Steve Evans

The production of literary magazines is a collaborative effort, and small ones tend to bring together people who are united in an enthusiasm that transcends financial aspiration. Translated, this means there is no money in it. The editorial notes for the rejuvenated Blast reveal what seems to be a family affair at work: the publisher–editor is Ann Nugent, and the person responsible for design and layout is Peta Nugent. Issues 4 and 5 appeared for review, but I have concentrated here on the first of these.

Craig sherborne is a poet, playwright and journalist. I remember being struck by the poetic quality of a delightful passage in his memoir, Hoi Polloi (2005), where he sketches a child’s view of flirtatious men chatting up younger women at the races: ‘The Members Bar. Race Five. Time of the day when men take women by the waist.’ Peter Craven commends that book as ‘scurrilous and unashamed’ and ‘a comic outrage’. Sherborne brings the same sharp eye, but a somewhat subdued humour, to his new volume of poetry, Necessary Evil.

In these lines, taken from ‘The African Spider Cures’, Judy Johnson might almost be describing her poetics. Nomadic, Johnson’s second poetry collection, consists of well-made poems that combine objective views of the world with snippets from the poet’s personal life. In the title poem, which centres around a recent separation, Johnson compares her experience of finding an illicit love letter with a Bedouin shepherd-boy’s chance discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls: ‘There is no connection between the two events,’ she writes, ‘[…] Yet I encounter coincidence.’