3.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the author in return for an honest review.

Several books that I have read recently have pointed out the obvious point that we are as much a part of this watery blue planet and its ecosystem as it is part of us. Over the pandemic many people have discovered or rediscovered the natural world and felt how just being in a woodland or near a river can help in so many ways. I spend a number of evenings walking down to the river, sometimes to watch the sun go down, or see if I can see the otters or sometimes just to watch the water flow under the bridge.

This new collection by Emma Blas is her conversations with the watery world that she wants us to start to correspond with too. They are poems that are drawn deep from her heart as she looks to the ocean for comfort and peace. In some she slings her anger deep into the cool silky water which absorbs and tempers her, the saline swell calm her boiling mind.

i will swap this ravens call

for a ride

on the wing of a gull

let this voice soften

salt and brined

to a howl for the moon

She finds herself at sunset, hoping to blend and blur with the sky and join the edge of the sunset. Her church is the ocean, a place that she holds dear and some of the poems reflect that spiritual side of her engagement with it. But there is anger in these words too, anger at the injustice in the world.

i have never tried

to hold something

so fluid as a river

Yet it feels more in my reach

than trying to grasp

what it means to be human

This is quite an emotional collection, Blas is baring her inner soul in a lot of the poems. From mourning not being near the shore for a long time to contemplating the vastness of the sky and counting the reasons why she cannot be loved. To Ripple is such a short poem, and yet full of profound mean about how we deal with relationships. As with any collection, there were a couple that I didn’t like, but overall I thought that this was a good collection.

Four Favourite Poems

In the Shadows

How High Will I Rise

The Edge of Moonlight

Worn Hollow

4 out of 4 stars

At the beginning of lockdown number 1, I was wandering through Waitrose last year I paused by a fairly empty shelf and I was surprised by seeing something on the shelf that I never expected to see; a Fray Bentos pie. Two things surprised me about this, one that they still existed and secondly that it was in Waitrose. It has been a while since I had one of those. And I think it was only ever one that I had…

You are what you eat is that well-known phrase that springs to mind, and on one level we very much are the sum of all the things we pop in our mouth. But on a different level, the things that we would call our favourite foods also define us as a person and make our class and the are we live very easily identifiable. When we think of India and its curries, France and the cheeses and gourmet foods and Belgium would be mussels and chips with mayonnaise. But what foods would you use to define Britain?

This was a question that Pete Brown often asked himself and it got him thinking. He was born and brought up in the north but now lives a London life. Couple that with his work as a food and drink journalist he has tried and drunk many different things, but he still has his favourites. Narrowing it down to eight different things to put in the book wasn’t going to be easy.

In the end, he made his choice of the meals that he wanted to include that he considered defined him and he considered were classic British dishes. These were Pie and Peas, cheese sandwiches, fish and chips, spaghetti Bolognese, a west country cream tea, curry, a full English breakfast and of course the classic roast followed by a Rhubarb crumble.

He decided that he wants to eat a typical example of each so rather than just wander out into the local area he decides to travel a little of the country to see the sights, meet the locals who make these things and most importantly eat. He heads to Blackpool to eat fish and chips, eats curries in Birmingham and enjoys decided whether it is the cream or jam first in Devon. He persuades two friends to make their version of spag bol and then decides to recreate the version he made as a teenager for his family. Searching for the typical cheese sandwich takes a little longer and the debate as to what you must include in a full English breakfast will run and run.

Each of his chosen meals has a chapter dedicated to it and he talks about the cultural and history behind it as well as eating an awful lot of really good food. I thought that this was another really good book from the pen of Pete Brown. I like his writing style, is conversational and informative without coming across as patronising. There is a smattering of withering sarcasm and gentle ribbing as well as a strong shot of self-deprecating humour too. Would I have picked these eight dishes for my iconic British foods? No, but some of them would have been on there. He also shows that British food can be really bad and more often now, really good. Entertaining reading, though you may need snacks when reading it.

3 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

It is 1837 and the Carlist Wars are at their height. A young man by the name of Rudolf von Wielemann arrives to help in the struggle. He is not there completely by choice as he has been lent on heavily by his family as his father thinks that assisting in the war with the Carlists against the liberals will be honour for the family name. He is bearing an introductory letter from his uncle. However, this young man is completely out of sorts, he has had a well to do upbringing with a passion for music and had an ordered comfortable life. But here in Spain, he is utterly out of his depth.

For a start, he barely speaks the language, Catalan and the dialect that they speak in the region that he is in is another level of difficulty. He has gone from his ordered and organised life in a civilised part of northern Europe to the chaos of war. They are not quite sure what to do with this tall Prussian but eventually find him a task but he is not really suited to it.

He makes friends with Dr Miguel Foraster and captivates him with his musical ability. But it is time to move into war and he is put in charge of a platoon of men, who are better known as the Shambolic Six, as the liberals carry out their attacks.

I liked this book overall, the prose is richly detailed and full of vivid descriptions. It is full of subtle nuanced humour, especially between von Wielemann and the men he is in charge of. But it is a layered story too, part of the book is about the discovery of the papers that von Wielemann left and how the narrator of the book, Raül, is teasing out the details and working with a publisher to write a book. I must admit that it took me a short while to work out that the story was jumping back and forwards from a historical plot to an autobiographical part as the author wonders about the man he is researching and hopes that the editor will like his writings about him.

