Poetry review – SUB/URBAN LEGENDS: Sarah Leavesley reviews a collection by Pam Thompson which seeks to open the reader’s eyes to the everyday legends all around us
Sub/urban Legends
Pam Thompson
Paper Swans Press
ISBN: 978-1-9160529-5-6
£5.00
As the title Sub/urban Legends, its cover art and John McCullough’s endorsement suggest, this pamphlet is an exciting blend of wide-ranging imagination and style with something deeper and different beyond the surface of every poem. This might be observational, insightful, emotional or a combination of these and more.
Like the pamphlet title, the opening poem, “Daylight, Saving Time”, offers familiar words and phrases slanted and made new. This effect is carried through both this poem and the pamphlet as a whole, alongside the same familiar-made-new applied to real world objects and experiences.
In this opening poem, for example, Thompson takes candy floss as we might already know it and transforms it into the entirely unexpected, yet recognisable:
peach-coloured, solid sugar then spun and smashed through
a multiverse of holes,
– rare as a leopard with ginger spots, or a zebra with golden stripes.
The unseen below the initially or often seen includes science, the stars and planets, legend/myth, literary references, popular culture and more, flowing through a variety of forms and styles with a flexibility that still keeps everything threaded and connected, from poem to poem and echoing to each other across the pamphlet.
Clear and striking images accumulate, combine or juxtapose, working with other evocative details to create a multisensorial experience. In “The Museum of Water”, microphones amplify (dripping) water, ‘catching breaths, sighs of water’, with all the beautiful observations here building and linking (like ‘coloured molecules’, perhaps) into a moving poem.
In “Edvard Munch in Haverfordwest”, the sensual develops into a kind of synaesthesia that is symbolic of reading Sub/urban Legends too. One of three young women outside the supermarket has ‘sea-green hair’. With his painting of this, ‘he’ll make the colours vibrate until you can hear them’.
A lively surreal element is at work not just in this poem but in many of the ‘legends’ found here. This poem’s lightly handled ‘On St Mary’s Bridge he has some sort of turn // that history will repeat— on pub signs, posters’ also demonstrates the playfulness and humour that can accompany this.
Elsewhere, a Valentine’s Day rose with its head cut off, a ‘spiky’ glass strawberry and cacti produce an unusual and moving poem. “My Life as a Bat” is a deliciously biting revenge and coming-out-the-other-side recovery-from-an-ex abecedarian. (I’m going to quote the end of this poem after the narrator imagines slipping into bed as a bat because it’s far too wonderful not to. But if you want to avoid the spoiler, please skip on to the subsequent paragraph.)
X-ray vision I won’t have as a bat but I can smell
your fear, see how guilty you look when, without
zopiclone she wakes, to a bizarre petting-zoo.
Meanwhile, the way ‘the problem’ is visualised in “White Sliced” simultaneously yet deftly weaves together the surreal, humorous, thought-provoking and moving.
The problem starts to smell of terriers.
The best thing to do would be to make toast
out of the problem but instead you toast it
with milk. […]
When “Suburban Legend” gives us ‘The man who constructed a telescope out of a cooker, whose oven door was no longer see-through’, this lightness of touch draws us gently towards a hugely moving final line. The poem may sit at the heart of the pamphlet, but to talk of this selection of poetry in terms of just one heart would be unfair. Thompson’s lens is shifting, from micro to macro and repeatedly back again, as reflected by the fact that this is almost, yet not quite, the title poem. For me, the slight change in wording to’ Sub/urban’ (separation/fragmentation/below the surface…) for the book signals that. I can also simultaneously read this as expanding the phrase not just to encapsulate the whole pamphlet’s range but maybe also extending this particular poem.
That symbolic interpretation may be specific to me. But Sub/urban Legends offers plenty of scope for this and art is one of many threads which can be traced through the pamphlet. Memory, relationships, sound/song and nature/city life are just a few of the others. As readers, we might not have considered everything in these poems in this way before but there are everyday legends all around us.
Unlike these poems, my summary is really only a surface overview and starting point for reading deeper. There are multiple other aspects and details worth exploring. The biggest difficulty in reviewing has been choosing which parts to highlight.
In the penultimate poem, “In New York City with my daughter”, ‘Our cameras / OD on light—we lose our bearings, just by looking up.’. While reading Sub/urban Legends has this intensity too, it’s with the opposite result – I know I could continue re-reading and re-reading, each time enjoying something more.
