Christopher Horton
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A Scholar of the Everyday: on ‘Collecting the Data’ by Mat Riches
Christopher Horton Collecting the Data (Red Squirrel Press, 2023) is a pamphlet that decrypts everyday experiences, observing in them both the complex and the sublime as an integral part of the poet’s coming of age. These experiences constitute a kind of life-induction programme for Riches that at times comes across as almost predestined, as is…
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What being human entails: on ‘Say It With Me’ by Vanessa Lampert
Christopher Horton In Say It With Me (Seren, 2023), Vanessa Lampert’s poems, at first, immerse themselves in familial, domestic subject matter before revealing darker themes underlying everyday routine. By way of example, in ‘Halloween’, a visit to her ailing stepfather, and a shared joke with him, infers uncertainty in relation to the speaker’s historic relationship…
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‘Cabbages’: a poem by Christopher Horton
The poem below appears in Christopher Horton’s pamphlet, Perfect Timing, published by tall-lighthouse and available to purchase here. ‘Cabbages’ ruminates on the speaker’s grandfather and a series of wartime memories. Cabbages As often retold, my grandfather stood on a battered frigate two days after D-Day. Food was scarce…