4 out of 5 stars

It was a night that she can still remember now, the full crowd, the warmth of the evening even though she was in Wales at the time. There came the moment in the concert where the violinist stepped up to play. The other instruments faded and the first notes flowed out from the strings.

When I heard the violin speak for the first time, with a voice powerful enough to open pores and unbuckle joints, and a shocking intimacy that left us all stupid with longing for emotions larger, wilder sadder and more joyful than we ever had known.

It became a memory and something precious in that very moment.

It was a bit of luck that after the concert they walked out and spotted the violinist. She went over to talk to him. He said that he had been told that the instrument had been made in Italy in the 18th century, but he had got it from a Russian and it is called Lev’s violin after the guy who had owned it before. He got it out of the case for her to see.

Expecting a pristine instrument, Attlee was surprised to see it worse for wear. Cradling it in her arms like a baby she realised that it carried the presence of everyone who had ever played it. He had been told that it was absolutely worthless when he had taken it to be valued. But surely a violin that was made in Cremona, home to the master craftsman, Stradivarius, and sounded like it did, must have a story behind it?

She thought about the concert and the sound of the violin a lot over the next few months, partly as the process of clearing her mother’s possessions meant that she wondered a lot about the stories that the things that we own have to tell us. As luck would have it she was offered work in Milan and that was really close to Cremona; she would go onto the town after to find out more about the history of the instruments made there.

It was the beginning of a journey that would take her from the workshops of that town and back into the past learning how they are made. She journeys high into the alps to see where the wood is sourced from and heads to Russia to meet Lev, the previous owner of the violin. Each of these helps her uncover a little more information about this particular instrument and the wider history of the various European diasporas that took the violins and the craft of making them all over the continent. She meets a modern-day luthier, Melvin Goldsmith who happens to make some of the best sounding violins mostly by not following conventional techniques. What would really tell her just what this violin that she had become a tiny bit obsessed with, is a dendrochronology check. Perhaps after that, it would reveal its secrets. Attlee was just about to find out.

It struck me that although people make things, things are very often the making of people

I really liked this, Attlee writes well and this has a strong coherent narrative as she follows the trail of Lev’s violin to north Italy and on into Russia gradually uncovering its history. I liked the blend of history, travel and memoir that has enough of each of them to balance it. If you have any interest in the history of music then you’d probably like this.

The violin is laying broken in it’s case and there is a crowdfunded here to raise the money to have it rebuilt and restored so it can be heard once again. You can donate money here

3 out of 5 stars

I did chemistry at school but didn’t do that well at it for a variety of reasons. However, chemistry is a big thing in our household, my other half teaches it and my youngest daughter is aiming to study it at university in the Autumn. There are copies of Chemistry World around the house and there are various chemistry conversations about all manner of things over dinner.

Even though I am not very good at it, I still find the subject fascinating, hence why I picked this book up. Kit Chapman writes about the metals that appear in the bottom rows of the periodic table and the stories behind how they were found, who discovered them and the challenges in finding these heavy metals.

The story begins with the atomic bomb and the research that led up to us discovering a foolproof way of completely eradicating the entire planet of life as we know it… This is cutting edge science and to make the metals that were needed to make these weapons. They had to develop the machines to do it including the wonderfully named cyclotron. Even though these are some of the heaviest elements, they are elusive, and often the only way of detecting that they have been made by the machine if looking at the decay trails detected by the sensors.

The guys who make these heavy metals were characters in their own right. Chapman has the opportunity to meet a number of them as he travels to all the labs in America, Russia, Germany and Japan and talks to some of the people who have that rare honour of finding an element that is new to science.

I quite liked this book overall. It does venture very close to the line that separates popular science from academic papers and occasionally ventures across it. That said, Chapman has done his research well and managed to hold together a cohesive narrative about the search for these elusive heavy metals.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

It has been a strange old world over the past five years, and then at the beginning of 2020 things took a whole different turn once again. Rising infections of disease from China crossed borders and continents and in what seemed like no time at all, we were in the midst of a global pandemic. COVID-19 was here and it wasn’t going anywhere soon.

Life as we had known it would change like nothing we had ever know before,

Different people coped in many different ways, there was generally a good spirit between communities and neighbours, but the stresses of the situation as further lockdowns that happened would begin to build. As these changes unsettled Cowen he began to pay heed to the things around him that never changed, things that anchored him to where he lived and became a metaphorical and literal support for him.

What he observed on his government approved outside excursions he began to write about what he had seen. Some of the poems were a scrawl on a page that scarcely changed from that first draft and others he would think about as sleep evaded him. Looking framed the poetry and the words demanded more observations. These are the tiny moments that he saw around him.

There it hung, in stillness, blackness,
Right there, for a moment, alone
As though arranged entirely for us;
A perfect disk of polished bone

The poems in this collection feel polarised, on one hand, there are poems about starlings and hawks carrying on with their lives as though nothing had changed in the world. Moments of the natural world gave comfort to Cowen as he coped in his own way with the pandemic. There are then other poems that are raw and emotional responses to the subjects that affected him and his family. I didn’t realise that the author and artist had not met before this collaboration, as what they have compiled is a beautiful book. I particularly like the art that Hayes has created for the book. The images are strong and evocative without being bleak.

Three Favourite Poems
Last Breaths
Self Isolating
Family Trees