2 out of 5 stars

In the rural community of Lincoln, Illinois a farmer is murdered after a neighbouring farmer shoots him. The community is shocked by this and again by the second tragedy that was to befall them soon after. What is left of the two families are left to patch up their lives and the case is soon forgotten about. Except by the narrator of the story. He was almost friends with the son of one of the deceased and the memories of the time still weight heavily in his mind.

Fifty years later, he decides that he wants to fill in the gaps of what happened at the time. He writes off to the local paper for copies of the articles that were written at the time and eventually gets a set of articles sent to him. It felt like looking at history through the wrong end of a set of binoculars. In amongst the $7 suit adverts of the time were the nuggets of information that washed over him as a child. As he starts to go back over the events that led up to this double tragedy he realises that he has more questions than answers now.

Even though I have only given this two stars, there were some parts of this novella that I liked, the prose is taut and sparse, he has barely wasted a letter in the writing of this. It felt at times a little like Of Mice and Men the way he portrayed the sense of place that you get from reading it. I could see the fields that the community lived in and sense the bleakness from the uniformity of it all. The main problem that I had with it was that it didn’t feel cohesive to me. It jumps back and forwards and you find out almost immediately about the murder and the remainder of the book is spent with the narrator exploring and trying to understand what happened all those years ago and coming to terms with his guilt.

3 out of 5 stars

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

One of the things that differentiate us from the majority of the animal kingdom is our use and development of tools that aid us in doing all manner of things. Just on my desk are a plethora of items that have been invented by someone at some point in history. Just take the pencil, it first came about in 1564 in the UK as a piece of graphite. Then the Italians wrapped that in wood to stop getting their hands dirty. Two hundred years after that, the Austrians added clay to the graphite and came up with what we would recognise today.

Ross has split these human achievements into seven sections, In the Beginning, At Home, Health and Medicine, Getting About, Science and Engineering, Peace and War and Culture. The first section is the shortest, more of a marking of time until carbon-based bipeds became the human beings of today. Each section that follows has reams of facts and dates of items and subjects as diverse as door locks, blood groups, kites, bridges and diplomacy and evening the space hopper (remember those?).

I did like this, but in essence, this is a great big list that is full of facts and dates. Sadly there is very little context as to how the thing was first begun or invented and how the subsequent inventions were derived from previous items. That said, that is not the point of this book, if you need that extra depth of information then consult an encyclopaedia of original source of material for more detail. It would be a great source for those doing quizzes.

4.5 out of 5 stars

One of the pleasures that I discovered from lockdown was the pleasure of sitting by the water, It is a dynamic medium that changes constantly during the day, it reflects the weather, moves as the breeze ripples the surface and is never the same each moment.

Way back in 2012, Clare Best and the artist Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis went in search of the water on the South Downs. There had been a drought that year that meant that the wells, furnace ponds, pools and dew ponds that they were looking for had more of less vanished, leaving only the faintest glimpse of their watery origins. Though the water was scarce, what they did find was the landscape that told the stories of those that had worked there as well as the richness of the natural world that of was claiming it back.

Now streams and lakes
Are lucent, hushed –
No hammers, no forges,
No cannon, no soot,
But fire that smoulders
In rusty pools

This beautifully laid out is split into three sections, the first is poetry, then there are short essays from other writers and their response to the landscape of the chalk down and watery places elsewhere in the country. They have also sourced artworks from a private collection that are just wonderful.

The poems are as sparse as they are beautiful. Coupled with Aytoun-Ellis’s artworks this makes a beautiful book to have and to hold. One to be dipped into again and again I think

Three Favourite Poems

How Water Comes Through

Ironmakers

Interval

4 out of 5 stars

They were flying over an endless desert at 220mph. It stretched to the horizon from both windows. Rather than feeling excited about the flight into Baghdad, Maxwell felt a touch of fear. This journey had begun a couple of years before when he had written to the man sitting alongside him on the plane, they met in London. He explained there would be no home comforts and it would be incredibly tough travelling. In the end, he agreed to take him the next time he was going there. That man dozing alongside him was the legendary explorer Wilfred Thesiger and this was to be Maxwell’s first trip to the marshes of southern Iraq.

