Skeleton Architecture

Well this election is scary. There are so many good people wanting to make an impact and do good things to help people. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could just elect people who could collaborate and find the best ways to do these things together? I fear that's not going to happen, but I hope that something pretty good will. You've got to accentuate the positive, right? I got to go see Amanda Palmer live in Glasgow (definitely not Manchester) recently, and one of the things she was talking about was how she got criticised for making light of a dark situation in her song, Oasis (it's a marvellous song with a joyous video here ). She does. She said to us that where there is darkness it's essential that we go into it and we make light. I'm all about the darkness myself (goth poet ahoy), but she's right, we need light, we need the volte, so if you've got some light to bring to these darkening days, or if you've just got a little black cloud that...

I am hardly new to the party in reviewing Fiona Benson's astonishing second collection, Vertigo and Ghost. It came out from Cape Poetry in January 2019, and has already been talked about a lot. Here's a good review from The Guardian back in January.  - (they were selling it at a discounted price then - worth checking). You don't need me to tell you it is an excellent poetry book.  Fiona has already won the Forward Prize for best poetry collection, giving her £10,000, and the book is also shortlisted for the 2019 TS Eliot prize. I only just got round to reading it as I have a bit of a book backlog - it's a hazard of working in a library! I got it on inter-library loan (thanks Newcastle libraries) because like most libraries at the moment, my local library has had funding cuts and now can't get much poetry at all, so it takes a little longer, but if more of us get poetry out of libraries, it becomes more cost effective to buy the books. Have at it! Anyway, Vertig...