WAR Reviewed by Lee Murray

Lee Murray reviewed my latest dark poetry collection WAR (written in collaboration with Marge Simon) released by Crystal Lake Publishing in June 2018.

"With its absolutely stunning cover art by Wendy Saber Core, and provocative interior images by Stefano Cadroselli, War: Dark Poems is a fitting production for a collection by two of the world’s best contemporary poets: Marge Simon and Alessandro Manzetti. It’s Manzetti’s fifth poetry collection, and Simon’s tenth, so they know a few things about putting together a thematically cohesive collection. War does exactly that, bringing together 32 stunning poems, some solo, some collaborative, and set in a range of battlegrounds spanning history and cultures. The poems are chillingly brutal, imbued with the waste and the depravity of war, but the way these poets tell describe it is bewitching, the images too startlingly vivid to look away. In these lines, where children are “cut to pieces, scattered everywhere, like pomegranate seeds freed from their peel” and “Ezra and Emmanuel are sewn together”, there are moments of softness too, tiny snippets of beauty to lull us into complacency, like cloaks thrown carelessly over chairs, and a soldier’s letters “scented with Muguet”. A sublime collection from two of the best. "

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