Reviews
Houses Without Walls by Susan Utting
ISBN 1 901677 47 8
My heart always sinks at yet more wry observations of domestic detail, and Houses Without Walls certainly has plenty of these. But that’s not to say there isn’t a lot to like about Utting’s collection, and she should appeal to a wide variety of readers. She is a dextrous and engaging writer, with a fluid style and a warm clear voice. The poems are confident, with well-developed, sometimes surprising imagery: ‘He remembered mercury dropped on a bench,/watching it move in its special way, wanting/to trap it, to take home its dull lustre,/its curved weight, its strange, round meniscus.’ However, some of the poems in this collection feel predictable, and at times, pretentious, and ultimately this collection left me unmoved.
Two Rivers Press www.tworiverspress.com £8.00
My heart always sinks at yet more wry observations of domestic detail, and Houses Without Walls certainly has plenty of these. But that’s not to say there isn’t a lot to like about Utting’s collection, and she should appeal to a wide variety of readers. She is a dextrous and engaging writer, with a fluid style and a warm clear voice. The poems are confident, with well-developed, sometimes surprising imagery: ‘He remembered mercury dropped on a bench,/watching it move in its special way, wanting/to trap it, to take home its dull lustre,/its curved weight, its strange, round meniscus.’ However, some of the poems in this collection feel predictable, and at times, pretentious, and ultimately this collection left me unmoved.
Two Rivers Press www.tworiverspress.com £8.00
Page(s) 29
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