Beth Brooke’s Transformations (Hedgehog Press) doesn’t whisper. It snarls, howls and caws across the page, tearing into the raw materials of humanity with claws sharpened by art history, mythology, and a keen political nerve. Inspired by the sculptural work of Elisabeth Frink, this modern poetry collection uses the body, animal and human alike, as its primary instrument. Each poem is less an ekphrastic homage and more a resurrection spell, dragging bronze and pigment into fierce new relevance.
The collection’s strongest thematic current is transformation through violence, be it war, political repression, or mythic desire. In The Abduction of Ganymede by Zeus, desire is rendered with erotic savagery: “his feet, sandals discarded, curl into talons… desire makes him ravenous.” Brooke doesn’t flinch from the erotic grotesque. Instead, she lets it burn hot and uncomfortably close, her language muscular and invasive. Ganymede isn’t a passive boy plucked from the sky. He’s a raptor by choice, complicit in the violence of his becoming. That complexity of agency and identity runs through the whole poetry anthology like a rupture that never fully scabs over.
If some poets reach for the lyric to soothe, Brooke opts for the scalpel. The Anguish of the Hireling Thug lands like a punch to the gut. The poem walks the thin line between soldier and sociopath, between agency and exploitation: “I am your hireling thug: point me in the direction you want me to go.” This isn’t moralising. No, it’s excavation. Brooke lets the character confess and rot in his own words. The final image of a “broken mirror” doesn’t seek redemption. It offers a fractured reflection of complicity, where reader and speaker both stand accused.
But Transformations isn’t all blood and sulphur. There’s nuance in the brutality. In Walking Madonna, Brooke brings tenderness to grief without ever veering into the saccharine. “She strides… her thin arms swing empty now,” we’re told, as Mary walks away from the cathedral into the “light of a cold blue morning sky.” It’s quietly devastating. No divine intervention, no resurrection theatrics, just the mother of God in motion, stripped of ceremony, moving forward with nothing but will. It’s a poem that understands power not as explosion, but as endurance.
Then there’s the dark humour threaded through poems like An Interview with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It’s a satirical triumph dressed in corporate-speak: “Modernisation is key and War has made good use of new technologies… less face-to-face, more drone, remote control.” The absurdity isn’t a punchline. It’s a mirror held to contemporary apocalypse culture, where ecological collapse and state violence are casually folded into strategy meetings. Brooke’s literary analysis of power isn’t academic—it’s viciously lived-in.
Placed in the wider landscape of contemporary poetry, Transformations stands shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Joelle Taylor’s C+nto and Denise Riley’s Say Something Back. There’s a similar fire-forged lyricism, a refusal to sanitise the feminine or abstract the political. What this poetry collection confirms is that independent publishing remains the home of work that dares, to be ugly, to be honest, to be defiantly physical. This isn’t polite poetry for prize committees. This is poetry for anyone who’s had to bite their tongue in the face of power and dreams, not of peace, but of spitting the blood back.
About the Author
Beth Brooke is a retired teacher who lives in Dorset. Transformations is her second pamphlet.
