there are two horizons, each with a flag of convenience

there is a road but you never seem to be on it

the grain of the air rubs your second skin raw

the ground’s criss-crossed by the tracks of travellers
coming and going in search of their souls

“consistently high quality writing, surprising and challenging with that signature of humanity and wit.”

“by far the best collection I’ve read in ages, and I keep  returning to it on a daily basis.”

“I’m highly impressed by the whole enterprise, including the clouds of metaphors, the consistency of tone, the excitement, and naturally the individual poems.”

Review in Londongrip here:

https://londongrip.co.uk/2023/12/london-grip-poetry-review-mike-barlow-4/

“It’s a great temptation to quote from every poem. This is one of the pleasures of Barlow’s work, the way he finds new sources of energy in language but in a way that never feels forced or strained.”

“He is writing about the never-ending stuff of life as it morphs and slips across borders, finding its own way, the way he has always done. These poems will push forward, prodding not just at our consciences but also at how we use language to tell the way we live. It’s an absorbing collection.” D A Prince, The High Window

“The vulnerability of being human is everywhere evoked…the language through which we travel is musical, a constant pleasure to sound in our heads…

Mike Barlow’s A Land Between Borders is an unusually coherent collection of poems which continually reinforce and add depth to one another. Focussing on dangerous border crossings and painful differences of identity, it remains somehow uplifting, and certainly pleasurable.” Jenny Hockey, Orbis

These poems are about lives we don’t lead as much as those we do, the enigma of one life as opposed to another. They explore a sense of being other, of life as if someone else has lived it, rubbing up against the unsettling and porous boundary between imagination and memory, fiction and fact, between ‘the waltz of the blood, the self-deceiving heart’ (‘The dead of night’).

“A new collection from Mike Barlow and you know it’ll be good. I think I would recognise that voice anywhere, the deep seriousness lightened here and there by wry humour, that exactly right image, the inspired word choice that keeps the poems always surprising and fresh. An unmistakable taste of the poet’s home county, Lancashire, its landscapes and its characters but also there are tender love poems which moved me. There is even (‘Building a Church with Maddy and Lewis’) the best poem ever written about Lego! Just wonderful.”
– Carole Bromley

“…we’re never more than a few lines away from one of his characteristically precise and memorable observations. ‘Whichever life we live’, ‘The painter in the barn’ concludes, ‘it’s the other calls’; and John Coltrane’s ‘breath’, as ‘Tonight’ has it, ‘is eight bars of what no one else can tell me’. But even more impressive for me is how deftly and satisfyingly the poems as wholes give such imaginative and original expression to the unsettling questions about identity, subjectivity and mortality with which we share our daily lives.”
– Nick Everett

“Mike Barlow demonstrates the essential gift of surprise, combining his recognisable playfulness, compassion and wry exitentialist wit with solid craft and surrealist twists…..(his) poems are beautifully made. His lineation is unassailable – there isn’t a word out of place in Hotel Anonymous, a collection which reveals new and joyous connections on repeated reading. If you want to convince any reader of the merits of contemporary poetry, introduce them to this work. This is a wise poetry which understands the ingredients of human tragedy and hope, that longs for connection yet knows too well the inevitably missed opportunities where Art must make its pitch.” – Pauline Rowe, Orbis

“Mike Barlow’s latest collection of poems is one of those rare beasts: a collection which while di-vided into three discrete sections, nevertheless achieves a unity of theme and motif. The poems speak to each other within each section and across the collection in such a way as to make Hotel Anonymous amount to considerably more than the sum of its parts.
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And it is this willingness to look hard not just at himself, but at the wider world, its ambiguities and contradictions, and what’s more to articulate these as unanswered questions, often through the de-piction of ‘characters’, which lends many of these poems such depth and interest.”
– Isabel Bermudez, The High Window

“Few poets have written so cleverly, in language which so exercises the imagination.
[ ]
You will find many poems in the collection to bring you heart pleasures, as well as many which promise mind pleasures. The best deliver both.”
– Andrew Geary, Acumen

what’s not said saying itself over and over
as if a need for having been heard
fills the mind

“This poetry doesn’t arrive at neat explanations of the meanings of silence. Nor does it draw inferences. Instead, it circles around different forms of silence and leaves space for interpretations to creep in.

These are minimalist poems which examine the unspoken. They do this all the more evocatively for their spareness.” Isobelle Thompson, Sphinx

Born of this world yet not quite of it, the ghosts that haunt these poems play with parallel realities, the alternatives ­ imagined, remembered, sensed and intruded upon ­ that shadow the everyday and taken-for-granted. Shifts and shivers, blind faith and fear, unspoken thoughts, hindsight, false trails, a missed beat in conversation, all lead to that “knife-edge feeling / as the will to fly competes with gravity” (“Ridge Walking with Maddy“).

