Please Hear What I'm Not Saying

'These poems crackle with the electricity of experience and sing with the effort of rendering that experience in language. This is work that stands a few inches away from your face and tells you tales that shudder with a terrible beauty; these voices must be listened to because what they are saying is something that all of us, whoever we are, need to know.' Ian McMillan 'Please Hear What I Am Not Saying takes the sense of anxiety, the fear, the feeling of self hatred and punishment and delivers it in the best way possible, for if you cannot hear what someone is trying to tell you about how they are suffering underneath, then at least you can read their words and hold them close, you can learn to read what is written between the words. In poems such as Neil Elder's Invisible, Angela Topping's Loneliness, Jinny Fisher's Ana's Therapy, Andrew Barnes' Black Rot, Peter Adair's Demolition, Alison Down's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Stephen Watt's Mark and the Maltese poet Miriam Calleja's chilling I Once Loved Something Dark, is written should be discussed, there is nothing in this world it seems that cannot be aired and have a view, compassion and consideration attached. Please Hear What I Am Not Saying is the passion in the voices, those that struggle in the dark and those that hear the whisper of being in a different place occupied seemingly by the rest of humanity; little realising that we are all, deep down inside, asking to be heard in between the words we are not saying.' Ian D. Hall (Liverpool Sound and Vision)