Review of The Magpie Almanack by Simon Williams, pub. Dempsey & Windle 2020

This is a long collection (99 pages) divided into sections by, roughly, theme, eg “People & Animals”, and style, as in “Surreal and Dada”. Needless to say, several could fit into more than one.

I can see why one would want to subdivide such a large collection but wonder if this particular way of doing it was wise. It means beginning with a whole tranche of personal poems (“About the Author”), which might be some readers’ cup of tea but to me felt a bit too anecdotal. Scattered throughout a collection, they probably wouldn’t have had this effect.
 

Things perked up with the next section, “People & Animals”, where the observation and language both sharpen:
 

   The little gulls, in a set of surprises,
  lift their wings like midget angels’ (“Little Gulls”)

He does a good job, too, in “Black Bear Dreams”, of getting inside the head of a female bear just going into hibernation:

  The taste of pink outstrips all others:
 fish, flesh, my aching teats.

There is a lot of humour in this collection, which for me works best when the voice isn’t being too aware of the fact that it is writing poems. When, in “A T-Rex Explains”, he has his dinosaur narrator, which has just mentioned a transformer coil, add in brackets

  (no, I don’t know what a transformer coil is,
  it’s just a simile)
 

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