Skeleton Architecture

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...

Toffee by Sarah Crossan is supposed to be a Young Adult book, but don't let the teens keep it to themselves. The story is perhaps best introduced by this widely referenced quote from the book itself: I am not who I say I am, and Marla isn't who she thinks she is. I am a girl trying to forget. She is a woman trying to remember. This story is about a teen who feels she has nowhere to go and an elderly woman so used to being unseen that she barely sees herself anymore, and now she's got dementia to deal with. Sarah Crossan is the Irish Children's Laureate, and she writes young adult verse novels, which is not a description I love for this book. It is written in poem-type-things which use poetic aspects, but mainly serve to provide narrative of the story in vignettes, cutting to the important bits. The protagonist, Allison, is not ready to talk about the trauma that has brought her together with the elderly and confused Marla, and one particular incident i...