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You took a reid threid [red thread] and knetis [tied] it about your cow’s tail. Which is also a special point of witchcraft.

This is an account of witch trials in one particular part of Scotland, during five outbreaks of what might be called witch-hunting. It begins with an overview of the historical background, then documents a considerable number of trials whose details survive in court records (the Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives) and finally discusses what might have caused these outbreaks to happen.

The quotation from the court records above illustrates how easily such an accusation might arise. In truth, the red thread sounds like a harmless country superstition, and if nothing untoward had happened afterwards, it would probably never have come to the notice of the authorities. When, however, such an event chanced to be followed by a misfortune to someone else, they looked for a cause, and preferably someone to blame, whereupon innocent words and actions suddenly became questionable.

Lawlor’s decision to recount in succession the records of these trials strikes me as a good one. In some ways they are very repetitive, but that is the point; it becomes clear from these unadorned records, related without comment or speculation, which factors were in play. Over and over we find, for instance, that midwives and amateur healers were at risk if their efforts went amiss, and even if they didn’t, for their ungrateful clients seem sometimes to have concluded that if someone could cure them, he or she might also have made them ill. This may be one reason why women were so much more often accused; they were responsible for midwifery and most everyday doctoring as well, since few could afford actual doctors. There are a few revealing cases also where battered wives seem to have gone to the local reputed wise-woman for poison to rid themselves of their abusive husbands (which, considering they then had no other means of doing so, I should say was a public service).

Women were also more likely, if involved in a dispute, to resort to words, including curses and idle threats, when a man might have had recourse to his fists. Threats that came to nothing might be forgotten, but if they happened to be followed by some misfortune, this would eagerly be ascribed to the “witch”, rather than to one’s own fault or sheer bad luck. “When we read people’s witness statements, they rarely mention any concern with Satan. Their run-ins with the witch-accused are mostly focused on arguments they have had, illnesses they or their family members may have suffered (and sometimes died of), strange or inappropriate behaviour, or business deals that did not go the way they wanted.” Strange behaviour could be simply being out after dark: “They took a great fear of you, that you had meit [met, run into] them at that time of night without ane erand [an errand, a reason].” And we should now be inclined to ascribe George Barclay’s troubles to his own poor judgement: “Isobell, by her witchcraft, caused George Barclay to marry a puire husse [poor hussy, a poor wanton woman]. And all men wondered why, seeing as he was a good and rich man that came from honest parents, and she an vgle harlot quyne [ugly harlot woman], come from baise degre [low societal rank]. He is now impoverished.”

Some of the accused do sound like cantankerous persons and had a name for being quarrelsome. They also, very often, turn out to be relatives of other accused persons. This is partly down to the belief that witches recruited others – hence the “contagious” quoted in the book’s title. It was dangerous to be too closely related to a convicted witch. But some of these families may also have been what we should now call problem families or, ironically, neighbours from hell. One’s reputation in the neighbourhood could be crucial when one could be described in court as “a known witch, by open voice and common knowledge”. Of Isobell Scudder it was recorded that “the whole parish […] swear that they never heard any good tales being told about her”.

One reason these outbreaks could spread, and were themselves “contagious”, was that the accused were encouraged, sometimes very forcibly, not only to confess but to implicate others in hopes of a pardon. It didn’t always work. Margaret Aitken, accused in 1597, turned into a witchfinder and, aided by a gullible minister, caused the death of many, perhaps hundreds, of falsely accused people. Eventually she was exposed as a fraud and executed. An opponent of the trials, Marion Walker, leaked the record of Aitken’s confession to the public, which brought about the end of the 1596-7 outbreak of witch trials.

One really odd species of repetition is the description people gave of their supposedly witch-induced illnesses; “Half of the day they grew cold, and the other half of the day they burned and melted away, like wax in a fiery furnace.” “He spent a part of the day birnand in ane gryte heit [burning in a great heat, fever] and the other half of the day als cauld as iise [as cold as ice].” “He spent half the day rossin [roasting] in his body. […] the other half of the day he spent in an extraordinar cauld sweat”. This sounds like your average fever, flu perhaps, but the use, over and over again, of the same formula also sounds like auto-suggestion, how people imagined they ought to feel in such circumstances.

As to what caused such outbreaks; as Lawlor says, there are generally several things going on at once. The 1649 outbreak followed “the coldest years of the Little Ice Age (approximately 1450–1859), and the years 1649–53 were particularly poor in Scotland for agriculture. There was a general scarcity of food and supplies (obviously impacted as well by all the wars), so social unrest would have been bubbling. Bubonic plague had also reared its ugly head in 1644–49, so the Scottish were taking beating after beating … no wonder they were looking for someone to blame”.

“Looking for someone to blame” in fact is crucial. In Britain, the habit of blaming witches was killed off by the Enlightenment; after 1735 it was illegal for people to “claim that they had magical powers”. Every relevant Act since has focused on this element of fraud, tacitly admitting that the magical powers witches and others might have thought they possessed did not exist. But the Enlightenment did not happen everywhere, especially not in rural communities and theocracies. A woman was executed for “sorcery” in Saudi Arabia in 2011, and this year (2026) a woman and infant in Jharkhand, India, were attacked and killed by fellow-villagers who accused the family of witchcraft. The trigger seems to have been the sudden illness and death of a local man – nothing much changes about human nature.

This book is well researched and written. Some of the places that were important to the Aberdeen trials can still be seen – St Nicholas Church, where convicted witches were held, and the nearby memorial to the victims, the art installation “Gallus Quines”, which inspired the book. Like Lawlor, I had often visited Aberdeen and never seen this, but shall go looking next time.

Humpbacks off the starboard bow, blowing and blowing.
One breaches for the sheer joy of it
(“Stellwagen bank and a god’s breath”)

This is one of your “themed collections”, the theme being, basically, living with severe asthma, though it does sometimes go wider, to consider the lungs and the act of breathing in a more general and indeed sometimes metaphorical sense. Themed collections can have the advantage that poems play off against each other, illuminating the theme from different angles, a bit like Monet painting Rouen Cathedral. The different angles are crucial, because with a collection on one theme there are always the dangers of repetition and monotony.

One way of avoiding these dangers is by thinking figuratively, finding various images in which to encapsulate and convey the act of breathing and the impediments to it. In “Ice threatens my breath”, the image is that of bagpipes, and sharply evocative:

the lungs
steadfastly Scottish,

      as when an infection
     has me struggling to inflate them,
     only to expel air

too, too quickly
from the goatskin bag.

I drone for days

And the image of the “stone dresses” in “Asthma is dressed stone rasping”, though not as immediate, is convincing to anyone who has seen an asthmatic fighting what clearly feels like a stone wall. In “The living death, a childhood nightmare”, Snow White “in her glass coffin” is a striking likeness for the girl in hospital:

      Immobile, she is condemned to forced breath,
     this living-death-iron-lung no handsome prince
     can rouse her from.

In those poems that relate directly to her own experience there are inevitably personal references and not all communicate equally well – I am still puzzled by the line “my certificate will say I died like little Ella” (“Particulates”), because I don’t know who she may be; a literary or film reference or something more personal – I even wondered momentarily if it might be a mistake for “Little Eva”. And “Common ground”, quoted in full, totally lost me:

I can’t breathe because of the environment
and five defective genes.

You can’t breathe because in this environment
the police think all your genes defective.

I can only suppose the “you” of the poem is someone she knows and I don’t, but the poem’s intent eludes me.

Many poems, though, go beyond the personal into a world where the naturalness of breathing, which most of us take for granted, becomes an envied luxury:

      The frog
     breathes on through skin or mouth or lungs
    (“Kent marsh frogs”)

The “lungs” of the world itself are in danger, as we all know (well, all except the climate change denial nuts) and in “Dead ice: the end of a glacier”, the image of breathing is persuasive and illuminating throughout:

Winter’s snows are its inhalation: a freezing
draw, replenishment.

Another successful poem, I thought, was “Painting for people with asthma”, which vividly conveys what may not be obvious to a non-sufferer (as it happens, I am married to an asthmatic, so it especially resonated with me):

      Everyone is clasping their hands to their breasts.
     This does not signal love or respect
     or their hearts being touched. […]

      Their faces have changed colour –
     to scarlet mostly from the strain of inhalation.
     Somehow scant air needs to be rendered
     as a trail of fine smoke or thin wind.
     Cigarettes are often involved.

I also liked “Pearl fishers” up to the last line and a half. But perhaps the most convincing of all the metaphorical takes on the theme was “How the night breathes”:

      in the random shufflings of tiny creatures
     in the hedgerow trying to stay alive,
     and in the longed-for call of the tawny owls
     making a swift end to them.

I’ve always been a little wary of themed collections, feeling that the occasional weaker poem may sneak in because it fits the theme, when in a non-themed collection it would have been culled. I don’t think this is totally immune from that tendency, but mostly the poems earn their place and enable the reader to see the world from an unusual and thought-provoking angle.

This is a collection by what you might call a doubly displaced poet: brought up in England, he moves to Spain and experiences being seen as a foreigner there, but when, many years later, he returns to the scenes of his youth (as the Welsh poet JT Jones put it, “to walk in the places where I used to run”), both he and they have changed enough to make him, again, a “foreigner”.

The collection is thoughtfully structured to reflect this narrative; in the first section “Britanico”, we can sense the strangeness of a new climate in “Calor”:

This isn’t heat. This is Calor,
silting and clogging up the air

and the effect of different history and memories in “Translator, Traitor”:

    The War was 39 to 45,
    suffering for the sake of a cause—
    common enemies, common memories.

   La Guerra, 36 to 39,
  was brother killing brother, scores settled
  with the neighbours, decades of reprisals.

He is good at focusing on the small details that constitute identity – forgetting which side of the road to drive on, having trouble with the Spanish rhotic “r” – the poem “Rolling my ‘r’s” echoes in reverse the Proclaimers’ anthem about how they could never “throw the R away”. I did think his reaction to surrendering his UK driving licence a bit overdone:

     my balance
    tilted and swayed— I had to make a grab
    for the counter. (“Carnet de Conducir”)

But then I’ve never had a driving licence, so perhaps I underestimate the trauma involved…

There is a section dealing with “Family Matters”, principally memories of parents, in which there are some memorable images, like the paper clip around documents:

    How it brings their things together.
    How neatly, temporarily,
    it brings them together.

