Ann Pilling In Flight (Mudfog, 2024)
Robert Etty Beyond the Last House (Shoestring Press, 2024)
Laurie Bolger Spin (smith/doorstop, 2024)

Ann Pilling’s In Flight is characterised by modesty and the exactness of its focus. ‘This daily round, this ritual  washing and drying, empties the mind  and ghosts creep in.’ These lines from the opening of ‘Domestic Chores’ are emblematic of the workings of the whole collection – its ability to celebrate the ordinariness and hauntedness of the everyday. Pilling finds creative recompense in the meditative space opened up within the apparently mundane which allows contact with the voices and tangible experiences of the past. In this way the poems quietly combine elegy with celebration. The collection opens with poems facing up to lock-down and other forms of physical limit and restriction, but by its end has demonstrated a capacity for discovery and beauty within constraint. There is a religious sensibility at work here as observation turns quietly to meditation and revelation. The continued eruption of the past into the present provides the delicate life of these poems as their subtle epiphanies find ways of angling themselves towards elusive forms of significance: ‘We seek truth in the obvious  but nearly always miss it’ (‘Advent’).
The ordinary, the everyday, and the familiar also form the chosen territory of Robert Etty’s Beyond the Last House, his sixth collection with Shoestring in which he once again engages humanely with the people and landscape of Lincolnshire. Etty’s democratic forte is in pointing us to the often ...