[The Alice Trap by Kate Rhodes] remarkable is the final section, a moving sequence describing the illness and death of a friend's daughter. Through a process of restrained detail and repetition the poems gradually build their effects--"you loved cocktails, parties and old films./You stayed up late, even when you were ill./You danced for as long as you could."from Charles Bainbridge: The Guardian: The Alice Trap
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But it's in the fiercely imagined fragments of past lives that [Gabriel] Levin's writing is at its best, whether it's Caravaggio "floundering (his face horribly disfigured/in a Neopolitan tavern) and coming up for air/with each brushstroke applied to canvas" or the mysterious ancestor evoked in "A Capella" "collapsed at a burning door/coated in the cinders of a language seeded with hope".
from Charles Bainbridge: The Guardian: The Maltese Dreambook
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This [Mark Doty] poem goes on to describe how a small garden perched on the edge of the sidewalk is redefined as each passer-by glances towards it - "it took all of us to make/the garden known. No one could assemble/the entire vantage we made together . . ./I felt in that moment/not dissolved in anything, not selfless, but joined/in a layering of singularities".
from Charles Bainbridge: The Guardian: Theories and Apparitions
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