Strnad-Reviews
‘H is for Hadeda’ reviewed by Paul Stephenson for Sphinx
‘There is precision and often surprise to the way Strnad paints her pictures of wildlife, a wildlife that often mingles with man. The poems suggest a well-travelled, keenly observant poet, looking on with binoculars from the shade. The poems are Darwinesque, rich in their depictions, like ‘fistfuls of powder pollen’ (‘Kirstenbosch’), each a place to be savoured because they ‘do not operate at the speed of hurried / things drawing nourishment in frenzies // of need’.’
The complete review can be found here
‘H is for Hadeda’ reviewed by Theophilus Kwek in The Kindling
H is for Hadeda begins on the streets of Prague, where the precocious geographies of growing up (a vivid afternoon in Vinohrady, dusky flirtations at the Café Meduza) are layered over childhood landmarks. But the pamphlet’s vista soon expands to take in landscapes that the poet conjures, imagines, or knows vicariously: we follow her homesick grandmother, for instance, through the ‘shuttered rooms’ of wartime Hyderabad, a young woman trapped in the colonial heat and ‘dream[ing] of coldness’ (‘Hyderabad, 1943’). It is on these tentative excursions – into the past, into dreamed elsewheres – that we learn something of the melancholy that structures the present.
The complete review can be found here.
‘H is for Hadeda’ reviewed by Jennifer Wong in Magma
‘An intelligent, complex and bold pamphlet.’
The complete review can be found here:
‘H is for Hadeda’ reviewed by Sarah Barnsley in The Frogmore Papers, No, 91
‘This accomplished pamphlet moves effortlessly between the micro-panoramas of cafes, gardens, and home lives in Eastern and Central Europe, out to the Gulf desert and beyond.’ (Extract)