The section “Starting Eleven”, at first sight, is something of an outlier in the pattern, concerning as it does past players for Aldershot FC. But since most of them seem to have come from elsewhere and later moved on, they too can be seen as deracinated, only ever temporarily at home. I liked “Ian Phillips”:

   All he wants is to play one more season,
  one more season, his shoulder relishing
  the chance to usher dainty right-wingers
  straight into the advertising hoardings

The last section, “Retracing Steps”, is the mirror of the first: on a visit to England it is the poet’s wife (or possibly son), rather than he, who is the foreigner, and post-Brexit, this takes on a menacing tinge. Brexit and its aftermath do not crop up much in UK poetry, but then few UK poets have this perspective on it:

Just don’t raise your voice if speaking
Spanish while on a bus or train.

Just don’t think anyone means you
when they slag off the foreigners.

Just take no notice of the flags
in every town. (“Warning”)

The poet himself, though screened by the English accent he has never lost, is conscious that he is no longer quite the same person who left:

But there’s a lift of my eyebrow,
rise in my tone at the end
of words. My dancing hands.

I wear these clues, can’t take them off
like some disguise. I’m different.
Are you afraid of me?

I was reminded of Confucius’s observation: “Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that drive them far apart”.

But the most powerful poem in this section, and perhaps in the whole collection, for me was “Aveley Lane”, heavy with the transience of human existence wherever it is, “temporarily”, lived:

   Here’s another mother getting supper
  in Neil’s kitchen. Here’s another father
  parking his car in Adrian’s driveway.
  They go about their family routines
  as if they’ll never be replaced.

This is an unusual collection, from a viewpoint we do not often see, and correspondingly enlightening.

What was so frightening to authorities—those whom Widman spoke for—was that these people took to the road to Niklashausen and did not ask anybody’s permission, not from their landlords to leave work, not from their priests to go on a pilgrimage. Social rank and obligations just seemed to dissolve.

And we’re back to revolutionary history, in particular the class struggle in mediaeval Germany. In 2024 I reviewed Andrew Drummond’s fascinating account of the life and times of Thomas Müntzer, a priest who fought alongside his flock in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1525. Here, from 1476, is an earlier revolutionary, Hans Behem, or Böhm, who herded animals for a living (though so contradictory is the information about his life that we are not even sure if it was sheep, cattle or pigs) and who for recreation played the drum and wrote songs.

Both, after their death, were traduced by their enemies, but while Müntzer, a highly educated man, left us his own trenchant writings to correct the balance, Behem was illiterate. So we are left with the words of his opponents, and they differ wildly. Bishop Rudolph von Sherenberg of Würzburg, a contemporary, saw him as a dangerous opponent, shrewd and intelligent despite his lack of education. Later writers seem to have been determined to mock and belittle him, asserting that he was a noted fool whose words were dictated to him by a Franciscan friar – it is at this time that they begin to call him a swineherd rather than a shepherd, presumably with the symbolic implications of each in mind.

We do know, from the charges against him, some of what he preached to the peasants who flocked to his home valley of Niklashausen. In a time when land was held by a small number of nobles and churchmen, and peasants had few if any rights, he preached that “the waters and woods belonged to everybody; and that the rich should be stripped of their wealth “so that we all have enough” (so hetten wir glich all genugk); and that “the time will come when princes and lords must work for a daily wage” (eβ karnpt dar zu, daβ die fursten und hern noch umb eynen taglone mussen arbeitten)”. He also held the recent Church invention of Purgatory in contempt and did not believe priests had the power to excommunicate people.

Behem’s transformation, apparently sparked by visions of the Virgin Mary, took place just after the season of Karneval and Wunderli argues convincingly that this season, when the world briefly turned upside down and normal social conventions ceased to apply, may have been the trigger.

Like Drummond, Wunderli is writing a history with many lacunae. He is scrupulous in indicating when he is speculating rather than reporting known facts, but I could do without his attempt to reconstruct from fragments one of Behem’s actual sermons. He is honest about it being a reconstruction, but it still feels off-key, because though we may know the gist of what Behem said, we can only guess at his tone, his delivery, whatever it was that so impressed his listeners.

Nevertheless, this is an absorbing account of a turbulent time and its main characters come very alive: Sherenberg, himself a would-be reformer whose attempts were constantly frustrated; the mysterious Beghard Brother who accompanied Behem to execution; the pragmatic Count Johann of Wertheim, who, replying to Church requests to prevent pilgrims travelling through his lands to see where Behem had preached, said that “he was reluctant to ban the movement of pilgrims through his lands because of the revenues pilgrims brought in. At least the count held a consistent position: banning tourism is bad business.” And Hans himself, commonly called “the youth”, whose behaviour at the stake, albeit reported by one of his detractors, who did not see it, still rings oddly true: “When he was tied to the stake for burning, however, he sang certain songs or verses in a high voice about Our Lady, which he had composed in the German language. […] But as soon as he felt the flames, he cried out three times, with a weeping voice, ‘O, o, o’. He was then engulfed by the flames. His voice uttered nothing again.”

"So unprepared were most people; so little did a large part of Denmark’s population understand what had happened; so little had a majority grasped the nature of Nazism."

This is an account of the Nazi occupation of Denmark in World War 2, with special reference to Danish Jews and the largely successful efforts of the resistance and others to save them from genocide. But its relevance goes beyond that one situation; it also concerns the difficulties of deciding how to deal with aggressors and madmen in power, which could hardly have more contemporary relevance.

While Sweden’s neutrality was respected, Denmark, like Norway, was invaded and occupied by Germany early in the war (1940). They were caught unprepared: “Intelligence had suggested for weeks that German forces had been building on the border near Jutland in obvious preparation for an invasion, but Danish leaders in the foreign ministry had decided that any defense preparations would be viewed as provocative by Hitler, so they opted to do nothing, which left the Danish Army and Navy with their hands tied” (I should mention that Brady is American and hence naturally uses US spelling conventions). Now faced with vastly superior forces, the king (Christian X) and government reluctantly decided to submit, under protest, rather than resist at the certain cost of many Danish lives.

This did not sit well with most Danes. There were some, especially near the border with Germany, who supported Hitler, but most were indignant and ashamed at having been invaded and without resistance – sabotage, on a small scale, began almost at once and soon escalated when SOE were able to help. But it is hard to see what else the Danish authorities could have done, except be better prepared in the first place. Resistance, once the invasion had begun without warning, would not only have cost many lives but would also have been futile. The king, especially, hoped to be able to influence the course of events and protect his people better by staying and wielding at least some authority.

For some time, this seemed to work. The Germans, warned by their men on the spot about the Danish character – “The Dane is freedom-loving […] He rejects every coercion and every subordination. He lacks a sense of military discipline and authority” – adopted a hands-off approach. Saboteurs were dealt with under Danish law rather than shipped off to Germany and there was at first no persecution of Jews, the king having made it very clear that “there is no Jewish question in the country. There is only my people.”

With hindsight, the first hint of trouble came when, after invading Russia in 1941, the SS demanded the arrest of Danish Communists. “Would the Danish government insist on their protection as Danish citizens? […] The answer to that last question was no, […] Danish Communists were rounded up and taken to a Danish internment camp, Horserod, in August. Soon after, the Danish Ministry of Justice drafted a law making any Communist activities and organizations illegal in Denmark”.

Danish Communists had made themselves unpopular with their fellow-citizens by supporting the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland. But resistance fighters, like the Kieler family, recognised that this was the thin end of the wedge, an admission that Denmark could not rely on being able to protect its own citizens from the invader. But the Communists were at least still in Denmark, and many still allowed themselves to hope things would get no worse. This, by and large, included Denmark’s Jews. They had had a long and mostly untroubled history of settlement in Denmark, since the 17th century when Sephardic Jews came to escape Tsarist pogroms in Russia. They were very assimilated. “The Jewish population, in general, felt as certain as most other Danes in the hope that the country’s culture, its democratic traditions, its king, and its economic importance to Germany would save it from the usual depredations visited on Germany’s own Jews and the Jews of Eastern Europe. If they just kept their heads down; if they stayed as invisible as possible, they might make it through.”

But imitating the action of the ostrich can be risky, when faced with an unpredictable and capricious opponent. Hitler’s attitude to Denmark apparently hardened after he sent Christian X a rather fulsome birthday greeting in 1943. This seems to have disgusted the king, already no fan of his, who replied with a curt 4-word note of thanks. Hitler went into a tantrum, as mad despots tend to do when they feel insulted; indeed much as Trump does these days. From then on, the Jews of Denmark were in as much danger as elsewhere, but it would still take a lot to convince them.

Fortunately there was by now a flourishing Danish resistance. In response to their increased activity the Germans demanded that the Danish government declare a state of emergency and enact draconian laws. The government refused and abdicated its functions, while Christian X declared himself a prisoner of war. “The next day, the citizens of Copenhagen awoke to find German troops swarming everywhere in the city, guarding and occupying all government buildings. In addition, von Hanneken ordered the roundup of hundreds of Danish leaders, including military figures, intellectual and political leaders, and, for the first time, leaders of the Jewish community.”

The resistance now applied themselves not just to sabotage but to helping the Jews to escape. But many would not have been persuaded of their danger in time, had it not been for a German diplomat, Georg Duckwitz, who tipped off both the Danes and Sweden that arrests were imminent and urged Sweden to accept the refugees. The physicist Niels Bohr, whose mother was Jewish, had also been working to this end and continued to do so once he had escaped to Sweden.

From then on, the book describes the efforts of good and brave people to thwart the genocide. Led by the young surgeon Dr Karl Koster, the staff of Bispebjerg Hospital turned the whole place into a safe house. The Kieler family, Henny Sinding and others organised boat crossings to Sweden and raised money both for the emigrant families, and for the fishermen who were risking life and livelihood by carrying them. “During a particularly busy moment at the height of the evacuation, Dr Koster found the coffers bare just as a group of Jews were being prepared for transport. In searching around for some source of emergency funds, he remembered that King Christian was being held under house arrest in nearby Sorgenfri Palace. In a move that was considered as audacious as it was necessary for the rescue of the refugees, Koster sent two of his most trusted nurses to the king to ask for his charity. According to Koster’s own account of the incident, ‘They were not disappointed’.”

