is/ a welder's mask./' Or in Daddy's Been A Hunting: Last time I saw you asleep in a moses basket,/ a gust of wind crowned you with lace knickers.' The language is straightforward and never obtuse but it does have magic. There is a whole world behind some of these pieces that the poet allows us to glimpse. She encourages us to put our eye to the crack in the door, see what we can discover. There is an appealing humanity in Chris's gaze. Sure, her gaze is crystal but you can have ice and sun in the same mix can't you? I picked up the book over a succession of days and found myself enjoying it more and more... 
Roz Goddard (Raw Edge)

Elaborating on something Chris Kinsey has said of one of her own poems, U A Fanthorpe comments that Kinsey seems to walk into poems as if they were just coming at her violently, and she records them faithfully, almost helplessly.  Her poems are characteristically reactive: observational, situational, anecdotal, less slices of life than snatches at it. The life observed may be that of another person, but it is as often her own, and though she has an eye for oddities and isn't averse to fantasy, she's just as likely to be provoked by the ordinary... 
Richard Poole (Planet Review)

The Cantonese character on the cover means life force and that is exactly what this handsome book of modern lullabies is all about. From the poem An Invitation to Imaginary Numbers the lines 'A skein of geese tows the dark/ flies a ragged noose around our roofs' illustrate the multi-layered intensity to be found in this first collection. In a poem about County Mayo Kinsey cleverly works the half-rhythm in a manner reminiscent of Christy Brown: famine came to our car picnic/ her anguish more barbed than the fence which caught me.' Other poems such as Alwenna's Flock, A Smell of Petrol and Progress are commendable for their understated fury.  
Gwilym Williams (Pulsar)

There is a masculine feel to many of Chris Kinsey's poems. The tension between ideas and associations of maleness and femaleness is flagged up at the outset in the title, but it's a tension that's never far away. A glance through some of her themes reveals this: knives, flowers, fighting, birds, street-life, moons and landscape, but there is also a quality in the poet's tone itself which feels (stereo?)typically male. Sometimes this has a touch of Young British Artist: slick, knowing, assured to the point of cockiness; sometimes it has the brittle poise of stand-up: 'It's the wedding season again,/ talk of outfits, etiquette, expense./ It'll be my go in a minute/ The turn comes like a tackle.// Do you regret getting wed?/ No, only the blue eye-shadow.//'  In many of the poems it seems to me there's a struggle going on. Even, or perhaps especially when the subject is a traditionally female domain (weddings, childcare, pregnancy), the images are hard, physical and sudden. Kinsey's characters fence, parry, tackle, even axe (Rehabilitation). If there is a linguistic marriage of the sexes in these poems, it's a marriage which is heading for trouble. And the persistent tone of menace isn't shrugged off by Kinsey's laconic delivery; every laugh is a distinctly nervous one. 'Father Patrick was going on about crucifixion/ nerve by nerve, blood drop by blood drop// Kevin passed out. I lent my blade to an older girl/ who blinked into its light and painted her eyelids blue.'  That this language owes more to the banter of the pub than the poetry reading is to do with Kinsey's ear for the one-liner, the compressed, casual yet loaded wit of the street; with her instinct for the danger of the outside world. In these edgy, wary exchanges there isn't time for more: 'I shout/ Give her a blanket/ into exhaust fumes.' The comparison with stand up and YBAs can only be taken so far. The metaphors which drive this poetry don't come consciously, darts aiming for the bull of audience reaction, but from a deeply internalized source; the impression is that they're fused to the subject-matter. Poems are frequently staccato, breathless, as if they're jottings made while on the run, but some - notably those where the human element recedes, and the harmony of the natural world is more evident - achieve a momentary stillness that isn't quite peace, but something close to it, as in the named and unnamed colours of Weather Vanes: 'Two red kites spiral then hover/ buckling under the span of blue/ Though our feet crunch ice nails/ gorse flames with new blooms.' In these poems, too, Kinsey seems to put the linguistic struggle of the sexes aside, lifting off into a region where the language is quieter, less aggressively gendered, where the pleasure of the poem seems finally to have taken its poet by surprise.
Roberta J Dewa (Poetry Nottingham)

A Kung Fu Lullaby
Chris Kinsey

I’ve never faced a novice so young, so fierce -
a moment of cowardice
makes me want to hand you back.