It was a place where outsiders were treated with suspicion, and not many ventured into their waterscape made up of a mass of tiny islands in a maze of reeds and swamps. They stopped for a few days in Basra where they were joined by the lads that Thesiger used to help him navigate the wilderness. They then all piled into a car and headed south before turning off the road and heading to where the lads had left their canoe. Finally, he was heading into the marshes.

Under a storm sky this landscape, too, could seem bleak and terrible, but now it seemed a wonderland, and the colours had the brilliance and clarity of fine enamel.

He would accompany Thesiger as he visited the various places that he wanted to go on this visit. They would only stay one night before moving on to another home so they didn’t become too much of a burden on their host. Moving across the water in a shallow draught canoe when the wind was blowing a gale is a bit nerve-wracking; especially if the local guides seemed to be worried too.

Maxwell is quite a good shot on land, shooting coots and ducks while sitting cross-legged in a gently rocking canoe is another matter. Sometimes he got lucky and sometimes he didn’t. As honoured guests, they attend weddings, watch dancers and share stories around the buffalo dung fires in the evenings. He watches how they construct their houses, and make the reed matting that is used for all manner of things.

It was a landscape as weird as a Lost World, and through it flew birds as strange and unfamiliar in flight as pterodactyls; snake-necked African darters, pygmy cormorants and halcyon kingfishers

The is the final book following on from Thesiger’s classic and Gavin Young’s Return To The Marshes in the triage of books I read about the Marsh Arabs. I think that I liked them all about the same but for a variety of different reasons. Thesiger and Young came across as more seasoned travellers, but in A Reed Shaken by the Wind, you got the sense that Maxwell was a little out of his depth travelling in the region for the first time.

Whilst he may have been outside his comfort zone, his prose can be magnificent at times. He has an eye for details about the people, their sparse but simple homes, the weather and the watery landscapes they are traversing in the canoes. I felt more of a sense of how it felt to be in the region more than with the other two authors. It was here too that he was to become the owner of an otter cub, Mijbil and the author of a book that would make him famous.

4 out of 5 stars

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

There are a diverse set of plots in this collection, from a man still mourning the death of his brother all those years ago and trying to understand just what happened on that day. There is Peter showing a previous resident around the home that he has just bought with his boyfriend and that they are just starting to renovate. A man who is in between jobs is staying at an apartment in Rome and he is called upon to help after an earthquake strikes the region. Another story tells of a brief dalliance with another lady who was working at the same supermarket as him before they went their own separate ways in the world once again.

Set in all parts of the world, all of the stories have richly formed characters and there is enough detail of each of them for you to be able to grasp their backstory as they are thrust deep into the plot. They feel like real people too, not wildly implausible characters, doing real, mundane things and experiencing the joys and pains of life.

I thought that there were some really good stories in this collection of thirteen by Mort. They are not always cheerful, so if you are looking for something uplifting at the moment, others might be more appropriate. Three of my favourite stories were Saint Peter, Pepe’s and Oliva, which I thought was superb.

3.5 out of 5 stars

The maxim, write about what you know rings true in this instance. Berry has tapped deeply into the Black Country as a source of the material in this collection. There are poems on the legacy of the coal industry, memories of camping in the Guides and of eating brains for tea at Nanny’s.

There are poems about places, Gotsy Hilland Tipton-On-Cut, (which are both fantastic names by the way) and some about the heavy industry that came to define the region. Among the poems are some on the natural world, including Owl, The Silver Birth and Woodkeeper.

