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The Grain in the Wood by Jennie Powell.
97pp, £8.99 (incl. postage) from The Lotus Foundation, 3 Sandford Street, Cheltenham, GL53 7JW.  ISBN 0-9540201-4-6.

First impressions aren’t encouraging. The cover is intensely brown, with a face peering out between the rings of a tree-trunk, beside a rallying cry: “Spirit of Fire. Burn our reluctance in a towering flame”. And inside it’s brown ink on foul pebble-dashed paper (unfortunate connotations). Small-presses often do a superb production job –well, not here.

   Far worse is the bumptious Introduction, with the author praising her own creativity and marvelling at where it comes from (something to do with “a ripple on the inner pool”). She then explains the startling insight behind what’s, at best, a very humdrum title.

   Why can’t people keep self-affirmation to themselves? I’ve seen posters on grim bypasses for the “Alpha course” – are “The Lotus Foundation” the same kind of thing?

   Despite this, some of the poems are quite good. The opening “Prelude” is moving, with some effective and interesting writing about her native Scotland, mixing prose and verse adventurously. In fact, throughout the book there were poems which seemed unusual, given the cloying “crystal on the belly-button” aura.

   Sometimes that’s due to an alarming naivety on the part of the writer. It can be an attractive quality, but someone should have warned her about a poem starting: “I have seen heaven like a golden shower”, or another one called “Fruitcake” which gives a voice to the various ingredients and seems completely nuts (sorry!).

   But I was impressed by a West Bank sequence “Taking Mrs Issa home” which imaginatively uses dialogue / inner monologue, and rises miles above the usual “seen it on the news” type of poem. The obligatory 9/11 piece “Raining in Manhattan” was less successful, though it also seemed better than the avalanche of others on this
topic.