Three weeks old;
fury fires your limbs,
charges your spine rigid.

Your perfect cries deafen midnight
till we tilt, heart on heart.
My hands let go

leave you balancing at low tide.

You shin along my ribbing
snuggle under my chin
subside into sobs and snuffles.

We bob in the shallows catching the swell
until we’re afloat
billowing on big breaths.

I tell you in thoughts,
It takes time and lots of practice
to map a mind into a body.

2.00 a.m. Dad brings your feed -
you’re stuck to my neck
like a snail on a hot wall.

Prised free,
we’re both afraid
you’re going to slip through our hands.

The Invention of Butterfly

by Christopher James

Price: £7.00 (p+p free)

ISBN 978 0 9542397 9 4

Available from book shops or direct from 
Ragged Raven Press (postage + packing free)

To pay by credit card

or send cheques (UK sterling) or International Money Orders made payable to Ragged Raven Press to 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire CV37 0LR England.

Christopher James won The Ledbury Poetry Prize (2003 and 2006), The Bridport Prize (2002) and the 20th Poetry Life Competition (2002) and was a runner-up in the Daily Telegraph/Arvon Poetry Competition (2002). He received an Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors in 2002.

Christopher James has made an impressive debut with The Invention of Butterfly. He has a wonderful eye for an image and a wonderful sense of humour. James has already won a depressing number of prizes for his poetry but on this evidence they have been well-deserved. We will be hearing much more from this writer.
Nessa O'Mahony, Orbis

This wonderful collection is infused with and sustained by an ebullience that, at times, is almost exhausting. Too grounded to be surreal, too substantial to be conceits, dense in content by light in touch, many of these poems are written in the style of comic magic realism. The sense of delight they carry, their wit, inventiveness and warmth, are overwhelming...Christopher James' range is impressively wide, the breadth of his knowledge and interests equally impressive. Refreshingly, he clearly prefers the tongue-in-cheek and good-natured satire rather than irony, that dead hand that mars so much poetry, and so many poets, which is all too easy a mode to write in, and a trap...There is some cleverness of the sort produced by whippersnappers, that grizzled veterans get sniffy about, but I'd defy anyone not to be beguiled as I was...Occasionally, he is a tad obvious, but being Christopher James, obvious with style...Where he achieves brilliance, which he does in a number of these poems, is when he attempts to get inside another persona, and ventriloquize. In this mode, he rises to small miracles of empathy, his language stripping itself down to stringent necessity...Whilst other poets only catch fire in single lines, single images, or single poems, Christopher James gives you the full blaze.
Paul Lee, Poetry Nottingham

In recent years there can be few young poets who have burst, fully formed, upon the poetry scene as Christopher James does with his first collection, The Invention of Butterfly. The word invention, in the title of his book, stands like a beacon to his success — James has got imagination in spades and this, together with his off-beat humour and assured skill as a story teller, allows him to compose cleverly formed and unique poems. James is interested in the curious, he is drawn to unusual facts... Once an idea is chosen it is sieved through his powerful imagination until it emerges, cunningly and strikingly formed, as a witty and curious poem... So many of James's poems are rooted in the most unexpected subject matter yet chime in the most astonishing ways. Reading The Invention of Butterfly at one sitting is a bit like watching a compilation of the best bits of Monty Python's Flying Circus. If anything, it is even more bizarre as the book leaps from a vision of [Samuel] Pepys at Sea via Christopher Marlowe in Reverse to an unusual take on Pinocchio — The Last Prank of the Marionette. I particularly liked The Only Penny Farthing in Iceland in which a careless Victorian cyclist and his machine tumble from a Liverpool dockside into the freezing hold of a trawler where they are: 'embedded in a hoard of herring and crushed ice'. The frozen cyclist and his machine are unloaded in Iceland: 'Reunited with his bicycle on the dockside/ the man resembled a newly commissioned statue,/ still slightly bent at the knee and stiff as cardboard,/ an official gift perhaps, from a neighbouring state'... I would recommend The Invention of Butterfly as a compelling and fascinating book — this accomplished and inventive young poet will certainly be someone to watch.
Patrick B. Osada, New Hope International

