REVIEWS

REVIEWS TAKEN FROM AMAZON & BARNES & NOBLE 

Matt Duggan's unique poetic voice in his second collection speaks about humanity to our humanity. It is ironic the title for this collection is called Woodworm, as each poem subtly challenges us to move, and shift our perceptions in the way Woodworm thrives unseen in wood. If wood was a metaphor for our government, political leaders, our own attitudes, and indifference, woodworm erodes the outdated. Equally Woodworm could be regarded as metaphor for the rot which has almost consumed core principles regarding our dignity as human beings, and our spiritual soul. Each poem speaks to and for the spirit of humanity, gaps in society, and calls us to reflect on our empathy for the most vulnerable, lonely, and disenfranchised of us, who have little or no voice.
'Don't replace the same armour where open wounds are healed by breath not medicine' 'why do we help plough burnt land and city? recycling dangerous metals - rivers of sarin and yellow chlorine' 'All that's left are the berry pickers the foxes have gone - magpies have flown from the storm' Lines such as these take you through Woodworm, worming their way of contemplation into your psyche. In these times of great upheaval we need poetry to soothe, challenge, and address the truth of our innate humanity. I highly recommend reading this collection.

Attracta Fahy 

Dystopia 38.10 comprises a balanced innovative collection of ground-breaking poetry. It is a poetic dystopia divided into four zones, city life, private life, the life of things, and inner life all blended together. The poetic voice like all good art provokes defamiliarization or ostranenie with a multitude of poetic devices, such as alliteration, repetition, half-rhymes, and enjambments. Also it has something of the confessional poetic strand that Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath propagated. It awakens us from a comatose and complacent state and thrusts us out of the cement of our comfort zone, right from first line. Matt Duggan, the author of this engaging collection, is a poetry activist who swerves our emotions, twists and tangles our feelings, making us see anew. With his antithetical language, his satire, his thudding rhythm, his novel use of words we are helplessly under his spell. Dystopia 38.10 is also imbued with poignant humanity and love for everything human. Despite the dystopian connotations, we feel that its poems take us through urban and suburban landscapes with a voice that both consoles and inspires change.
The first poem of the book, "The City Statue", sets the pace. We immediately visualize a city that is moving yet static. Unloving and cold, inhabited by walking dead, the homeless, disillusioned and drunk. With ladies whose eyes are in death's royal plum. The tanned faces with innumerable credit are rich but dead. His very imagist poem "The sun bathing fox" consistent of only two quatrains, immerses us in a drowsy day where we can see a fox embalmed in orange. By means of a "bedroom" metaphor, present for example in L6 rolling in the daisy covers, we can feel the comfort of being at home protected under an Ikea duvet, on a lazy summer afternoon. It brings recollections of two other fox poems, Ted Hughes and Simon Armitages'. Both are about a fox, which personify violence and even inspiration and are set at night. Matt poem renovates on this theme, it is set in the afternoon, under a luminous light and it's the blood thirsty bugles that bring violence not the fox itself. Sun pools of grass gestures to a Whitmanesque optimism. A soothing soundtrack that alienates us from the faraway chase and its death tones that threaten to end it all.
"Obsolete" and "Ice Cream Utopiansim" reveal a poetic stance with a tragic sense of humour. "Ice cream Utopiansim" resembles with its repetitions a nursery rhyme, which shouts truths at us under its "sweet" simplicity. It invites us to see again with words that echo sight: look around, reflections, opening our eyes, visage, reflected.
There are so many poems that sting and yet simultaneously are vitalizing and compelling that it is difficult to single out a favourite. I feel Matt Duggan stimulates a desire for more poetry on our reading shelves. He makes us aware of poetry's power with his modern, deconstructive style and provocative art. In other words, and following from one of his titles, he's rebooted poetry today!
His gift makes us more receptive to explore modern life and its controversies, to explore our inconsistencies and what's more, aspires to make us better humans.

Maria Castro Dominguez

Dystopia" is a powerful theme in contemporary culture. Consider the Mad Max movies, "The Walking Dead," or even the fantasy series "Game of Thrones." One could argue that the fictional genre of fantasy is often characterized by a sense of dystopia, post-apocalyptic worlds in which people must survive by brute power and cunning. British poet Matthew Duggan takes the idea of dystopia a step backward, however, and applies it to the world and landscape surrounding us today."Dystopia 38.10" contains some 98 poems, most of which suggest a sense of dislocation, dystopia, the idea that life and the landscape around of us has changed, almost while we're weren't watching. The changes can be physical, social, cultural, or political, or perhaps even a combination of all of these."London is burning" says one poem, amid bonfires, charred effigies, and the halting of a crowd wandering in aimless direction. "The Asylum" is another kind of dystopia, as its residents "reside for eternity in bedlam." The landscape is a "wasteland," says "Dystopia," as cameras scan "the flesh and ashes of dead shopping malls."These descriptions do not sound like a fantasy world suitable for inspiring television series. Instead, they sound disturbingly like contemporary life. Consider the poem "Langharne."Laugharne

I woke in the birth of darkest morning

sound of a pony's hooves scraping against granite,

following the forest to a road of open borders

guarded by rooks that thread the castle remains.

I walk on the shill of black air sills of light 

like children jumping for a higher shelf,

peaking bright pocket of sun crowning the morning 

with the crispy repeats of dew.

