Saturday 30 September 2017

Reviews of my poetry collections: Anne Stevenson, Djelloul Marbrook and Denis Gray



Couple of reviews: for my first pamphlet collection, The Skin (pub. Flarestack 2003), The Other Side of the Bridge and my second, full, collection, Salt Road (both pub. Indigo Dreams 2012 and 2013)

“My assignment was to review only three from the 20-odd small press publications sent to me, but before signing off, let me recommend a small blue booklet titled The Skin by Geraldine Green, from Flarestack Publishing in Birmingham.  

Green’s gift for poetry is naïve – or perhaps the right word is natural – in a way I would have thought impossible these days.  Though she writes in free forms, her poems kept reminding me of WHDavies’.  She writes a good deal about angels (a fashion these days) and about love and the land, but there’s a freshness about her work that brought tears to my eyes.  Real tears, like a child’s.”

-       Anne StevensonMslexia OctNovDec 2003


Review of ‘The Other Side of the Bridge’


"The Beloit Poetry, one of America's most venerable, famously reads submissions aloud. If they read Geraldine Green's poems aloud they will think inevitably of e e cummings' regard for punctuation as impediment. 

Her very first poem, "Me and Janine," is full of information and yet it tells its story-sings it-without punctuation simply because Green's mind possesses unerring musicality. She thinks musically whereas some poets translate their thoughts into music. The difference shows up again and again in this remarkable, stylistically diverse manuscript, The Other Side of the Bridge." -  Djelloul Marbrook

and Salt Road by Geraldine Green pub. by Indigo Dreams:

It has all I want in a book with its careful attention to language, heart, and soul.  I was overwhelmed by the book's introduction. How intimately and personally it was written. As if it were written for the world of people, never mind their ethnicity or culture or life experience. I read it to begin the book, but also again when I finished it. It touches the beauty of what human discovery entails, the absorption of knowledge and ideas and truths.

As for the poems, there are so many that are memorable. But just to name a few, "The echo-sounder." I looked for him last June/ found only green shoots/growing like music through stone. "Cave of the Honey-Bee, Cave of Arachne." When she woke/ dawn was spreading pink-gold fingers/ across the sky. And "Doors" what an adventure that sings of mystery and seeking and then the finding.




This is a compelling book that only a person with a joy for living could write and bring to life with such exuberance and understanding."  -- Denis Gray, New York, August 2015





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