Wayne Burrows
Reviews
Books & Magazines Roundup
Quantum Sheep by Valerie Laws
(Peterloo Poets, £7.95) 68pp
Available from www.peterloopoets.com
The right word for Valerie Laws’ latest collection is ‘rude’ in the old-fashioned sense of those innocent yet quasi-salacious volumes of ‘Rude Food’ that appeared in the late 1970s. Poems about ice-cream, wonderbras, olives and a “flatpack baby” place us squarely in the world of Middle English eccentricity. ‘I’ve Got A Heifer To Inseminate’ takes its cue from a storyline on The Archers, (“We all know there’s nothing finer/ Than to have your arm up a cow’s vagina”) while ‘S&M’ begins “Met a cute guy all dressed in leather,/ Thought we could have some fun together” and goes pretty much exactly where you’d expect it to from there. Laws’ poems mainly read like verbal equivalents of Beryl Cook’s paintings, or songs from a particularly racy evening with Victoria Wood. She’s up to date enough to use email porn and viruses as a metaphor for unwanted sexual attention in ‘MyDoom’ and sufficiently aware of her readers’ own mucky imaginations to twist them with unfinished rhymes in ‘Straight Talking’. Yet she can (very) occasionally venture into less flippant territory, as in ‘Mine’, which imagines the voice of a wife buried with her two former husbands in a Northumbrian churchyard, or deploy inventively hidden haikus, like solutions in a puzzle book, in the stanzas of ‘Embedded In The Body’.
Page(s) 144
magazine list
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- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
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- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
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- Dream Catcher
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- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
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- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The