The book focuses on individuals and is the livelier and more absorbing for this. But the message it left with me concerned the danger of the ostrich approach. If it looks like a fascist, talks like a fascist and acts like a fascist, don’t waste time hoping it may turn out to be a pussycat. Believe that it will do what it says. 95% of Denmark’s Jews were saved, but the conduct of the Nazis toward those they did lay hands on, including all the inhabitants of an old folk’s home, indicates what would have happened were it not for people like those in this book. Don’t think you can appease the beast either; you probably can’t. Elsebet Kieler, one of the resistance, was conflicted because she was a confirmed pacifist and hated the idea of causing death. She consulted the pastor, poet and resister Kaj Munk, who advised “Burn all your literature on this topic, at the present moment it is not relevant, or is simply a millstone round your neck—and learn how to use a machine gun”. Munk was eventually killed by the Nazis.

This is an introduction to twenty ancient civilisations that don’t get as much attention as some more famous ones, partly because there is less archaeological information on them, partly because they have not the initial glamour of ancient Greece or Egypt. Some are more obscure than others. I would guess many know at least something of the Cretan, Akkadian and Indus Valley cultures, while far fewer will be acquainted with those of Great Zimbabwe, the Lapita of Oceania, and the Moche of Peru (a bunch with whom you wouldn’t want to be at all closely acquainted, unless you had an unusual interest in torture and Toby jugs). And I certainly wasn’t aware there had ever been such a thing as a Mississippian civilisation.

Each section begins with an imagined and italicized reconstruction of a moment in the life of someone from the culture in question. I don’t mind these, since the italics make it clear that they are fictional. Then we get an overview of the particular civilisation: where its people came from, what marked them out as a culture, what caused their decline and what influences and achievements they left behind.

Surveying so many cultures in succession can be slightly overwhelming; one tends to merge into another. But there is a great advantage: it shows not only what individualises these civilisations but what they had in common. It becomes clear, for instance, that few things matter more to any urban or semi-urban culture than good management of water and sewage. Over and over, we find that societies which lasted for any length of time - the Hittites, the Minoans, the Nabateans - had engineers who could ensure a supply of pure water and the removal of waste. At Harappa in the Indus Valley, they “created water management and sanitation systems that were unheard of for their time, and not seen again until Roman times, two millennia later. Drains and sewage systems were built to help remove wastewater and other sewage from the city. They normally ran down the middle of the main streets”. This would have materially reduced death by disease, though in that way towns could become victims of their own success – at a later stage of Harappa’s existence, its population outstripped the infrastructure, “sewage overflowed onto streets and into houses, forcing the city’s inhabitants to raise the level of their doors and walls.”

One craft product which individualises any culture, and which fortunately for archaeologists tends to survive in the ground, is pottery, and here the variety is extraordinary, from the Minoans of Crete, who, almost alone in the Bronze Age, ignored the celebration of rulers and wars in their art, favouring instead flowing designs of sea creatures, to the Moche, who preferred depictions of sacrificial victims, or possibly just enemies, being tortured to death. They also, no kidding, seem to have invented the Toby jug: “the Moche created lifelike portrait vessels either in the form of a human head or of their full figure. These vessels were modelled with individual traits and features that evoke their personalities so well, that they appear to have been modelled after living people. These portraits are so detailed that researchers today have been able to identify individuals possessing infectious and neurological diseases, mutilation, and congenital disorders. People were masterfully sculpted with various conditions such as Down syndrome, extra toes, and cleft lips.” An odd lot, the Moche.

Another common factor that emerges is the way these cultures go into decline. She makes it clear that there is seldom or never one reason for this, rather a number of factors coming together, but one possible cause that crops up over and over is environmental. Sometimes it is in the form of climate change outside human control, like the Little Ice Age which may have put an end to the Thule Inuit. Sometimes it is down to over-use of natural resources: the wealth of Nubia was built on iron, but the smelting of iron requires huge amounts of charcoal, which entails burning wood. “Eventually, this caused mass deforestation and Meroë depleted its local wood supply. This, combined with overuse of their fields, led to the complete exhaustion of their environment.”

Downsides to this book. There are too many typos, at least in the Kindle edition, I can’t speak for the print version. There is no index, at least in the Kindle version. There are also infelicities of style. The chapter heading “A Return Back Home” is just an irritating tautology, and the sentence “The girl poked her head around the stable door, careful not to alert her father of her presence” is bad grammar; “of” should be “to”, but at least the meaning is clear. But this sentence; “To the European colonists, Great Zimbabwe was made by who they considered to be the great people of the ancient world, and centuries older than what it really was” is so clumsily phrased that I am not at all sure what it means. This is infuriating, as it occurs in the course of a fascinating and informative account. I was not surprised that early Europeans insisted on believing buildings, monuments and artefacts in Africa to have been made by ancient Phoenicians or Arabs; indeed most are aware that they did. But it was news to me that long after it became clear that this narrative was false, as late as the 1960s, “the ruling political party, the Rhodesian Front, even went as far as blocking books about Great Zimbabwe. Some archaeologists who refused to accept the narrative of the site’s biblical origins were imprisoned and deported.”

This book, then, has much to tell us, and while I don’t find the style always to my liking, I can’t deny the import. It does not claim to be anything but an introduction to all these cultures, there is a bibliography for those whose interest has been whetted by some chapter and who want to find out more (on the Akkadians, I can recommend "Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East" by Amanda H Podany).

Use three Physicians still; First Doctor Quiet, Next Doctor Merry-man, and Doctor Dyet.
- From Sir John Harington’s translation into English of the Regimen Sanitatis Salerni

“Avoid stress, keep cheerful and eat the right things” is not bad advice for maintaining good health, and a feature of this book is that it does not spend much time mocking the supposed credulity and ignorance of our ancestors. There are of course some outlandish “cures” that can only have made matters worse. But as Knight points out, quite apart from the state of medical knowledge at the time, most people simply could not afford a qualified doctor – as Nicholas Culpeper observed in a bit of tart wordplay, “Too many Physitians in England being like Balaams Asse, they will not speak unless they see an Angel.”

People were therefore driven back on their own knowledge and resources, and “people” generally meant housewives, who were responsible for keeping their families healthy as they were for feeding them. Medicine, in an everyday context, seems to have been viewed as a rather specialised branch of cookery – indeed this was how the author, from an original interest in historical cookery, came to research the subject - and the “household books” that many women kept contained recipes and remedies indiscriminately mixed: “in 1699 a cure for urinary gravel appears between recipes for potted tongue and potted herrings”.

Most of these remedies were of course herbal and relied on knowledge, or assumed knowledge, passed down generations. When this was observational, the result of trial and error or of watching what animals ate to relieve pain, it often worked. The use of onion juice to treat burns, for instance, was based on the work of Ambroise Paré, a French surgeon of the sixteenth century, who pioneered more humane and effective methods of treating battle wounds, and since, as we now know, onion has antibiotic properties, it would have helped the damaged tissue to resist infection. And Lady Egerton’s remedy for “greensickness” in girls, which involved dissolving iron hobnails, looks less eccentric when one realises that greensickness was probably a form of anaemia.

Remedies were less useful when based either on the ancient medical knowledge of men like Galen which, though outdated, had acquired a sort of unchallengeable authority, or on superstition and sympathetic magic – eg, yellow plants would be good for jaundice. And some herbal cures would have been of more use if their authors had not crammed in as many herbs as they could think of, presumably either on the basis that more was better, or in hopes that one of the many might prove curative. In fact though, the effect of one ingredient might well counteract that of another, while boiling them to intensify their essence might also destroy much of their virtue.

Indeed some of the receipts are fiendishly complicated and would have taken days to prepare. Knight suggests, plausibly, that the amount of work involved may have been as much to relieve the home physician’s feelings as the patient’s condition. Referring to a medicine for advanced TB, a condition which was almost certainly going to be fatal, she says:

“It is a ‘raire watter’ distilled from a cock, half a gallon of sack, milk, dried fruit, herbs, rose water, hartshorn and china root – plus sugar candy, gold, musk, ambergris, horn of unicorn and bezoar stone. Very expensive, but when a life was obviously ebbing it may have helped to realise how much one was prized by the family who were paying for these costly ingredients. As far as the family was concerned, too, perhaps they felt that they had done their utmost for the patient.”

The mention of gold among the ingredients is interesting. As late as the mid-20th century the tubercular George Mackay Brown was being given injections of gold which probably did no good and were certainly potentially toxic. We may no longer tie dismembered tench to the stomach to cure jaundice, and we know that tobacco, far from being the panacea Culpeper thought it, caused his early death, but we are perhaps not so far removed from our ancestors as we might think: sick folk and their relatives still hope for miracles and sometimes look for them in bizarre places. Richard Burton (the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, not the actor or the explorer) remarked “We see commonly the toothache, gout, […] and many such maladies cured by spells, words, characters and charms […] All the world knows there is no virtue in such charms or cures, but a strong conceit and opinion alone”. In other words, vis medicatrix naturae, the impulse of the body to heal itself, can sometimes be aided by what we would now call the placebo effect, the feeling of being valued and looked after.

There are amusing moments in this book, but the feeling it left me with was one of sympathy for ordinary people, usually the women who kept those “household books”, who were doing the best they could in the face of diseases they knew very little about.

Thank you, dear,’ she said, the way adults did when they thanked you for something that hadn’t really helped and that they hadn’t really wanted.

This is a coming-of-age novel, the progress of the eponymous Henry through the sixties and seventies, from birth to leaving for an unspecified university. It is written in close third person, and almost all from Henry’s point of view.

A child’s-eye view can give a fresh outlook on things, because their perspective is so different from an adult one. They observe in a way adults seldom do – “the mangle, a strange thing that looked alive and sad and whose rubber lips were chapped and perished” – and their sense of priorities and realities is different, as becomes apparent when a sudden accidental death happens at Henry’s primary school. The adults are horrified, but the children sharing the news, “smiled, because deaths never happened at boring old school, and it was exciting and not quite real, like something in a story or film”.