Christopher James' voice has a cheerful tone - sometimes verging on the irritatingly zany - but the poet as MC wins us over in the end.
Christopher J P Smith, Acumen

This inspired first collection offers a rich diet of language tricks and subtleties...James' skilfully-handled humour and fantasies yield to a simple way of speaking and describing, as if a poem hid nothing at all .
Paul Sutherland, Dream Catcher

In Christopher James' first volume, The Invention of Butterfly, the worlds created are impressively diverse...there is an unstoppable fascination with oddness, and absurdity: small or large events which create their own poetry...James is a narrative chameleon, easily attracted into the worlds of diverse personas...James' ability to develop an original idea, character or place is remarkable, and he writes on the sure foundation of a genuine talent.
Will Daunt, Envoi

James' strengths are in narrative and metaphor, revealing the fantastic in the real and giving fantasy the substance of reality...Be prepared for an ice-age in modern London, a fire in an ice house, a musical safe-cracker, a chocoholic saint, a deep-frozen Victorian cyclist, a handwritten national newspaper, Ernest Hemingway 'wrestling with a combination lock' in Convent Garden, and Anthony Trollope in the cockpit of Thunderbird Two. Throughout James' Muse is in the details...images have a breathtaking cleverness and delicacy.
Mark McGuinness, Magma

...intelligent fun. Each poem sets out its own internal logic and credibly follows it so you believe in Norfolk drifting out to sea or the job description for a writer in residence in Antarctica or when a man asks where he can buy snuff on O'Connell Street or Shakespeare ordering his wine from Tenerife. Paul Klee once described art as taking a line for a walk. Christopher James very much enjoys taking an idea for a walk. One to relish.
Emma Lee, The Journal

Wordsworth on Wordsworth
Christopher James

Nobody else had noticed him,
the man at the back of the guided tour
with the Nick Drake T-shirt,
stretched as tight as a snare over his belly.
His thin, grey hair was brushed forward,
and a full set of side-whiskers
bristled like speech marks about his face.
It seemed a flimsy disguise
for a romantic poet on home-turf.

While the others peered
at the home-made candles
that burned at both ends
and which filled the room
with a thick, yellowish smoke,
and stared into the double sink
that he and Coleridge
once filled to the brim
with rum and laudanum,
he beckoned for me
to follow him into the garden.
We passed over the step
De Quincey once slipped on
during a midnight rainstorm,
shaving off an entire eyebrow
against a sharpened flint,
and settled on a bench
overlooking the lake.

Never live with your sister,
he said, pinching a thin ridge
of rolling tobacco into position.
Choose friends with habits
better than your own
and don't tinker with poems
you finished as a young man.
They will not improve.

the mile long piano

by Andy Fletcher

Price: £7.00 (p+p free)

ISBN 978 0 9552552 3 6

Available from book shops or direct from 
Ragged Raven Press (postage + packing free)

To pay by credit card

or send cheques (UK sterling) or International Money Orders made payable to Ragged Raven Press to 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire CV37 0LR England.

