Robin Houghton reviews Home Farm on her poetry blog

Robin Houghton's poetry blog is a mine of information for poets navigating their way to making submissions to poetry magazines and anthologies. She also reviews poetry collections and writes about her poetry life. Her blog is always interesting, informative and encouraging and I highly recommend it. I was very pleased to see she had reviewed Home Farm recently. The link takes you straight to the review. Here is an extract:

"A seemingly simple poem about a doe making her way tentatively through a wood (‘She will enter’) is a moment of such intensity and understatement, very typical of Janet’s style. I hesitate to call it ‘nature writing’ as there’s something rather limp about the phrase.

The collection embraces experimental poems, fragments and illustrations, all of which I found absorbing, moving and mysterious, propelling me on.

A facsimile of a page from a letter is reproduced, phrases from which appear in a poem later in the book to heartbreaking effect:

'I was just looking at your room this morning
and wishing you were home

this room is already empty
the face above the sheets
has gone to clay

now son take care of yourself'

Even as I type this my eyes are welling up! Surely this is what poetry exists for."