Condensed and surefooted, the poems … bridge the inner and the outer worlds to take you somewhere unexpected.

“Mike Barlow and New Walk Editions have crafted a pamphlet containing poems that absolutely ‘have a deceptive ease and informality’ about them as the back-cover blurb tells us. It’s this ‘deceptive’ in the blurb that rings the truest to my mind. I’m more than happy to have followed the flight of Barlow’s hands while he conjures magic in front of my very eyes. It’s not the ghosts we need to be afraid of here, it’s the living.” Mat Riches, Londongrip

These poems are concerned with the way our world can be other than it seems, where the certainties of belonging, borders, history and faith can shift, become illusory, and launch us into unsettling waters.

“The collection zings with the splash of the sea, with voices borrowed and adopted, and landscapes rich with the vocabulary Barlow bestows upon them. Reading the titles alone feels transformative.” Penny Boxall, Sabotage

“This is imaginative work. Barlow’s poems continue, throughout the collection, to be arresting, evocative, tantalising.

I will guarantee that when you, too, read The Promise Boat, its poems will stay, bedded down, in your mind, and you will be all the richer for the experience.” Peter Ulric Kennedy, londongrip.

Drawing on the experience of living in rural north Lancashire, Mike Barlow’s poems evoke the sense of another world, one in which he is both intruder and intruded upon. His woods, fells, river and stones with their weather and atmosphere are at times almost animate – wilful and contrary – whilst his own presence is ‘flawed by thought’.

“It seems to combine a fascination with the exuberant and independent life of words with a sense of richly-textured entropy.” Carole Coates

“Barlow achieves his effects by a careful choice of language, an attention to line length and rhythm, the introduction of a startling image in order to marinate his work in his unique and satisfying sensibility.” Alan Dent, Mistress Quickly’s Bed

Charmed Lives: charmed as in surviving, as in getting away with it, as in possessed, as in fortunate. Whether drawing on direct or imaginary experience, works of art, literature or myth, the lives and moments in these poems are about being vulnerable, getting by and sometimes being at one with the world.

“Instead of relying on surface effects, Barlow’s work catches the attention firstly through skilful choice of apt yet surprising words and images and secondly because of his knack of finding subject matter which can engage, intrigue and startle his readers. He sometimes writes movingly and with a fresh eye about quite ordinary situations; but elsewhere he draws us into imagined worlds which are not so far from the real one and yet where no point of reference can truly be relied upon.”
Thomas Ovans, Londongrip.

“There’s a definite sense of the subversive in these poems, a kind of alternative worldview ‘from below'” Steve Spence, Stride

“muscular lyricism……from a mature and strongly articulated voice.” David Harmer, Orbis.

“He wants to hit that point where our certainties and securities break down because that’s where we are most alert. Importantly, Barlow doesn’t search self-consciously for this effect, rather it is part of his sensibility”. Alan Dent, Mistress Quickly’s Bed

Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice
“There is a warmth running through the whole collection, a connectedness between each poem and a loose narrative arc – as if the pamphlet were a beautifully composed piece of music.” Poetry Book Society

“Barlow’s voice is clear and direct, the space between the lines easily read. This clarity provides the perfect minimalist setting for his stand-out images and fresh perspectives” Julia Bird, Poetry London.

“There’s directness and lightness of touch, an often brilliant deftness, in Mike Barlow’s poems, and an unusual warmth – all of it underwritten by vivid detail. But what he sees is only partly why his poems are so compelling; there’s also the sense he has of ‘living in two worlds at once’. What he imagines is alive – vital and often dangerous. It is what makes this collection outstanding”. Ann Sansom

“Whether he’s climbing in high winds, reading about captain Cook or birdwatching on Unst, Barlow’s poems all grapple, in the end, with this question of ‘real life’ – what it is and what lies outside it.” Sarah Crown, The Guardian

“Out of the commonplace practice of contemporary poetry he has shaped something utterly unlike the work of any other present-day writer. This is originality of the very best kind: unforced, unobtrusive, unselfconscious.” Alan Dent, The Penniless Press

Winner of the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition 2003; short-listed for the Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize for Best First Collection 2004.

“This collection has cumulative power, cohesion, and a particular, individual voice. The poems bring in a wide field of reference, which deepens and adds layers of understanding and meaning.” Gillian Clarke

“Time and again, in poems that comment and build on each other, the reader encounters Barlow’s questing intelligence and, best of all, a refusal to accept or offer easy answers.” Kate Keogan, Acumen

“..takes a slice of life and stares hard at the layers. And this is no mean feat – there are some enviable moments of bravura descriptive writing…” Clive Allen, Exultations and Difficulties.