Clive Donovan’s Movement of People, published by Dempsey & Windle, is an unflinching collection that takes on some of the most urgent global issues of our time: displacement, war, incarceration, environmental collapse. With tight control and sharp, imagistic clarity, Donovan crafts scenes of profound suffering and historical reckoning. His is a voice steeped in empathy, and often, rage. But as I read, a different kind of question began to press through the lines, not about the stories themselves, but about who is telling them.
The collection opens strongly. This Is It is a flash of revolution caught in metaphor, “as the lightning bisected the moon / the revolution began”, and The First Stone offers a chilling prehistory of violence, musing on who first wielded a weapon, who first threw to kill. These early pieces are inventive, layered, and interested in origin myths, not just political ones, but human. They set the tone for a book that wants to understand how we became what we are.
But when Donovan steps into more contemporary, geopolitical material, the tone shifts. In Ahmed the Refugee, for instance, he constructs a narrative of a boy whose body washes up on a Norwegian shore, grotesquely “stuck” in his rubber suit. The critique of Western spectatorship is there, “Bemused families watch / Between paused volley-ball shots” but the poem risks re-enacting the very gaze it condemns. The boy remains a figure to be pitied, interpreted, mourned. We never hear him, only the poet interpreting him from afar. It’s a sharp image, but I question its ethics. Is there a deeper act of solidarity here, or just a poetic rendering of another distant death?
There are poems that work brilliantly. Prison Letters is formally bold, running through an abecedary of incarceration with dark wit and detail: “C is the Colour of Cell—Creamy shit ochre. / D stands for Door with its spy-slit and hatch.” It’s inventive, caustic, and shows Donovan at his most effective, where the voice isn’t imposed, but channeled through linguistic play and close observation. Similarly, Cobbles dazzles with metaphor, tracing the history of stone from sea-smoothed compliance to the hands of insurrectionists: “to fit just so, in furious fingers and slings, to throw.” Here, the political is earned through the material, not borrowed from another’s experience.
What troubles me is how often the collection leans on global trauma as subject matter without locating the poet’s own voice within it. In Train, Donovan meditates on Holocaust transport with powerful, fractured lyricism, “I remember the feather / Floating through the slats”, but again, there is no sense of why he is writing this, or what stake he has beyond horror. Does he see himself as witness, inheritor, bystander? That tension remains unexplored.
Movement of People is a book of intense moral conviction, but that conviction sometimes overrides interrogation. The language can be beautiful, the anger real, but the positionality, the why of the speaker, is left vague. In poems like In Search of Cash, where five drowned migrants are described as “sodden books,” the metaphor is striking but depersonalising. What does it mean to turn bodies into objects of aesthetic contemplation? Where is the limit between lyric empathy and narrative possession?
This is not a condemnation. There is serious craft here, and an undeniably powerful sense of conscience. Donovan is clearly trying to do the work of confronting the dehumanising forces of our time with poetry. But I can’t shake the feeling that what’s missing from Movement of People is a deeper reflection on authorship itself, and that simply isn’t enough. At The Broken Spine, I don’t just publish protest poems; I hand over space to queer writers and editors, recognising sometimes it’s right to step back and let others lead. I act. Protest without action is just performance, and too much of this collection feels like a well-meaning gesture dressed in lyric, rather than a reckoning with the power and privilege of the pen. I ask, who is allowed to speak for whom? When we (poets) write about others’ suffering, how do we remain accountable to those lives, not just as subjects, but as real, complex people with voices of their own?
Donovan is not the first poet to wrestle with this, and he won’t be the last. But in a moment where representation is under rightful scrutiny, the burden of that question cannot be elided. Movement of People wants to speak truth to power, but sometimes, power looks like a poet holding the pen.
About the Author
Clive Donovan is the author of two poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press 2021] and Wound Up With Love [Lapwing 2022] and is published in a wide variety of magazines including Acumen, Agenda, Broken Spine, Crannog, Popshot, Prole and Stand. He lives in Totnes, Devon, UK. He was a Pushcart and Forward Prize nominee for 2022’s best individual poems.
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The Broken Spine is a poetry and arts collective proudly published on the coastal edge of North-West England. Founded in 2019 by Alan Parry and Paul Robert Mullen – two school friends reunited after twenty years through a mutual love of poetry.