They also tend to be solipsistic, and Henry is no exception. He is not particularly likeable or dislikeable, more your average ordinary child morphing into your average whiny. self-obsessed, self-pitying teenager. Indeed a key moment in his development is when he briefly contemplates suicide, for no better reason than that a girl he’s only just met has refused to go out with him, but is distracted by a phone call from a friend. Afterwards, returning to the pills he has collected: “he stared at them for a while and tried to remember how he’d been feeling before the phone call but could not. Then he picked up the pills and went back to his mum’s room, replacing them in her medicine bag. Back in his room, he re-read his note and shook his head, as Mr Muldoon would have done, at the hackneyed phrasing. Then he tore the note into small pieces, and put them carefully in the bin.”

Henry’s viewpoint is challenging, both for the writer and any adult reader, because we can share, as Henry at the time cannot, the adult viewpoints that baffle him as a child and annoy him as an adolescent. It may be particularly challenging for a female reader, because part of Henry’s trouble, in his own mind, is that he is male. His father does not provide the kind of male role model he wants, and he feels his mother prefers his sisters and sees his masculinity as a nuisance: “‘Why can’t you be more like your sisters?’ she said, waving her duster, a technicolour nylon thing on a stick, as if she would dust him out of existence, or at least, into femininity”.

An adult reader can see that this may not be what she means at all, and can also see that Henry’s resentment at his sisters “getting away” with things at certain times stems from his total inability to appreciate how enervating the onset of menstruation can be: “They were girls; they had strange fits of weakness where all that would console them was cake and music and cartoons on TV. Henry knew then that girls would always get away with things that he couldn’t, and that, all things considered, he would have been better off born female.” But though the first reaction of a female reader to this whinge may be pardonable irritation, it is illuminating and thought-provoking to see how things look to him, and perhaps to boys in general.

Henry grows up in the 60s and 70s, which makes him about 10 years younger than me. For the most part, I think the evocation of the time period is convincing without looking over-researched. The obsession of Henry’s mother with class and her horror of anything “common” ring very true for the time, as does the gradual change in dietary habits: “You should never invert your fork and shovel in food as if it were coal going into a boiler. Holding your fork that way was only acceptable if you moved it to your right hand and were eating spaghetti Bolognese, which you sprinkled with a thin dusty cheese called Parmesan, that smelled faintly of vomit. The smell made it sophisticated and more Italian, his mother said. Sophisticated meant eating food that was slightly disgusting. This food was what was called an acquired taste.” Only at two points did I feel “hang on, it wasn’t like that”. One was when we hear that Henry and his sisters, as teens, liked The Waltons. Now admittedly it is hard to judge, because I was a teenager in the 60s, which were more rebellious and cynical than the 70s, and it’s also possible that because of the Vietnam war, we were more anti-American than the next wave of teens, but I recall The Waltons (first broadcast 1972) as the sort of squeaky-clean programme one’s parents liked, which pretty much made it anathema; I can’t imagine teenagers of any time watching it unless to mock.

The other point that puzzled me was the indifference of Henry’s teenage schoolmates to events in the wider world: “Outside the window, the other world was still there. It was a world of power cuts, and punk; a world of strikes and the IRA. Bombs were everywhere: in pubs, letters, packages, carrier bags, pillar boxes; in tube stations, trains and litter bins. There were firebombs and nail bombs, car bombs and boat bombs. All this was in the air and on the radio and on the TV in the living room, but the boys hadn’t been taught to take an interest, and these events might as well have been happening in another country.” I went to the same kind of school as Henry (except that mine was co-ed) and I remember heated conversations in the playground about current events. Again, this may point to a difference between the two decades: maybe the space race, swinging London and the 1968 assassinations in the USA were just more interesting, but one would have thought the IRA bombs at least would have held their attention.

The author’s wry, observational tone can often be very funny, and he is good at pinpointing a character. The foibles of Henry’s mother make an especially good target: “She believed in extra sensory perception and sometimes exclaimed when she turned on the radio, because the song she’d been humming in her head was playing right now, and that just showed you, didn’t it?” Not that Henry himself escapes: “He’d begun drinking coffee because he believed doing so made him an intellectual. In fact, it only succeeded in making him jittery and giving him heartburn, but still, he thought, one must suffer for one’s art.”

In many ways, this is an ambitious first novel – set in a past many can still recall, seen through a child’s eyes – and one of the most ambitious things about it is its choice of a really quite ordinary boy as protagonist. Henry’s progress toward being adult, male and reasonably comfortable in his skin is not that of someone in any way remarkable but of Everyman, which makes it the more interesting and meaningful.

“Marcus. If Meton is stuck in bed upstairs for the foreseeable future, then who’s doing the cooking?”

Who indeed? Meton the anarchic but brilliant chef is so essential to the Corvinus household that his indisposition is a serious matter, especially since the solution proposed by Vipsania, Corvinus’s mother, is to play her own chef, the too-inventive Phormio, as substitute… Meanwhile Corvinus is investigating another murder, that of an inoffensive boatman with no known enemies. His investigations take him to Corsica, where he runs into an old acquaintance of his and ours, the philosopher Seneca, currently in exile. Corvinus has fond memories of their former meeting:

“He may be a serial furkler, a social climber of the first water and a third-rate poet, but he hasn’t got a speck of real political ambition in his makeup, let alone the stomach for any kind of risk-taking. He’s a worm, the sort that gives other invertebrates a bad name.”

It's the presence of Seneca that alerts us to the fact that this is one of the “political” Corvinus cases. As so often with these cases, the ending proves frustrating for Corvinus, in that though he knows whodunnit, there is a limit to what he can do about it.

Indeed in some ways this feels like one of those films-in-the-middle-of-a-trilogy, where you can sense that the author is building up to No 3. The first in this “trilogy” would have been Family Commitments, two or three books ago, in which Corvinus became aware of certain treasonable goings-on involving a relative. Three characters from that book, his major-domo Bathyllus. the latter’s slightly dodgy brother Damon, and the freedman at the top of the civil service, Narcissus, also figure in this case. And I can guess what the climax of the third is set to be…

In the meantime we have a complex plot with one quite surprising (but plausible) twist at the end, and some memorable characters.

You can keep up with Mr Wishart’s proceedings on his website.

Here's my list of this year's reviews, with links

Poetry

Real Lear: New & Selected Poems by Claire Crowther, pub. Shearsman 2024
From Base Materials by Jenny Lewis, pub. Carcanet 2024
Chalking the Pavement by Kate Noakes, pub. Broken Sleep Books 2024
A Bird Called Elaeus: poems for here and now from the Greek Anthology, by David Constantine, pub. Bloodaxe 2024
Leaving the Hills by Tony Curtis, pub. Seren 2024
Aleph Bet by Sue Rose, pub. Cinnamon 2025
maybe i'll call gillian Anderson by Rhian Elizabeth, pub. Broken Sleep Books 2025
Object Permanence by Anne Berkeley, pub. The Garlic Press 2025
The Green Month by Matthew Francis, pub. Faber 2025

Anthologies
Fire, Brigid and the Sacred Feminine, eds Shauna Gilligan and Niamh Boyce, pub. Arlen House, 2024

Prose fiction
Fox Bites, by Lloyd Markham, pub. Parthian 2024
Circulation, by Magnus Florin, trs. Harry Watson, pub. Vagabond Voices 2024
The Bruegel Boy, by Emma Darwin, pub. Holland House Books 2025

Children’s/YA
Kata & Tor, by Kevin Crossley-Holland, pub. Walker Books Ltd 2025

Non-fiction
The Hundred Years War Vol 5: Triumph and Illusion, by Jonathan Sumption, pub. Faber 2023
Edinburgh: A New History, by Alistair Moffat, pub. Birlinn 2024
Embers of the Hands; Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, by Eleanor Barraclough, pub. Profile Books 2024
The Haitian Revolution: An Enthralling Tale of Resistance, Freedom, and the Birth of a Nation, by Billy Wellman, pub. Enthralling History, 2024
Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era, by Alwyn Turner pub. Profile Books 2024
The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for an Endangered Planet by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams, pub. Viking 2021
Twilight Cities, Lost Capitals of the Mediterranean, by Katherine Pangonis, pub. Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2023
Bletchley Park’s Secret Source, by Peter Hore, pub. Greenhill Books 2021
The Ship Beneath The Ice, by Mensun Bound, pub. Macmillan 2022
Our Daily War by Andrey Kurkov, pub. Open Borders Press 2025

If he’s lying by omission then it’s only as all storytellers lie: they tell what makes the story work and they don’t tell what they must not; nor what they cannot.

In 1627, Gillis Vervloet, known as Gil, is a man of 79, seeking to end his life as a monk at an abbey in Saarland. But because, in his far-back youth, he was involved in some dubious activities, his admission to the abbey depends on two things: doing the abbey a favour via some detective work involving a statue looted and possibly destroyed during the religious wars of those times, and an account of his life that he is writing to help the abbot decide whether he is suitable.

There is a split narrative from then on, between 1627 and Gil’s youth. In addition we see some of the account he is writing, from which it becomes clear that the abbot is getting a heavily edited version of the story that we, as readers, are hearing from Gil. Indeed there are sixty years for which we do not see this account, and it is implied that whatever else Gil told of these years, he cannot have included the profession he practised then, or the abbey doors would surely be shut to him.

Most of the narrative takes place in the Low Countries – Antwerp and Brussels, mainly – between the years 1562 when the 15-year-old Gil arrives in Antwerp and somewhere around 1567, when he has to flee abroad. They are eventful years, dominated by religious strife and Gil’s friendship with the artist Pieter Bruegel, who takes him on as an artist’s model and to keep his accounts. Gil also models for other painters and sculptors and there is an intriguing possibility that he may have modelled for the very statue he is seeking.

Gil’s life at this point in his youth is complicated by the involvement of his brother Roeland and his religious mentor the priest Paulus in reform movements which could get them and all their associates into trouble with the Inquisition. His other problem is that though his greatest wish is to be a priest himself, his attraction to women, and to the idea of marriage and a family, is almost equally strong. He is continually having to choose between friendship and duty (as he sees it), and between the religious life and his natural inclinations.

