The Knives, Forks and Spoons Press

The Moth Is Moth This Money Night Moth by David Berridge is a 28–page slide–show, a growing puzzle, poetry like blocks of concrete dropped. Each page is a phrase, often a distorted echo of previous page. There are resonances and tensions here that I’ve yet to grasp. I want to hear this set to music: electronica, serious or both.

The Moth Is Moth This Money Night Moth
by David Berridge
ISBN 9780-9565418-3-3

In among the flowers of Big On The Hawkesbury by Michael Blackburn are sharp sharp character conflicts, melodies & airs. Glorious. I laughed enough to worry the barmaid.

Big On The Hawkesbury
by Michael Blackburn
ISBN 978-0-9563928-2-6

Birds by Neil Campbell has short character portraits with some sharply nasty flavours. A book of death that doesn’t have the clown sparkle of Hawkesbury. Damn damn good lines though, e.g. from Sakura, "Then you fell / like wax / dripping from / a balcony / and turning / into snow." But the book fades into simple observation about birds. This might be connected with the fact that the book is called "Birds". I am missing something.

Birds
by Neil Campbell
ISBN 978-0-9563928-4-8

Intersections, a word–play on section, is a three part mixture of consistent experiment. It’s a good dance, an analytical work, a play across the semantics of chemistry and mythology, through their common greek roots. Part I is a long poem of three line stanzas; I like. Parts II & III, left / right, small / large, prose poetry streams, I’m not so sure about. My problem, ultimately, is that Clapham riffs off the words more than the hollow echoes that resonate underneath them.

Intersections
by K.C. Clapham ISBN 978-1907812-10-1

Birkenau tours nazi murder camps in photos and poetry. I’m not sure about the photos, they illustrate the ruins, but they’re unfocused, unpositioned. They’re tourist photos, but I want photos to be about the tourism, not to be the tourism.

Both poetry & photography tour the great shame, contrasting petty modern rules, petty nervousness, petty modern life, natural life, with the wreck of the collective insanity. The poetry works, beyond doubt, but I feel it’s too restrained, as though the oppression of the camps was still so powerful it suppresses too much poetry.

Birkenau
by Antony Rowland
ISBN 978-0-9565418-9-5