Jun 9 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Pam Thompson
Poetry review – SUB/URBAN LEGENDS: Sarah Leavesley reviews a collection by Pam Thompson which seeks to open the reader’s eyes to the everyday legends all around us
As the title Sub/urban Legends, its cover art and John McCullough’s endorsement suggest, this pamphlet is an exciting blend of wide-ranging imagination and style with something deeper and different beyond the surface of every poem. This might be observational, insightful, emotional or a combination of these and more.
Like the pamphlet title, the opening poem, “Daylight, Saving Time”, offers familiar words and phrases slanted and made new. This effect is carried through both this poem and the pamphlet as a whole, alongside the same familiar-made-new applied to real world objects and experiences.
In this opening poem, for example, Thompson takes candy floss as we might already know it and transforms it into the entirely unexpected, yet recognisable:
peach-coloured, solid sugar then spun and smashed through a multiverse of holes, – rare as a leopard with ginger spots, or a zebra with golden stripes.The unseen below the initially or often seen includes science, the stars and planets, legend/myth, literary references, popular culture and more, flowing through a variety of forms and styles with a flexibility that still keeps everything threaded and connected, from poem to poem and echoing to each other across the pamphlet.
Clear and striking images accumulate, combine or juxtapose, working with other evocative details to create a multisensorial experience. In “The Museum of Water”, microphones amplify (dripping) water, ‘catching breaths, sighs of water’, with all the beautiful observations here building and linking (like ‘coloured molecules’, perhaps) into a moving poem.
In “Edvard Munch in Haverfordwest”, the sensual develops into a kind of synaesthesia that is symbolic of reading Sub/urban Legends too. One of three young women outside the supermarket has ‘sea-green hair’. With his painting of this, ‘he’ll make the colours vibrate until you can hear them’.
A lively surreal element is at work not just in this poem but in many of the ‘legends’ found here. This poem’s lightly handled ‘On St Mary’s Bridge he has some sort of turn // that history will repeat— on pub signs, posters’ also demonstrates the playfulness and humour that can accompany this.
Elsewhere, a Valentine’s Day rose with its head cut off, a ‘spiky’ glass strawberry and cacti produce an unusual and moving poem. “My Life as a Bat” is a deliciously biting revenge and coming-out-the-other-side recovery-from-an-ex abecedarian. (I’m going to quote the end of this poem after the narrator imagines slipping into bed as a bat because it’s far too wonderful not to. But if you want to avoid the spoiler, please skip on to the subsequent paragraph.)
X-ray vision I won’t have as a bat but I can smell your fear, see how guilty you look when, without zopiclone she wakes, to a bizarre petting-zoo.Meanwhile, the way ‘the problem’ is visualised in “White Sliced” simultaneously yet deftly weaves together the surreal, humorous, thought-provoking and moving.
When “Suburban Legend” gives us ‘The man who constructed a telescope out of a cooker, whose oven door was no longer see-through’, this lightness of touch draws us gently towards a hugely moving final line. The poem may sit at the heart of the pamphlet, but to talk of this selection of poetry in terms of just one heart would be unfair. Thompson’s lens is shifting, from micro to macro and repeatedly back again, as reflected by the fact that this is almost, yet not quite, the title poem. For me, the slight change in wording to’ Sub/urban’ (separation/fragmentation/below the surface…) for the book signals that. I can also simultaneously read this as expanding the phrase not just to encapsulate the whole pamphlet’s range but maybe also extending this particular poem.
That symbolic interpretation may be specific to me. But Sub/urban Legends offers plenty of scope for this and art is one of many threads which can be traced through the pamphlet. Memory, relationships, sound/song and nature/city life are just a few of the others. As readers, we might not have considered everything in these poems in this way before but there are everyday legends all around us.
Unlike these poems, my summary is really only a surface overview and starting point for reading deeper. There are multiple other aspects and details worth exploring. The biggest difficulty in reviewing has been choosing which parts to highlight.
In the penultimate poem, “In New York City with my daughter”, ‘Our cameras / OD on light—we lose our bearings, just by looking up.’. While reading Sub/urban Legends has this intensity too, it’s with the opposite result – I know I could continue re-reading and re-reading, each time enjoying something more.