A major factor in the religious strife of the time is the question of images, which ties into Gil’s search for the statue. Paulus the reformist priest objects to the whole idea of earthly representation of holy images; ‘But in kneeling to lead-white and madder, and to the image of a lazy servant girl and a lewd apprentice paid by the hour to represent the saints, a man plants God’s gift of adoration into the sinful earth of his gross and worldly desires.’ This could not be further removed from Bruegel’s ethos in painting, as expressed in a conversation with Gil: ‘Why do you draw drunkards? Or criminals?’ ‘Because they’re men, and men get drunk and so do women, and they’re proud, and wrathful, and they fornicate. So I need them for my pictures.’ ‘So you paint sin?’ ‘Men sin, and women too. Wrong-doing – malice and hurt – or folly, or simply what we break by our own carelessness…they’re in our nature.’ All his life, Gil is torn between seeking fulfilment in the religious or the secular, between idealism and nature, and it may seem that at the end of his life he has opted for the former, but a key passage earlier suggests that it is Bruegel’s view of the world that has influenced him more:

‘It was on the long, damp trudge back home to Antwerp that happiness came on him suddenly, like sunshine. It was in the moment he stooped to talk to a dog who reminded him of Pelle, and when he broke his limping stride to help an old man and his even older wife over a stile. It overflowed when he came on a woman at a crossroads weeping over a newborn baby as she sought the White Sisters’ orphanage at Middelheim. He could say with truth that the Sisters would be good to the baby and were very holy and loving, and when he left her and the child with the portress she was quite calm, her face softened if not smiling, and reconciled to her sacrifice. And in all that ordinary road was nothing glorious: no beauty among the dripping hedgerows and the cow-pats, no glory of angels in those sodden skies, no high majesty and passion in the sacrifice, no joy in being reconciled to sorrow…only the happiness granted to an ordinary witness to these ordinary things.’

In a time of murderous religious intolerance, Gil eventually seems to come close to believing, with Elizabeth I, that ‘there is only one Christ Jesus, one faith. All else is a dispute over trifles”. He also comes to see that concepts like “truth” and “memory” are not as clear-cut as some imagine and that ‘people are lots of things’, as Bruegel paints them, unlike the saints his fellow-servant Doortje recalls from the orphanage of her childhood:

‘the saints they taught us in the Maagdenhuis – I shouldn’t say it, I suppose – but they were so simple. Like the puppets at the Poesje Theatre: carved to be good, or bad, and the same – just wood – all through. You never wonder what they’re thinking, the way you do with Mijnheer’s people.’

Gil, looking at one such painting, reflects, ‘it was the Bruegel Gil had always known – a true Bruegel if not the only true Bruegel – who had painted it. Gil could not accept Bruegel’s faith, any more than he could accept Roeland’s. But each was a good man, and a wise man – most of the time – and surely the rest of it all could be left to God’.

The end of the book, where sixty years are skipped over in a few paragraphs, did feel somewhat rushed to me. In a way, this is inevitable given the novel’s structure. It is the events between 1562 and 1567 that Gil is trying to justify to the abbot, plus for his own safety he needs to conceal from him much of what happened afterwards. But given that Bruegel had been so important to him, it seems odd that his early death in 1569 doesn’t rate a mention – it would have happened while Gil was abroad, but we are told they kept in touch by letter.

One reason this struck me, though, is that Bruegel is such a towering character in the novel – fully realised, fully rounded, as contradictory and exasperating as humans generally are. He comes alive as Doortje’s wooden saints did not. So, and this is important in a historical novel, do the place and time.

“But things feel strange – they feel different. Like this is a waiting time. Like when you see dark clouds riding in, and swelling, and you know that before long there’ll be a storm.”

The publisher labels this novel as being for ages 12 and upwards; in other words it’s one of those that get labelled YA because the protagonists are aged about 15. I’ve never been entirely sure why this fact should automatically render a book YA rather than adult, particularly since, these days, the designation doesn’t mean a certain amount of sex and violence can’t be included. I don’t feel I need to be a pensioner to interest myself in Lear, and though I may no longer be 15, I do recall what it was like. Certainly I did not feel, when reading this as an adult, that the author was simplifying his message or vocabulary for a young audience in a way he wouldn’t have for adults, which is just as well, because young readers notice and resent that. It is a fairly short novel, which perhaps is the one concession.

It is set in the neighbourhood of York in the year 1066. Kata, a 15-year-old girl living in the village of Riccall, is finding life dull, and longs for more interesting times. “Is this all there is? Kata thought. Ploughing and planting, and weeding, haymaking, harvesting… Round and round and round.”

Things are of course about to get infinitely more interesting, because Harald Hardrada has landed with an army and is about to claim the kingdom. He has with him an illegitimate son called Tor (not an historical character) the same age as Kata. While Tor is scouting for the Norwegian army, he and Kata happen to meet, and fall in love on sight. This is obviously inconvenient, given the circumstances, and Tor, who has no previous experience of war, was already conflicted by having watched his father’s troops burn Scarborough:

“Before long, Tor could hear timber crackling and spitting, the roar and updraught of flames blazing, sucking and whistling. He could see men and women and children running away from their huts and shacks; he thought of the old people inside them, unable to escape.

“I’ve come to help these people”, the king shouted to his son. “I’ve no quarrel with them. No wish to hurt them. But if they resist me… Well, the word will soon spread. This is a warning.”

Hardrada, in fact, is your archetypal warmonger, convinced of his own rightness and justifying his actions as such men always do; these days he would be talking about collateral damage. Tor, scouting incognito among the locals, gets to know them as individuals. He also comes to realise how racially mixed their community actually is, and how the war will fracture it. Nevertheless, his loyalty to, and admiration for, his fearsome father are equally strong in him.

Kata’s conflict, in the end, is less between her love for Tor and her feelings for her people than between a longing for novelty and adventure and a wish to escape the turmoil unfolding in her world. This crystallizes around a convent she visits in York:

“Everything within seemed so peaceful and straightforward, while the world without was so uncertain and dangerous, and yet … yet so alive.

I want to be within, she thought, but I need to be without. Both.”

While I know women in Saxon times had more agency than later under the Normans, I did wonder if a girl, and one of Kata’s age, would do, or contemplate, quite so much journeying on her own. Enabling girls to do interesting things is always a problem for historical fiction writers, and unless they use the old trope of disguising their heroines as boys, their only option is probably to make them rather more self-reliant and determined than the norm – Kata, unlike Tor, is an orphan, another classic way of giving fictional children more agency.

The love-at-first-sight story is no more unlikely than Romeo and Juliet, and their feelings are quite credibly and sympathetically drawn. But for me the main focus of the story was the effect of war on ordinary people. The vengeful racial violence that erupts in York against Scandinavians who have lived peacefully side by side with English neighbours for decades, the burning and looting of essential winter stores, the ruin of a tranquil landscape. When the headman of her village predicts where the battle will take place, Kata asks what is really the novel’s crucial question:

“The earls, they’ll draw up somewhere around here”, he added. That’s my guess.”

Kata stared at the scrub to her left, and the boggy water meadows across the river, and the sweet water, now running so softly, ribbed with blood light from the lowering sun.

“Do they have to?” she asked.

“Inspired by Humphries’s reworkings and in keeping with my established approach, I chose to write poems ‘after’ Dafydd rather than translations – not changing the setting or period but aiming to bridge the imaginative gap between his world and that of the modern English-speaking reader.”

Those readers who were enchanted by Matthew Francis’s collection The Mabinogi (and it would be a dull reader who was not) have another pleasure looming, in these versions of the mediaeval Welsh poet Dafydd ab Gwilym. In the absorbing Introduction, Francis explains why, before he came across the reworkings of the American poet Rolfe Humphries, more literal, faithful translations had left him with a sense of something wanting:

“They present the poet as a historical oddity, someone we have to make allowances for, imagining what his poems would be like if we were the sort of people for whom he originally wrote, speaking his language and sharing his culture. They are not so much poems as placeholders indicating what the poems were for other readers in other times.”

This resonated with me, because it was just what happened to me when reading translations of Aristophanes. Most British translators of him were good enough at indicating what he was to Athenian readers in the fifth century BC, but what they never did was make him sound remotely funny. Not until I discovered the equally scholarly but less reverent US translators - Dudley Fitts, Richmond Lattimore, Douglass Parker and William Arrowsmith - did it dawn on me why Athenian audiences might have been splitting their sides laughing.

In The Mabinogi, Francis treated the old legends not as sacred texts to be revered (a sure way to kill them) but as stories that were told aloud, added to, twisted according to need and developed a life of their own in the telling – which was why they came so alive in his versions. In The Green Month, he takes the key to the original poems to be Dafydd’s own personality – humorous, self-mocking, fascinated by nature and keenly observant of it, fascinated also by sex and unusually honest about it, fascinated above all by words and the craft of writing. By making this man come alive, Francis can get inside the skin of the poems, as he does in “Fox”, which is both a brilliant sketch of a fox and Dafydd’s rueful admission of his own sexual obsessions:

     Then watch out, hens! The gentleman in the gamey coat
     has a nose for feathered flesh. Men may chase him
     for fifty furlongs, but he’ll be back
     sniffing around your bedroom.
     I know how he feels.

This verse also demonstrates how Francis chose to tackle the poems technically. Dafydd was a very formal poet, and while wisely not attempting to reproduce cynghanedd in a language not designed for it, Francis felt some formal constraint was necessary and chose this 5-line “tapering syllabic stanza in which each line is shorter than the one before”. It imposes economy, the more so as the poem progresses, and the result is a considerable shortening of some of Dafydd’s longer and more discursive forays into description and metaphor. It produces a poem which is “a snapshot of one of Dafydd’s themes, concentrating on the most striking images and ideas”.

A sort of distilled Dafydd, then. And often very effective. In the lines from “Hay”, complaining about the rain:

      I must be seven-eighths water now
     as the rest of the world is
     this sodden evening

there is the immediacy that Francis missed from earlier translations, the sense that this fed-up, rained-on man was like ourselves. In “Geese”, the lines “I told her I ached from my journey/ and other things” are not just indicative of Dafydd’s sexual obsession but a convincing approximation of a voice; one feels that is how he would have said it.

