Book Review: At Sixes and Sevens Delivers Grit, Grief and Raw Magic in Contemporary Poetry Collection.

A Promote Indie Lit Review

What happens when six poets collide without a shared manifesto? You get At Sixes and Sevens, the latest in the Sixty Odd Poets series, which stumbles into brilliance more often than it falters into indulgence. It’s a jagged, generative read, part literary mixtape, part poetic group therapy, where sharp-tongued wisdom sits comfortably alongside the surreal, the sentimental, and the straight-up strange. This isn’t a tidy anthology, and thank Christ for that. Instead, it’s a catalogue of human murk: grief, lust, failure, and the comforting lie of nostalgia – all served up in varied voices that mostly earn their keep.

Mick Jenkinson opens strong with poems that weaponise lyric clarity. Oysters masquerades as culinary innuendo but works deeper as a metaphor for embodied longing: “Savour me with absinth, / sip me with champagne, / devour me like your senses / will never soar this way again.” It’s not just about appetite but identity as performance; sensuality as survival. Parliament, however, goes darker. Apples become uncanny sentinels, “each Braeburn…inflaming your compulsion to escape.” It’s domestic horror dressed in lyrical restraint, the poet pulling tension taut with each stanza. Jenkinson’s musicality never veers into preciousness. He writes like someone who knows how fear and desire rhyme, and how to sing through both.

Dick Jones brings gravitas and a tighter narrative lens, particularly in Taking the Shilling, a raw excavation of war’s seductions and betrayals. The poem’s spine is its enjambed reckoning: “Times are tight. / I need a ladder out of here right now / and maybe this just might / see me through.” Jones writes like someone who’s buried friends and counted the shrapnel. In Jazz Club: Tubby Hayes, he riffs on rhythm and time, building a scene smoky with memory and sonic reverence. “And then he’s bucking like / a great bull waking out of / a dream…” This is musical resurrection, performed with formal control and emotional improvisation.

Amy Garratt’s section is shorter, sharper, and arguably the anthology’s beating heart. Her spoken word roots lend urgency to pieces like Chapters, where romantic decay is charted through rhyming tercets that refuse easy catharsis: “You were going through the motions, / as I held my tongue to silence, / till I questioned your emotions, / your tone answered me in violence.” Garratt doesn’t just write about pain—she exposes the polite silences around it, using rhythm to both lull and rupture. Oblivion, meanwhile, is a standout—a surreal, cinematic poem that navigates trauma as tidal: “My feet have stuck, / I know there is no way I can move in time.” Its dreamscape finale slams into a quietly devastating awakening: “Yet my mouth still tastes of salt.” That’s the sting of truth poetry should deliver.

Paul Laycock writes with a clarity that resists pretension, often anchoring his poems in working-class memory and unvarnished social observation. In The Street, he pulls no punches depicting a homeless veteran haunted by PTSD—“Deserted by those whom he served”, laying bare the brutal irony of heroism followed by abandonment. His knack for tonal shifts is evident in the comic lament On Losing a Sock, but it’s Rice Pudding that shows his full range, wrapping nostalgia and inherited myth into a tight, evocative piece: “She used to make it for the soldiers… You know, the ones that lived in Conisbrough Castle.” Laycock doesn’t romanticise the past; he preserves its texture, letting warmth and melancholy sit side by side.

Eileen Thompson’s poetry thrives on tension between visibility and erasure, often filtered through gendered experience and formal control. The Silent Dusk is a standout, mapping societal indifference toward ageing women with surgical precision: “Do you hear me, / mouthing mutely / in the silence of the dusk?” It’s a poem that burns slow and bitter, refusing easy sympathy. Elsewhere, in Marital Harmony, she uses the villanelle form to dramatise creative rivalry in a domestic setting, balancing jealousy and admiration with unsettling elegance. Thompson’s work is polished without being polite, theatrical without overreaching—its power lies in what’s said quietly but unmistakably.

Finally, Peter White’s contributions move between meditative and mystical, grounding metaphysics in real soil. In The in-between, a neem tree becomes a metaphor for the boundary between life and death: “The dead are underneath and at the root of things… death settles and feeds the upward green.” It’s not a poem, it’s a slow hallucination—and all the stronger for it. White handles imagery like a veteran stonemason—deliberate, textured, and unafraid of quiet. Air Pollution turns its attention outward, critiquing Delhi’s ecological decay with brutal lucidity: “Citizens protest the obvious idiocy / but it’s as if they are not there.” His tone is political but never preachy—anger rendered poetic, not polemic.

Within the wide net of At Sixes and Sevens, not every poem cuts deep, but that’s the gamble of an independent poetry anthology. What this volume does brilliantly is refuse homogeneity. It thrives on difference: of style, of subject, of tone. It’s the kind of project that reminds us why independent publishing matters: because it makes room for poems that don’t always fit the mainstream mould. Whether through Amy Garratt’s intimate torment, Dick Jones’ historical reckonings, or Peter White’s spiritual landscape-mapping, this collection opens multiple windows on modern poetry. It’s not polished to death. It breathes. It risks. And that makes it worth your time.

At Sixes and Sevens is the real deal – poetry that sings, stings, and sidesteps safe. This anthology from Sixty Odd Poets is a must-read for anyone hungry for contemporary poetry with grit, grace and guts.

About the Project

At Sixes and Sevens is the seventh volume in the Sixty Odd Poets series. Each volume features the work of six poets who have previously appeared on the Sixty Odd Poets website, earning the title of Fellow of the Order of the Sixty Odd. With a range of subjects, styles and poetic forms each edition has something for everyone. This volume features Mick Jenkinson, Dick Jones, Paul Laycock, Amy Garratt, Eileen Thompson and Peter White. With writing inspired by music, romance, the animal kingdom, and rice pudding and plenty else besides.

Mike O’Brien lives in the North of England. He has previously been published in the Stone Circle Review and Dreamcatcher. He publishes his own poetry online at Sixty Odd Poems zoomburst.substack.com and the work of others at Sixty Odd Poets sixtyoddpoets.substack.com. He publishes selections from these sites as physical volumes.