Katy Evans-Bush, Broken Cities (smith/doorstop, 2017)
Ruth McIlroy, Guppy Primer (smith/doorstop, 2017)
Josephine Abbott, The Infinite Knot (smith/doorstop, 2017)
Lesley Saunders, Angels on Horseback (smith/doorstop, 2017)
Stephen Knight, A Swansea Love Song (smith/doorstop, 2017)
Andrew Waterman, Bitter-Sweet (Shoestring Press, 2017).
  

Katy Evans-Bush is an assured poet with several collections to her name and writes with wit and imagination in this pamphlet of eighteen poems, which was one of the four Poetry Business Competition winners reviewed here. Broken Cities manages to combine a vision of urban fracture – and therefore broken lives – with an engagingly comic slant where positive and negative aspects appear to twist round each other in an animated double helix. She achieves this in a finely wrought spoken style that at times ends up by being curiously formal so that in spite of the chuckles one understands the serious message of ‘watch out’, this poem means you. The subject matter is laudably wide and socially deep, ranging from a collection of aging putrefying milk bottles in an old man’s home (‘The Milk God’) to ‘Prior Bolton’s Oriel Window’ where the reader is enjoined to ‘have a think’ about the medieval cleric’s practical ways and means as they ‘sit and watch / the daily trumpetings of internet or telly’. The wit is well to the fore in all these poems where the poet grabs reality and tweaks it in her imagination so that it is enhanced rather than traduced. Of particular mention are the brilliantly ...