A History, Dan Burt (Prototype, price: £9.99)

A History is an unusually thin volume from master publishers Prototype, although the poems are hugely meaningful and profound, and make a huge and lasting impression. They sit inside a cover which shows a painting of a scene intimating death, grief, and memorial; the poems themselves detail love, illness, and loss. The poet uses rhyme, here and there, to create a lilting sense, which is starkly at odds with the subject matter, and there are some truly remarkable and greatly affecting lines, such as “Surgeons probe the ruin / that six weeks before had been a woman”. The poems are, for the most part, pared back, sparse, as if they’ve been sculpted with a surgeon’s knife.

The end result of A History is a compelling and highly effective gathering of works which do indeed give ‘a history’. We rage, too, at “the egg-sized ruby mass / that damns her bowels”; we mourn the “wasted high school heartthrob” transmuted to “nothingness”. It’s powerfully devastating work, set within very fine writing, that cannot fail to affect the reader. Set within matte, black inner pages, it’s another great output from this very varied small press publisher.