I will ripen you like a rare Chanterelle,
Let you creep into tender cracks of my bark
penetrate the dearest heartwood at my core

What I most liked about this collection was the language. Not only does Berry have a way with words but she is utilising her local dialect to its maximum advantage. The poems flow with words that I have never come across before, such as canting, jedden, donkey bite and the fabulous tranklement. I liked this a lot and am going to try to get hold of her other collections.

Three Favourite Poems
The Year We Married Birds
The Silver Birch
Echo

4 out of 5 stars

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

Marcus Preece is said to be one of the most interesting writers you’ve never heard of. They were right too, I have never heard of him until this landed on my doorstep. This is likely to be the only book that he has to his name too as he sadly passed away in 2017 at the age of 54.

Thankfully his friend, Malu Halasa sifted through his draft notes and incomplete projects for dozens of stories, screenplays and comic strips along with essays, journalism, poetry and random pieces that didn’t quite fit in anywhere else. And amongst that mass of material, there were some gems. Thankfully Halasa is an editor and she knew what she could make from his work. Even though Preece is the author of this book, this is her work in compiling it into a cohesive entity.

As I find with any collection there are some things that I like more than others. There were a couple of screenplays that didn’t really work for me but I did have some particular favourites from this book. I thought that the poems here were excellent, it is such a shame there were so few of them. His music journalism too was really good, he manages in so few words to really convey the vibe of the bands and the venue. Swiftnick and The Legend of the Lonesome Cowboy were really good too. The final part of the book is another screenplay, Everybody’s Happy Nowadays. To begin with, I wasn’t sure, but then it reached a point where everything slotted into place and I really ended up liking it.

As it is so diverse, not only in its styles but also in the material that he covers, there is something for everyone in here. They even made space for friends to pay their own tributes to him. If you want a challenging and often entertaining read then give this a go.

4 out of 5 stars

Young was in Basra working for a shipping company in 1952 when he heard that the great Arabian traveller Thesiger was in town. He managed to wangle a meeting with him via the British Consul and over lunch told him about his dream of travelling across Saudi Arabia on the back of a camel. Expecting encouragement from him, he was rebuffed and told that he would never get a visa for the country. At that moment, the thought of sitting in an office for the rest of his working life almost became too much of a burden to bear. Instead, Thesiger suggests a trip to the marshes. He was going there tomorrow, but would be back in six weeks, for a bath and could take him then.

He had never heard of the place, but six weeks later he is climbing out of a taxi, alongside a tribute of Tigris. Alongside the bank is a long slender black canoe with some lads sitting in it. He is told to carefully climb in as it can tip. In no time at all, they are gliding silently through the water. Greetings were exchanged with other canoes that they passed. There was a word from the lad paddling in the front and they turned a corner and Young had the first glimpse of the home of the Madan. The following morning they would travel far deeper into the marsh.

It was the beginning of a series of friendships that would last all his life. Like Thesiger, he grew to love the watery landscape and most of all the people. It was a harsh life there, aa lot of the people he knew or saw had some form of injury or illness. Even though it was tough there, the people seemed happy, but he could sense that pressure from the outside world starting to seep in, men were starting to use nets to fish rather than the more traditional spears, guns that had been looted from various armies had changed the dynamics between the various tribes to a certain extent.

He returned many times to the marshes, but the last time he went before this book was written was in the early 1970s. His memories flood back as he pulls up in a taxi in more or less the same spot as he did all those years ago. Fear mixed with elation as he wondered how it would have changed over that time…

I really liked this book, like Thesiger he is a sensitive traveller, accepting of the hospitality that he is generously offered and wanting to help and spend time with the people of the marshes. It is partly a history of the region, how it moved through its various changes before adopting Islam from the Arabs before it moves onto his travels around the place with Thesiger and then by himself a few years later. He has a perceptive eye for the people and the wildlife as he travels around the marshes in his own boat with locals acting as guides. The final part of the book was excellent; he heads back after a large number of years and not only does he find the people that he knew from the 1950s, but they remember him. His writing style is a little warmer than Thesiger and it is a good companion volume to The Marsh Arabs and A Reed Shaken By The Wind. You get a sense of the events and places that all three authors saw from a subtly different perspective.