These poems struck me as being very true to Dafydd’s obsessive inventiveness with imagery – the “tattered sheet of snow”, the fogbound man “smothered in fleece, a tick in the weather’s wool” – also to his keen observation of the natural world and to his self-mocking humour. They are also, as one would expect from a combination of Dafydd ab Gwilym and Matthew Francis, hugely entertaining poems in their own right. Just as the American translators fixed on the one thing that really matters about Aristophanes, ie how and why he is funny, so Francis’s “snapshots” have focused on what mattered about Dafydd.

“Object permanence”, as the notes explain, is “the understanding that objects can continue to exist even when we cannot perceive them”. This collection delineates various people, including the author, via objects, places and moments that have been important in their lives. This is as good a way as any to bring characters to life, provided the writer chooses the right details, and Berkeley proves very acute at it. In “Behold This Woman”, a long list of details gives a vivid picture of a somewhat intimidating woman, “hair upswept in a fury”, who might be the speaker’s mother, but perhaps even more impressive in this regard is the poem, short enough to quote in full, “Bendinck’s Bittermints”:

     He was not a man for confectionery
     but my father loved the way the spartan shell
     cracked against the tongue to yield
     an inner sweet asperity. A small
     box would last all January.
      A second mint, he said,
     would taste the same, so why
     would you eat another straight away?

The same sharpness of observation surfaces in her forensically accurate rendering of remembered adult expressions: “And the wind comes up/ All the Way from the Urals” (Gibraltar Point) and attitudes: “Save the string because you never know/ when you’ll next need string”.

Memories of childhood, various temporary jobs, incidents, people, all combine to build up a kind of autobiography. Artistic influences figure too, The end of “Darning”, “Between my fingertip and thumb/ the needle fits. The thimble finger steadies it” acknowledges its debt to Heaney, and though “Places I have slept”, according to the notes, “’ owes its inspiration to ‘Sleeping’ by Raymond Carver.”, I did wonder too if Tracey Emin’s famous bed was not somewhere at the back of the poet’s mind.

There is a certain humour in these echoes, especially that of William Carlos Williams,

you won’t
forgive me

I have eaten
the last tomato

and indeed an acerbic humour has always been characteristic of this poet’s work, as in “Coin of the realm”:

     She’s looking right, into the future
     where her bareheaded son will be crowned,
     looking left, into the past. She wears a crown
     (or is it tiara?) because without it
     she’d just be a woman, but the king
     is a King, bareheaded on coins
     and, like all depictions of monarchs,
     shown for simplicity’s sake
      neatly cut off at the neck.

By its nature, this is a collection full of personal references, but that need not, and does not, render it inaccessible, because they are mostly the kind of references to which a reader can easily relate, or substitute his or her own memories for those of the poet – we have nearly all, in childhood, been on a trip to the seaside like the one in “Gibraltar Point”, that did not live up to expectations. The one poem where I did feel I didn’t really know what was going on was “Monday at Kettle’s Yard”. I was hoping to find a reference to this in the notes, but in vain.

Mostly, she works in free verse, but when she feels a poem belongs in a form, she handles it deftly. “Breaking news” is a villanelle, appropriately for a poem in which “ it’s all happening again”, and “Missing”, again aptly for its subject, is a lipogram omitting one letter of the alphabet in each stanza. This must be a fearsomely complicated thing not just to do, but to get a decent poem out of, and testifies to considerable technical skill.

The longest poem in the collection is “The bowser”, about a disused water-tank around which childhood memories cluster and whose decay mirrors changes in the wider world. In one italicised section it speaks, like an object in an Anglo-Saxon riddle poem, recalling its past. Then the poem segues into a long lament for all that the object and its falling out of use stands for:

     O stubborn tank of stale water
     o lumpen iron emptiness
     o grim beacon of loyalty and decay
     of foundries in west midlands
     young men trained in technical drawing
      taps and gaskets
     baffles and wheelhead valves

Again this format echoes place-laments through from Anglo-Saxon times to the nineteenth century, though they tend to concern ruined halls, mansions and abbeys. But this poem is none the less powerful and evocative for memorialising a water-tank. This is a collection notable for its keen observation; the poet had various jobs when younger, but judging by her eye for the telling details in all of them, she was always at heart a writer.

The book may be obtained from this address.

This is very much a themed collection; its genesis was empty nest syndrome resulting from the departure of a daughter to university, but as is generally the way, one emotional preoccupation leads on to others, memories of the mother’s own youth and past relationships. The words “mother” and “daughter”, though, remain central throughout.

The sense of the daughter’s absence is sharply evoked in poems like “the winter the murders stopped”:

     i miss hearing the creak of my daughter’s bedframe
     in the middle of the night, miss being summoned
     for glasses of water she could easily
     get herself, and now my house is filled
     with spiders, since there is
     no one here afraid of them

Memories of this daughter as a child

     as soon as you could walk you had the inclination
     to bolt and there was i, forever yanking you back
     on your reins (“the bolter”)

mingle with memories of the narrator’s own childhood sleepwalking: “i was an escape artist in a pair of fluffy pink slippers.” (“escape artist”). Indeed escape, of a kind, is also central to the poems, in that many of the remembered or imagined relationships in the collection end in failed contact. The idyll of “drowning on a stranger’s couch”, in which two people seem to be fulfilling each other’s emotional needs, ends with

     you will never
     write the letter you vow you will write when you eventually
     return home to wales a few weeks later, the
     thank you to the stranger who misses
     being a mother, from the girl who misses being a daughter.

And in “glasgow”, what looked like the start of a promising friendship also ends with the parties each going their own way:

     on one of your days off you took the bus
    into glasgow and brought me back a stuffed polar bear that i still have.
    and then one morning,
    some weeks after the bear,
    i heard from one of the housekeepers
    you’d caught that same bus
    in the dead of night, rode out to some other hotel in some other country,
    onto some other adventure. you left me alone

If this sounds despondent, that is not how the collection comes across, because there is quite a lot of wry humour in the voice, also a recognition that one cannot own people, nor keep them for ever – the daughter “is not lost, she is free” (“i didn’t call gillian Anderson”), and “the person next to me is not mine either, not really,/ because people never are, are they?” (escape artist”).

Some things about the poet’s technique will by now be evident; she doesn’t feel everything needs to be left-hand justified and is happy to use all the white space on the page, which is always rather a pleasure to me as a reader. And she works only in lower case, which some readers will not like so much, but it does seem to suit the conversational, informal tone of these poems. She also, at least in this collection, works mostly in the first person (occasionally in the second, when addressing the daughter). There are hazards in the “I” voice, notably the danger of sounding self-absorbed and sentimental. I think she mostly avoids this through the use of humour, though the last two lines of “the bolter” do strike me as not only predictable but a bit saccharine in tone. Mostly, though, she manages her endings well, making them memorable without looking contrived or sought-for. Indeed the last three lines of the last poem, which I won’t spoil by quoting, undercut the emotion of the collection in a way that raises a wry smile.

This is one of those collections inspired by Covid, but in an odd way. The author, though of Jewish descent, had not learned Hebrew as a child, nor especially missed it, but “the imposed solitude and feelings of collective dread in those strange times prompted an urge to reclaim something of my heritage and explore my identity. My parents were both dead by this time and the vacuum of lockdown made me long for community and a renewed continuity with the past.”

Hence a renewed engagement with learning the language. But Rose, besides being a poet, is a translator, and soon became interested in the language for its own sake rather than just as a source of personal memories. “When I did more research into the letters, I became fascinated by their different layers of meaning and the further I delved into the symbolism of each letter, the more interested I became.” And so we have a sequence of poems in response to each of the 22 Hebrew letters. It also, as befits a project concerned with heritage, includes images of religious objects which had significance for her forebears.

It is obvious from the first, title, poem how conscious she is of the history and physical reality of language; the way its shapes evolved from pictures and from being carved into stone (“Aleph Bet” is of course the ancestor of “alphabet”):

      rapped right to left, hammer
     and chisel tap-dancing
     thought into endurance,
     tablet dust a halo rising.

She is conscious too of shape, the shape that sounds make of a mouth and their own shape on the page

this letter is a hard kiss
of sound, a pursing of lips […]

     This is the sign,
     in shape and meaning,
     for a house, its door open,
     beckoning always
      (Bet)

Our letters are a lot further removed from pictograms than those of the Hebrew alphabet. Though C and G are our closest equivalents of the Greek gamma and Hebrew gimmel, neither much resembles a camel with an outstretched neck, as gimmel does. The recognisablility of the pictograms enables us to see what was important to the people who invented these ways of visually representing sounds: a tent, a riding animal, water. They also lend themselves to imagery: mem can mean water, but also a womb, since water is the source of life. All these layers of meaning (somewhat reminiscent of the readings of Philip Pullman’s alethiometer) naturally fascinate a linguist like Rose, and of course for all those fortunate enough not to be monoglots, there is also the fascination of their accidental resemblance to the words of another language:

      One
     of the elemental mothers—
     aleph, mem, shin: air, water, fire—primordial
     mem keeps mum,
     clamp of lips at teat,
     a murmur of mam, mummy, am, immi,
     names like mementos
     recalling the mmm
     of comfort and home.
      (Mem)

There is of course a personal relevance to this, which surfaces elsewhere:

      this letter
     is forced between lip
     and teeth, delivering
     the vim in words
     like lev, heart, avi,
     my dad, hav, give, ahava,
     love
      (Vet)

Ultimately though, if I had to define the overarching theme of this collection, it would be neither Judaism nor a sense of personal identity and heritage, but the nature of language. How and why it develops, how it works physically, how it shapes our thoughts. The notes at the end, explaining more about the individual letters, will be fascinating to anyone with an interest in linguistics. And there are times in the poems when the wordplay begins to echo George Herbert, convinced that two words do not sound alike by pure accident:

      Repentance
     may yet ring changes
     to convert a pauper,
     rash, and rasha, a rascal,
     to rosh, head, the skull
     a crown, righteous as one
     throwing stones
      (Resh)

Apart from a couple of slightly unexpected near-contemporary images in “Shin” – “fingers split like Spock/for a tripartite salute” – and “Dalet” – “the blinking 404/error of existence” – there is only one definite reference to a contemporary event: covid, in “Kaf/Khaf”. But the last poem, “Unknown”, concerns a letter traditionally said to be missing from the alphabet and whose eventual revelation will set all wrongs right:

      this is the missing shape
     that will mend the place
     of hurt where grief plumes
     like a city of debris rent
     with sirens

It is implied that we don’t yet even know how to make the sound of this letter; it might be palatal or labial, but if we ever find out,

      it will rise in thanksgiving
     from our depths and press
     its utterance to the cheek
     of the child who sleeps
     through the night’s silence.

