Reviews

Clare Pollard in Magma - ' ... these poems recall the rich confessional poetry of Pascale Petite or the surreal psychodramas of Selima Hill, and herald a bold, truthful new voice.'

Anne-Marie Fyfe - Poetry London '...the sheer welter of blues transcends cliched correlatives such as blue for joy or for the blues, to include the blue-arrowed tongue on an embarrassed father's wartime tattoo, a pink-eared rabbit disappearing 'faster than a blue-arsed fly', an unwanted bacon joint turning nauseous silvery-blue, and blue heat from a paraffin lamp. Blue is also in the childhood dress of a now elderly mother, once one of a 'flock of children' abandoned by a grandfather on the run. '

John MacKay - Poetry Express - 'Here is a poet whose language is like a multi-coloured kite: she knows how to let it fly and swoop, but she never lets go of the strings. Sawkins doesn't let the words out of her sight because she knows only too well that to become too flowery or elaborate would be to do a disservice to the events that have shaped her life.'

Rachel Playforth - The Frogmore Papers - This collection is full of the kind of confident, natural poetry where the reader is hardly aware of the craft behind it, where the rightness of the language speaks straight to the mind and heart. Each poem here delivers its emotional charge without fuss but with new insights into everything from the half-understood traumas of childhood to the process of writing itself.'

Nadine Brummer - Artemis - For me the loveliest poem in the book is Under a Stone. I wish I had space to quote this in full to show its imaginative movement and a delicacy of language that enlivens and delights. Maggie Sawkins in taut poems has achieved a hard-won eloquence.

Susan Utting - The North - 'Observing strangeness is what Maggie Sawkins excels at. Reading her poems lets us into her world with all its strange particularities, its 'little bits of darkness that slip through', to share her view and

to marvel at it.'