NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

An independent small press poetry review

NHI independent review
RICHARD LIVERMORE: SWEET NOTHINGS
Chanticleer Press
6/1 Jamaica Mews
Edinburgh
EH3 6HN
UK
£1
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This page last updated: 11th December 2007. 		RICHARD LIVERMORE: SWEET NOTHINGS

The photograph of the bull on the cover with its notice;

Do not grab Hamish by the horns
may be intended for the reader as some indication of how to approach SWEET NOTHINGS by Richard Livermore.

Included in this small green book of many musings are three shape poems. The opening one entitled THE MUMMIAD is round in appearance, picking up on the round

	mad as wobbling eyeball
of the mad mother of the poem. The disjointed effects of the lines are circled by the shape of the poem. The shape gathers in and corrals the madness of the lines and the poem's subject.

THE HERON-GOD is a two stanza rhymed poem. It uses a quick image of a fishing heron succinctly, anthropomorphizing the heron, from the fishes point of view, to a God.

Overall the sense of this book has to be worked at. Perhaps Livermore is playing with the idea of 'sweet nothings', because the poetry contained in this small book deals in the main, with the abstract, rather than the figurative, and Livermore does seem quite concerned with death. Perhaps he wasn't joking about the bull on the cover. For its price, the cover photograph and the contents recommend themselves.

reviewer: Barbara Smith.