Angela Gardner

Philip Hammial is the author of over a score of poetry collections. With his new book, Detroit, he returns to the city of his birth taking us, the reader, on his helter-skelter ride. From the first, a poem entitled ‘Mayday’, we are already travelling at break-neck speed, suddenly materialised in an alley with three unlikely characters, plus a bear and a looming summary execution. We enter and leave the poem in the thick of action and must imagine for ourselves the backstory and outcome. In twelve short lines I am already empathising with the un-named first person speaker to imagine him slipping free of the medieval fresco sky-hook descending from the heavens.