Reaching an ivy smouldered cabin

window smeared with an amber moss,

a writing desk levelled to a vista of trickling water

a pen cushioned in age and inkling ash.

A morning in black hoods of cloud

where a moon lights up a castle like a cathedral,

I saw discarded fishing wrecks sleeping in dribbles

simmered by a slow tide of blue and wide sparks.

Laugharne is in Wales and where the poet Dylan Thomas lived until his death in 1953. One of the sites it's known for is Laugharne Castle. Duggan is envisioning a landscape of "black air," a cabin covered in ivy and with windows "smeared with an amber moss," "black hoods of clouds," and discarded fishing wrecks. That last line - "simmered by a slow tide of blue and white sparks" - is particularly striking.Matt Duggan was born in Bristol, England in 1971 and lives there today. His poems have appeared in numerous online and print journals, including Indiana Voice Journal and Ink Sweat and Tears. He started and still hosts a spoken word evening at the Hydra Bookshop in Bristol and is co-editor of the political poetry magazine "The Angry Manifesto." "Dystopia 38.10" won the Erbacce poetry prize for 2015."Dystopia 38.10" is filled with unsettling connections and disturbing ideas, made more so by the vivid images and descriptions. The poet and the reader are taking a journey together, and it is a harrowing one because it is so familiar.

Glynn Young

Matt Duggan's 'Woodworm' is the best collection of poetry I have read this year. Duggan is an exceptional writer with a unique voice who captures the uncomfortable realities and truths of life in contemporary society with compassion, humanity and wit. This is compelling read that challenges the reader to 'Look at What We've Become'. If you buy only one poetry book this year, buy this one because you will want to return to it again and again.

Nigel Kent

I have always been drawn to Matt Duggan's superbly crafted, lyrical poetry for its political punch - and, just as it was in his first full collection, 'Dystopia 30.10' (which I also highly recommend), so it is in 'Woodworm', his new collection from Hedgehog Poetry Press, with courageously caustic poems such as 'Orator of Peterloo', 'Look What We've Become' and the title poem. But, as ever - with poems like 'The Plot to Kill What Could Never Be' and 'The Iron Children' - Matt Duggan proves himself to be as deft and as devastating with the personal, and this collection - for its much-needed uncompromising stance as well as including various instances of gentle introspection - is a must-read and highly recommended.

Thomas McColl

Matt Duggan's latest collection, Woodworm, details in searing honesty the poets view of modern society. Starting with The Pursuit for Truth, we note the shopping malls where metal spikes close the doorways overnight to ensure the homeless cannot sleep in their empty spaces. The Transformation of Sebastian Gilmour follows the progress of the moneyed offspring of the rich, the lifetime of trying to find a place in a protesting world, finally to end in the lap of the Gods - back where he came from. The poet's fierce honesty and anger at our shameless politicians shines through his work, note the hatred of foxhunting and of the hunters. A recognition of Class War.

Moving through space and time we come to Part Two, which asks 'Look What We've Become' in a section of Questioning Sanity in a Post-Truth Age. Here we find gems such as Separation, and A Poem For Thomas ( a Letter From The King) both expressing love and emotion in powerful, accessible poetry.
'The Plot To Kill What Could Never Be' is a 'coming of age' poem embracing first love with all its pain and joy. The emotion in the second verse 3rd stanza - "She held my heart and squeezed it until I couldn't breath" - is a revelation of sorts. Here is a man unafraid of Truth, showing blazing honesty in his work and challenging our perceptions of the world around us.
Recommended unreservedly.

Angela Brookes

Woodworm is a seductive and hazardous odyssey into the mind of a poetic alchemist capable of transmuting the mundane and even the squalid into something shining and memorable. How does Matt Duggan accomplish this? Through his own philosopher's stone, an arsenal of unique words and phrases enabling us to see the world though his lapidary prism. In the process we become, like our artificer, "that watchful Kingfisher puncturing surface - a slewed flicker of blue."

On every page we share in the raw emotions of a living, growing human organism whose inner nature rails against insensitivity and the rapacious attitude of human beings towards one another. Lamentations and the gnashing of teeth are audible when it comes to those unaware of or indifferent towards their own coarsening. Lingering at the bar among erstwhile friends, "How empty is their cup that will never be filled." But this neither stifles the bard's indomitable spirit nor stills a voice that will be heard and remembered. Ruminations standing at a river's edge: "Yesterday the walls had ears that listened to us/today our fingerprints leave a continued trace." There's a Dantesque sense of apartness coupled with purpose: "I'll sleep with the bones of isolation...a self-exiled alienation."

Matt Duggan's kaleidoscopic mind takes him and us out into uncharted waters. "Swimming so far from the crowd to stronger waves that guide me back to the shore - / I confess all my sins to a theatre without any faces /where the only ears listening are the cracks in bathroom mirrors." Duggan's singular vision and voice offer us a mandate echoed in his title: "Always keep dreams so close/those enemies far from you/ Be the ship mast not the sails/where underneath the shipwreck/ the rooting wood reveals the worms that sleep/inside the resting place on earth. Woodworm is a world within itself, but a magical world, only an arm's reach away.
John Maxwell O'Brien

Emeritus Professor (Queens College, CUNY)