Which last outcome we can all agree would be highly desirable, though it currently seems most unlikely. This is a sequence which would appeal to anyone interested in heritage and identity, but above all in language.

Tony Curtis has now been active in poetry for some 50 years, and as might perhaps be expected, this collection is very retrospective, sometimes elegiac, in tone. There are many childhood reminiscences, tributes to departed friends like Dannie Abse, Helen Dunmore and Glyn Jones, and poems centring on the history of Carmarthenshire, where Curtis grew up. To quote (in translation) the Welsh poet J T Jones, a man in old age is drawn to the scenes of his youth, “to walk in the places where he used to run”. But Curtis has also been a much-travelled man, and this is reflected in poems set in the US and Europe.

In poems like “Visiting the Big Man”, the elegiac tone is very pronounced:

     We looked across the fields
     for what had gone
     and what we’d never see again.

     That would have been the last time
     I saw him, or maybe the time
     before the last time.

Those three “time” line endings strike like hammers, or the tick of a clock, emphasising both the passing of time and the fallibility of memory.

But though the poet is necessarily conscious of mortality (even, in “Further instructions”, leaving guidance for the disposal of his ashes), elegiac does not have to mean unremitting gloom, and these memories are mostly positive. There is keenly observed nature,

Sparrows bicker in the bankside bramble (“The Guardian”),

and the “Bosherston Pike”,

     angling through the lily roots,
     Razor teeth and steel-clasp jaws
     Cruising the pools like a U-Boat in the shadows.

There are intriguing “characters” from the past, like Jimmy Wilde and Anne James. There is also the present, in the form of grandchildren and, still, new experiences:

stare up through the huge pines and meet
a sky that comes down to greet us

     with its diamonds closer,
     bright and sharp and beyond number,
     met as if for the first time. (“Yosemite”).

Having said that, there is undoubtedly a dark streak running through the collection, perhaps best exemplified in the often ambiguous and mood-changing endings of some poems. From that of “Railroad – “blood and dreams. Everything we need/ it seems” to the sinister double meaning in the last line of “In the Duomo, Siracusa”:

      out of the body in death, that motherly caress,
     the waiting over, knowing your depth
     and it’s taking you in.

“Scrolling Down”, a list poem which is his one concession to the internet age, didn’t really work for me; it highlights the random nature of news stories and the way they manage to equate the vital and the trivial, but we all knew that. There are, inevitably in a retrospective like this, a great many personal references, especially to friends and acquaintances. I know from experience that this can sometimes irk readers (or maybe it’s just reviewers), but it really shouldn’t, as long as the writer has managed to find the universal in the particular. We have all lost friends and relatives; all found inspiration in odd corners of history, and we should be able to mentally substitute the names in our own experience for those in the poem. I was reminded a couple of times of a review of one of my own collections, which opined that it wouldn’t please any reader who was “not interested in history”. I think that is true of this collection too, but then I can’t actually imagine what such a person would be doing reading any kind of a book.

All the policies of tsars are now being implemented by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Teaching in Ukrainian is once more prohibited in the occupied territories of Ukraine and Ukrainian books are being withdrawn from libraries there.

I’ve already reviewed one book about the war in Ukraine, last year. That was the journalist Jen Stout’s Night Train to Odesa, by an outsider whose interest in the area led her to spend time in a war zone. This, by contrast, is an insider view: essentially the diaries and other connected writings of the novelist Andrey Kurkov, who was Russian-born but has lived in Ukraine from the age of two and naturally considers himself Ukrainian.

Like Stout, he is informative on what it is like to live in a constant state of war; he notes, as she did, the way people get blasé about air-raid warnings, and the expanding vocabulary of children (to judge by his surprised tone, the f-word was, before the war, far less common among Ukrainian children than it has long been among English ones). He dwells more than she did on the effects of power cuts, having experienced more of them: “The Russian aggression has given electricity a very bad name. People in older buildings with gas stoves and ovens consider themselves very fortunate. They can cook and make hot drinks. What is more, bricks placed strategically on the gas hob can heat a room quite effectively”. And there are chilling details like this: “In the Kyiv metro, there are adverts for apartments in newly built blocks. The posters show floor plans and I noticed that all the new apartments have rooms set around a spacious, windowless area – a clever design for wartime.”

What I hadn’t bargained for was how, as both a writer and a Welsh person, I would identify with him in the culture war. Kurkov can speak and understand Ukrainian, but his native language, the one he grew up hearing his parents speak, is Russian and as any writer knows, it is very hard to compose in any but one’s native tongue. Kurkov still writes in Russian but does not publish in it; he gets his work translated into Ukrainian and other languages and it is the translations that get published, not the originals, a decision eased by the fact that his work has been unwelcome to the Russian authorities since he took part in the Orange Revolution.

You’d think this would qualify him as a Ukrainian writer in most people’s eyes, but as Welsh writers in English will know, things are not that simple: “I continued to write literary texts in Russian but I called myself and considered myself a Ukrainian writer. Some of my Ukrainian-speaking colleagues treated my self-identification with hostility. They stubbornly called me a Russian writer and insisted that if I wanted to call myself a Ukrainian author I should switch to writing in Ukrainian.” Groans of recognition… The one difference, as far as I can judge, is that Ukrainian and Russian are a hell of a lot closer than Welsh and English, so it might be easier to switch between the two, but it still wouldn’t be that easy.

This linguistic antagonism is not universal; “Odesa is a commercial city – full of sellers and buyers – where people are used to responding in the buyer’s language if they know it. At the central market, in addition to Ukrainian and Russian, you will hear Moldavian, Bulgarian and Gagauz. Hatred of Russia, which is evident at every step around the city, has not transposed into hatred of the Russian language”. And bigoted statements do generate angry responses:

“The climax of this round of the fight over language was a statement from the infamous anti-Russian-language crusader and former Member of Parliament, Iryna Farion, who declared that Russian-speaking Ukrainian soldiers should not call themselves Ukrainians. Feedback from both Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking soldiers was not long in coming. Ukrainian soldier Ekaterina Polishchuk – known throughout the country by her call sign Ptashka (Birdie) – who fought in Mariupol and survived Russian captivity, said: “Your position is not pro-Ukrainian and I consider you a project of the Kremlin. You are an enemy, promoting poisonous narratives. Your position and statements are complete shit. I say this as someone who spoke Ukrainian in captivity and who has been defending Ukraine for three years side by side with heroes who speak Ukrainian, Russian, Georgian, Belarusian, Polish, dozens of dialects, English, and dozens of other languages …” Kurkov adds that the commander Major Zhorin responded with a similar message, “but in words nobody was likely to print”.

Nevertheless, the intolerance of language zealots is understandable; if you spend generations undermining someone’s language and culture, they are liable to attack yours in return. Hence the recycling project in Kyiv: “turning Russian-language books into pulp to raise money for humanitarian projects. This campaign is not spearheaded by the state but by Ukrainian-language writers and cultural figures who believe that the preponderance of Russian-language books in libraries, both public and domestic, is an aspect of Russian aggression.” Understandable but saddening, like the campaign against the memory of Mikhail Bulgakov: “a memorial plaque dedicated to the writer was publicly removed from the wall near the entrance to Kyiv University, where he studied. Now a host of Ukrainian intellectuals and writers have decided to ‘take up arms’ against his museum”. The issue with Bulgakov is not just that he wrote in Russian but that he opposed Ukrainian nationalism. But he’s long dead, he was a fine writer, and Kurkov plainly shares the view in the Facebook comments of Ukrainian soldiers about such goings-on: “While we are fighting here, are you out of your minds?”

I must not imply that the cultural question dominates unduly. There is far more about politics, the course of the war and everyday life for civilians in wartime. And it is fascinating and informative, from remarks like “Ukrainian children can already tell the difference between the sound of a blast made by air defence systems and the noise of the explosion of a missile hitting its target” to humour, like the story of Grandad Danylo, the one man in Kurkov’s village near Kyiv who, in the 1980s, subscribed to a newspaper: “Every morning, a postman cycled up to the gate of Danylo’s house and left a newspaper between the slats in his fence. Danylo immediately pulled it out and read it from cover to cover before beginning his “anti-Soviet” activities. He walked along the street stopping to talk with everyone he met, calling over the fence to neighbours if he saw a potential interlocutor in a courtyard. First, of course, he greeted them and then he told them, in detail, what the Soviet press was lying about that day.”

But the book is essentially the diaries of a writer in wartime and not only does the cultural aspect naturally matter a lot to him, it also resonates more with any reader who shares that preoccupation.

This is an anthology of poems, prose pieces and artwork celebrating “the sacred feminine, Brigid, and the heritage of Kildare”. It becomes obvious quite soon that “Brigid” is but one avatar in a long line of female figures of worship going back through mythology to the great Asian goddess variously known as Cybele, Isis, Lady, Mother and much else. The “brideog” dolls which are dressed in white and resemble slightly potato-faced children were once made of straw, which betrays their origin as corn-doll fertility symbols. Indeed Katie Donovan’s poem “Charm” references not Brigid but that other famous feminine symbol Venus of Willendorf, “totem of pleasure and plenty”, powerfully contrasting her “yeasty curves” with the stick-thinness of starvation or anorexia. Jesse Hill’s macaronic “Selkie, Find Your Skin” uses the Scottish Gaelic myth of the seal trapped in the skin of a woman, while Lenore Hart’s “Lady of the Beasts” has for its title yet another name by which the Great Goddess was known, and for its theme another of her attributes, as a guardian of animals. A more modern myth of Hans Andersen’s surfaces at the end of Claire Blennerhassett’s “Feabhra” (February, the month of Brigid’s feast day), in which an idyllic portrayal of a little girl is undercut by the sinister ending:

your playful feet
dancing in red
t-bar shoes.

