Review of Celestial Chess

Here’s a review of my poetry collection by the actor and poet Mark McGann. I was attending one of his brilliant stage acting masterclasses earlier this month and gave him a copy of the collection. These are his kind words.

‘I’m really enjoying it. I find the honesty, pathos, imagery and courage really rather moving. Well done. It’s so wonderful to have achieved something so passionately crafted for posterity that can be shared and identified with by others like this. Thank you so much for letting me glimpse your inner world.
Stylistically they are often quite resonant of an oratory style, which I suppose one could argue is more traditional than contemporary in its sensibility but this is not something that should devalue them. It’s also probably informed by your relationship with the acting process. A lot of these poems feel like the internal narratives of character informing performance, the 7/8ths of the iceberg unseen below the waterline if you will.
Your chief focus is on the human psyche. This is further thrown into sharp relief by your frequent use of 1st and 2nd person narratives, which also underlines the outlier/populace, singular/plural framing. In this respect your poetry seeks to play less with words at times than psychological irony and does shed some moving light on the inner narrative. This is not to say there isn’t some great word play and metaphors explored, but that these are often presented within the powerful constraint of rhetorical devices like ‘anaphora’ e.g. ‘Gaps in’, isocolons, repetitions and full rhymes that naturally add heightened oratory power and scale to the poems and their focus. But you also move markedly away from such traditional constraints with others. I think it’s a lovely miscellany of poetical considerations. You should feel proud of your work.’