1/ These poems combine affection with an affecting control of form and language, from the metaphor which magics puffins into 'portly monks' in 'Uncle Den's Puffin Tour' to the idiomatic 'right pickle' in 'A Hero Called Neville'. From the titles alone, it's clear this is a collection assembled with wit and warmth, with the poem 'Watching Vicars Eat Chips' suggestive of the gentle absurdities and sensibilities of local and personal memory. Within the poem 'Watching Vicars Eat Chips', however, you swerve such sentimentality with punchy parataxis of 'They killed them while they discussed matters' paying short shrift to the reader's memory of those 'portly monks' spied in the earlier poems.
2/ This is a touching and well-crafted collection of poems exploring a wide breadth of themes and subjects in an increasingly confident style and voice. Your attention to structure, especially in terms of stanzas, lines and line breaks is very strong indeed and there is almost always the feeling of being guided through the poem in a smooth and balanced way. There is also a real strength in the connections drawn between past and present, and between absence and presence, and in this too the poems show a strong awareness of the reader. The care and confidence is also layered with modest but engaging elements of surprise (e.g. the ending of 'Ghost Guidelines', or the deferral of the introduction of 'Uncle Den' until the second half of 'Uncle Den's Puffin Tour').
3/ This is touching and engaging collection of poems exploring Norwich and Norfolk landscapes through history and memory. The poems have a great command of detail and intensify this through their use of imagery as well. The first two poems (and The Wind Chime) are particularly effective in this, bringing imagined and remembered worlds to life in vivid ways for the reader. I very much enjoyed the playful Return of Thomas Gooding and Freshly Caught and Boiled, both of which animated their sense of local distinctiveness with innovative conceits. You are working with place, with ideas about local distinctiveness, spectral traces, history and memory, in intriguing ways.
4/ A really thoughtful and varied collection with some beautiful, tender and accomplished poems contained within it. 'El Cid' is a particular standout, as is 'l'auberge....'. Your poems are at their best when combining the confessional with a lyric form of historical/cultural analysis, and when you focus on the detail of small moments to create striking, precise images eg. 'a floppy neck / like a pelican's beak, and tragic eyes'. You also have a gift for portraiture in your poems: the franco-american couple, the chip shop owner, the trombone player.
5/ There is a fine balance of warmth and wit in these poems, often most evident in your poems' opening lines, with zingers like 'George Winters died suddenly of Mondays'. Take care, however, that the warmth of nostalgia doesn't tip into the sticky sentimentality that 'Marshmallows Eaten and Moons Admired' gets mired in at its middle. The rhyming triplet which opens 'The Sacred Rope' is excellent, holding together the unlikely trio of 'Camphor', 'awe' and 'shimenawa' with a control that returns in the closing tercet, sealing the poem with that half-rhyming brace of 'kit' and 'lid'. Between the opening and closing stanzas, the control of the poem's sounds is not always sustained but this long poem handles its line breaks with grace.