4 out of 5 stars

We as humans, like to put various things into separate sections, the shops are here, the roads are there, housing is in this part of town and so on. This is great in principle, but it has the effect of obliterating the wildlife that was there before. What happens though is that we are not always neat at finishing these projects off, there are gaps in between and it is in these hidden corners that our wildlife finds a way to cling on, survive and in certain cases thrive.

He begins with the peregrine, a bird that after years of persecution and the horrific effects of DDT we nearly lost. They are most commonly found high on cliffs, but now if you know where to look they can be seen in the artificial cliffs we have built in our towns and cities. We even have some in Poole that fly between the high rise buildings near the harbour, picking off the pigeons that populate our towns now. Also, while in Dorset he visits the town of Blandford Forum to see what the council have been doing to the verges. We are lucky not to have a single meter of motorway in the county, however, there are over 5000 miles of roads and these almost all have verges. What they have done is to stop cutting them until the late summer this allows the wildflowers on them to set seed properly and providing a bounty for insects and therefore for birds and small mammals. These little mini nature reserves have become recognised as Sites of Nature Conservation Interest in their own right.

These linear wildlife highways also exist on the railways, or what is left of them, the embankments and cuttings having their own little ecosystems. The lines that were ripped out after the 1960s cuts have changed in usage now are have become cycle paths and in their own way very long and thin nature reserves now. In Wiltshire, there is a huge tract of land that is used for military training, Salisbury Plain. As well as having lots of unexploded ordinance around the plain is basically an untouched chalk grassland. The tanks make a little difference, but the wildlife is there because the military has ensured that it has never been developed.

Developers much prefer to build on untouched land as the cleanup bills for brownfield sites can be huge. There are a lot of them around the country, previous industrial sites that have been closed as we have moved manufacturing offshore. Where they have been left for a number of years, the natural world creeps back in moving to scrub land in what feels like no time at all. And in these unplanned scruffy patches of land, the natural world does really well. At one site, Moss goes to hear nightingales, it didn’t have the same ambience as a glade in a woodland, but the dense scrub suits the birds perfectly. One of these scraps of land, Gunnersbury Triangle, would become the subject of a famous ruling in favour of keeping it because of its value as a natural space for local people.

As with all of Moss’s book this is well researched and very readable. He is an engaging writer, with a fine eye for detail of the places that he visits and more importantly knowing the limits of his knowledge and when it is best to seek that from a local who knows far more. It is a book that builds on others writing on these marginal spots, including the excellent Edgelands and Richard Mabey’s Unofficial Countryside. Well worth reading.

4 out of 5 stars

The oppressed are sadly not given the chance to speak and say things in their own way, but that is beginning to change. On of those who is taking the opportunity to speak on behalf of Latinx, black and brown and other indigenous women is Natalie Díaz.

Her poems are about the things that matter to her, the landscapes that define and nourish her tribe but also of the pain that that nation suffers in trying to rise again. It is a metaphorical and actual pain that she writes about here too, the pain of suffering the loss of their land and the pain suffered by their bodies whilst being persecuted. Her strong and deeply rooted native America culture flows through words like a river. It is the struggle against the subjection where she draws her power from. Being a Mojave and gay have been held against her, and she has to fight back against the overwhelming odds that want to see her become a footnote in American history

What is a page if not a lingering, an opaque
Waiting — to be marked , and written?

There are some powerful poems in this collection, poems that probe the future that we might make as well as mourning for past mistakes. I really liked her way with words; a simple verse can evoke such emotion for a place that I have never seen. Great stuff.

Three Favourite Poems
The First Water Is The Body
Wolf OR-7
That Which Cannot Be Stilled