Though mythology is at the back of everything, there are several pieces set in the present day, in which the image of Brigid acts to empower a woman – in Caroline Busher’s prose piece “Brigid and the Heart-Shaped Womb”, not only does water from Brigid’s well help a post-menopausal woman to become pregnant, a sense of Brigid’s determination and agency seems to enable her to discard an unsatisfactory former flame; her feelings go from “there was something about him that she found impossible to resist” to “He was no more than just a face in the crowd”. And in Catherine Anne Cullen’s sharp “Brigid of the Bargain Bins” a modern-day Brigid proves a match for the harsh circumstances of her life:

She checks the prices of sliced pans,
weighs up own labels against known brands.
She knows they cut corners with prices,
sees through their tricks, has a few of her own.

The third element in the title, “the heritage of Kildare” perhaps features less obviously than the others, but in the prose piece “Strong Bridgets” by Alison Wells, the landscape comes across very clearly:

Decanted suddenly, as a young child, into landscape. Bequeathed an inheritance of bogs, wide skies, rock castles, pools of frog spawn, moss and furze and rushes, holly trees and hideaways. A V-shaped valley between hills, like arms opening out, like a cloak thrown across vastness, marram grass rippling, folding, silk, spreading and settling all round.

This is an anthology of poems, prose pieces and artwork. Though the artwork is scattered throughout, the anthology seems otherwise to have been arranged with mainly poems in the first half, prose in the second. I’m not entirely sure this is the best way of doing it; sometimes after a longish piece of prose one welcomes the different kind of concentration, shorter but more intense, that a poem needs.

Brigid’s blue cloak, reminiscent of how the Virgin Mary is so often portrayed, marks her as, like Mary, an attempt by the adherents of a monotheist religion to make up for the lack of a female deity (ironic, really, that she is no longer officially a saint, having been dropped from the calendar by Pope Paul VI on the ground that there’s no evidence she actually existed). One does wonder if the Vatican’s real problem with her was that she shared too many attributes, including her name and feast day (Imbolc, February 1st), with a pagan Irish goddess. In this anthology Monica Corish’s “Keepers of the Flame”, an excerpt from a novel, imagines a meeting between the two. There are aspects of her, like her association with metalwork, that are strangely un-nunlike, and one of her miracles, in which she helps an unwillingly pregnant woman by making the embryo “disappear without pain” (see Maureen Boyle’s “St Brigid in the Orchard”) must have raised some clerical eyebrows. I don’t suppose her de-listing will have stopped folk celebrating her feast day and legends, in which she “exists” in a different way from that envisaged by Paul VI.

The thing about the Greek Anthology; it is universal in a way so much poetry aspires to be. It deals with universal human concerns, which is why it lends itself not just to straight translation but to re-making in other contexts. There is some of both here. Constantine’s translation of an epigram of Leonidas of Tarentum is fairly straight:

This here is Clito’s bit of a dwelling, this
The bit of land he sows, that there’s
His vineyard, that his wood, both scant. Nevertheless
Among these meagre ownings Clito’s clocked up eighty years.

This felt oddly familiar, and was, but not via Leonidas. I was recalling the Orkney poet Robert Rendall:

Look! This is Liza’s but and ben,
Wi’ screen o’ bourtrees tae the door,
Her stack o’ peats, her flag-roofed byre,
Her planticru abune the shore;
Yet ‘mang her hens and household gear
She’s brucked aboot for eighty year.

Constantine is himself a fine poet and his versions of the Anthology poets are as sensitive and effective as one might expect. The poets he has chosen are a personal selection. The predominance of Leonidas must be a personal preference, and understandable, because the man was such a superb epigrammatist that one wonders if there has ever been a better. Constantine also makes a point of foregrounding the female poets who are often overlooked, especially Anyte of Tegea, whose work also fits in with a thread of kindness to animals that runs through the selection – this concern for nature and our fellow creatures will resurface in the Coda, a section of his own poems inspired by the Anthology. Anyte was clearly an animal lover, and several of the Anthology poets express indignation at ill-treatment of horses or sympathy for injured dolphins, seen as friendly to man. Perhaps the most moving is Addaeus of Macedon, praising a grateful farmer:

When his labouring ox was worn out by old age and the furrows
Alcon, reverencing him for his service, led him not to the slaughter
But to a meadow of deep grass. There how this fellow creature
When Alcon strolls out to visit him at the hour of shadows
In grateful delight lifts up his head and bellows!

“This fellow creature” – we do not often think of the ancient world as a kindly place for other species, but some of the Greek anthology poets clearly had a sense of fellowship with them.

This kinship with animals is a major theme of the epigrams he has chosen. So are human relationships, often expressed in the sense of loss on the death of friends or kin, and the often troubled relationship between humans and their environment, especially the sea, on which so many Greeks found both a living and their death.

In the “Coda” we have a further development, wholly original poems constructed on the acknowledged model of the Anthology poems. Many are full of contained anger and sadness both at what we do to each other:

Laws of war

We too had laws of war: don’t poison wells
Don’t fell the olive trees (they take so long to grow)
Don’t bomb the schools, don’t bomb the hospitals …
Stranger seeking our monument, look around you.

and at what we do to the environment and to other creatures:

Albatross chick

Opened, this babe’s full stomach looks like a trove
Of bright things stowed away for an after-life.
What we cast on the waters is not the food of love.
Nothing will come of us for you but grief.

Perhaps the two most striking examples concern the death of children. In the main body of the work, he translates Zonas, being as universally relevant as any poet has ever been:

Dour ferryman, coming for the child Euphorion
When you hush your prow through the reeds and touch the shore
Be kind. His father, standing in the muddy shallows
Will hand him up the plank. Reach down, Charon
Bring him carefully on board. Those are his first sandals,
His pride and joy. But his footing in them is still unsure.

And then we have Constantine’s own take on a child in the aftermath of war:

Child After.

Over and done with. All gone.
She is too small to be left on the road alone.
Another day, another night, will nobody come?
Death will, a kindness, and take her home.

I found it interesting to compare Constantine’s versions with those of Dudley Fitts in his “Poems from the Greek Anthology” (1978). Fitts’s choice was often different, he translated many more humorous poems, but when he and Constantine translate the same poem, you couldn’t say one version was better than another, more that they have looked at the poem from slightly different angles. But that’s the Anthology for you: new to everyone who reads it and the proof that ancient models still say something to living poets. Genius can’t date.

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Review of Contagious Enemies: The Aberdeen Witch Trials, by Dee Lawlor, pub. The History Press 2026
Review of Sublime Lungs by Kate Noakes, pub. Two Rivers Press 2026
Review of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, by Matthew Stewart, pub. Happenstance 2023
Review of Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen by Richard Wunderli, Indiana University 2024
Review of A Light in the Northern Sea, by Tim Brady, pub. Citadel Press 2025
Review of The Other Ancient Civilisations, by Raven Todd DaSilva, pub. Mango 2024
Review of Secrets of the 17th Century Medicine Cabinet by Katherine Knight, The History Press 2024
Review of Becoming Henry, by Graham Strugnell, pub. Constellations Press 2025
Review of Dead in the Water, by David Wishart, pub. 2025
List of 2025 blog reviews
Review of The Bruegel Boy, by Emma Darwin, pub. Holland House Books 2025
Review of Kata & Tor, by Kevin Crossley-Holland, pub. Walker Books Ltd 2025
Review of The Green Month, by Matthew Francis, pub. Faber 2025
Review of Object Permanence by Anne Berkeley, pub. The Garlic Press 2025
Review of maybe i'll call gillian Anderson by Rhian Elizabeth, pub. Broken Sleep Books 2025
Review of Aleph Bet by Sue Rose, pub. Cinnamon Press 2025
Review of Leaving the Hills, by Tony Curtis, pub. Seren 2024
Review of Our Daily War, by Andrey Kurkov, pub. Open Borders Press 2025
Review of Fire: Brigid and the Sacred Feminine, eds Shauna Gilligan & Niamh Boyce, Arlen House 2024
Review of A Bird Called Elaeus, by David Constantine, pub. Bloodaxe 2024

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Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

Sheenagh Pugh's writing blog

Recent Entries

Review of Contagious Enemies: The Aberdeen Witch Trials, by Dee Lawlor, pub. The History Press 2026

Review of Sublime Lungs by Kate Noakes, pub. Two Rivers Press 2026

Review of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, by Matthew Stewart, pub. Happenstance 2023

Review of Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen by Richard Wunderli, Indiana University 2024

Review of A Light in the Northern Sea, by Tim Brady, pub. Citadel Press 2025

Review of The Other Ancient Civilisations, by Raven Todd DaSilva, pub. Mango 2024

Review of Secrets of the 17th Century Medicine Cabinet by Katherine Knight, The History Press 2024

Review of Becoming Henry, by Graham Strugnell, pub. Constellations Press 2025

Review of Dead in the Water, by David Wishart, pub. 2025

List of 2025 blog reviews

Review of The Bruegel Boy, by Emma Darwin, pub. Holland House Books 2025

Review of Kata & Tor, by Kevin Crossley-Holland, pub. Walker Books Ltd 2025

Review of The Green Month, by Matthew Francis, pub. Faber 2025

Review of Object Permanence by Anne Berkeley, pub. The Garlic Press 2025

Review of maybe i'll call gillian Anderson by Rhian Elizabeth, pub. Broken Sleep Books 2025

Review of Aleph Bet by Sue Rose, pub. Cinnamon Press 2025

Review of Leaving the Hills, by Tony Curtis, pub. Seren 2024

Review of Our Daily War, by Andrey Kurkov, pub. Open Borders Press 2025

Review of Fire: Brigid and the Sacred Feminine, eds Shauna Gilligan & Niamh Boyce, Arlen House 2024

Review of A Bird Called Elaeus, by David Constantine, pub. Bloodaxe 2024