...as imaginative - and varied - as the scale of its title suggests...Through using clear, uncomplicated language to explore feelings - and some surreal flights of imagination - Andy has created a powerful, and often surprising, poetry collection. 
Will Ramsey, Hull Daily Mail  

Well worth a look. I particularly liked, 'the u.s.a,' an amusing take of what would happen if the super power had to entirely relocate to the Isle of Wight! A good Christmas present.
 David Pike, Pulsar

According to the back cover of this book, Andy Fletcher was founder (and only member) of Revetisana (revolutionary vegan tigers supporters against nuclear arms). It is good to know that all that tofu is being put to good use, perhaps to befuddle the sonar of Trident submarines or foul the flight path of the odd missile. With such important work to do and so many trips to Holland & Barratt to make, it’s amazing he found time to write a book. I am glad that he did.  
The poems themselves, whilst not quite revolutionary, are certainly different, fresh and engaging. The focus here is primarily the everyday world, but from an off-centre viewpoint and with a dash of sidelong surrealism which I enjoyed. I particularly liked the prose poems that pepper this collection which are meanderingly discursive and shaggily Shandyesque without being rambling or inconsequential. Cat sequence was perhaps my favourite of these, which manages to take in football, the invention of cats’ eyes and what can be found behind the panel of the poet’s bath in the space of a page. These unpunctuated stream of consciousness style pieces can often be forced and leaden, but the touch here is light and sure, the voice fluid. I also liked man and horse, which describes a man leading a horse across the sea, with the poet speculating what this vision means: 'i could be the man or the horse, the man in a grey jacket and worn boots, the horse with a bare patch on one of its flanks. i could even be the rope connecting them, a wet rope with a few frayed strands.'
The rest of the collection is written in free verse with irregular stanzas, a format that suits the poems well. The tone throughout is informal, conversational and never intrusive, with the content and movement of each piece being allowed to determine its form and structure. Many of these poems are about people and the always complex, often difficult, relationships between them. The cool, restrained, uncluttered style works well with this, nicely counterpointing the often emotive content, highlighting it by throwing it into relief. A good example of this is fifteen, which is about a tentative same-sex experience in a school cloakroom. Many poets would wring a poem like this dry, put it through a mangle, iron it and leave it on the radiator for a few hours to be sure that every last millilitre of pathos and emotion had been extracted from it. Fletcher’s treatment, by contrast, is sparse and restrained, letting the precise and carefully wrought images do the work: 'i couldn’t separate truth from truth /i crept away into an innocent forest /where coats hung /from the branches
Some of the shorter poems are almost Japanese in their economy and concision. Writing a good poem is as much about leaving things out as putting things in and Fletcher is definitely a master of leaving things out, meaning that what is left in is lean, powerful and sometimes mysterious, as in caravan in the nettles: 'the door is off its hinges /dead leaves on what’s left of a cushion /your folded sunglasses still there /nobody’s ever asked me and i’ve never told them'.
This is a well written and enjoyable collection which is both humorous and touching, often at the same time and has moments of great seriousness and profundity without ever being sombre or heavy. These poems remind us that we do not have to look to the heavens for meaning and significance: it is all around us in the people that we know, the things that we see, the words that we speak and the thoughts that we think. They also, with their subtle swoops and swerves of syntax and sense, their mercurial mutations from a start point of apparent simplicity, remind us that how things are is not how things will always be, as in at any moment: 'at any moment /the universe may turn itself inside out /and then where would we be /with our carrier bags full of bargains?'
Tom Jenks, Parameter Magazine

Small things
Andy Fletcher

the real power
lies in small things.
a freckle, a ball bearing,
a dandelion seed.
a wall may stand for years
but its fall's determined
by the separation
of grains of sand in the mortar.
think of a whale relying on plankton,
a rocket beginning as a dot on a piece of paper.
a whole world's set in motion
by an eyelash, a wasp's sting,
a press-stud, a microchip.
i look at the zig-zagging reflection
of my watch on the ceiling
and at night across the darkness a shooting star.
in its path small words follow
words such as 'how' and 'why'.