Poetry review – glass knot sun: Colin Pink reviews Patrick Romero McCafferty’s poems set in two very different locations
glass knot sun
patrick romero mccafferty
Ignition Press, 2025
ISBN 978-1-7394543-6-4
£7
The poems in glass knot sun straddle two very different locations, Mexico and Scotland, and reflect the author’s dual heritage. The collection is bookended by “ASCII art” depicting Espiritu Santo in Mexico and Sgùrr Alasdair (on Syke) which reminded me of the, literally, clunky art created long ago using a typewriter keyboard, where the ‘images’ are fashioned from letters, numbers and punctuation symbols. The pictures form quirky land/seascapes at the start and end of the collection that give it a distinctly retro feel.
The first poem “A Doorway Between Explosions” refers to the San Juanico disaster in 1984 when parts of Greater Mexico City were devastated and many people killed or severely burned by an explosion in a gas storage facility. The narrator rushes to someone’s home after the explosion and finds them, miraculously, standing beneath the lintel of their house:
& in the hand you held at your apron, an avocado,
as if the deaths we did not yet know had taken place
stopped there, at that emboldening armoured fruit,
the stone at the centre of all the pain still unaccounted for.
In the following poem, “If I Couldn’t Sleep in the Granary” the narrator waits unsuccessfully for the walls of the granary to reveal their history. The poem concludes:
I begged the settled dust for honest words,
a sign of each mistake made in that hollow
where they’d kept the grain for times of need
of which there must have once been tonnes & tonnes
which artfully exploits the ambiguity of tonnes of grain and tonnes of need.
The first part of the collection focuses on memories of places and events in Mexico such as walking on a beach and stumbling on the severed head of a baby shark that ‘the trawlers had culled accidentally for gull food.’ In the powerful poem “The Flyers”, which uses Charles Olson’s ‘projective verse’ style (where the phrases are scattered across the page), we take a trip around Mexico City, in the company of the many posters on the walls of the faces of the ‘disappeared’ which pile up in ever greater numbers:
…I’d slowly learned how not to see
the faces of the disappeared
the grainy ink that masked their cheeks.
but wasn’t I loading the pulp into buckets before long.
now I bring a shovel
& in this way my work has become a constant burial of the paper
that masses like dough wet clay in the pit of a cold stomach.
The second part of the pamphlet refers to places in Scotland, and some of the poems have a rather dreamlike quality to them. In “Gloup, Winwick” (a gloup is a deep chasm where the land plunges into a sea cave, in places such as Orkney) McCafferty skilfully evokes the sense of summer: ‘running in my dream / you celebrate the honey / of a summer thought’. The final stanza conjures that experience of falling that can happen in dreams:
to the lip of
this teen fjord
this gull church
whose floor of air,
mid-stride
will no doubt wake me
Falling is prominent in the following poem “the girl who was a foal that left the paddock without leave”:
…and on the tracks where beaten is to dream
of falling & to wake because you’re falling towards rails
or falling off the jeep for the third time & down a mine-shaft
Another poem depicts a car crash, the car rolling like a bottle ‘til by & by a jink cracked the windscreen / & showered us mind? in safety glass’.
All the poems create a strong sense of place and refer to walks in the Scottish hills (“Mountain Log”) and building a kayak in the Hebrides. One of the strongest poems in the pamphlet is “Storeys” about scaffolding, that uses the analogy of scaffolding for the body, with striking imagery such as:
the sound of spring-
loosed pool balls in their chute
is my spine
releasing the tension
it’s been loaded with
having shrunk
the longer I’ve stood
The rigging of the scaffolding strains ‘in their fixings / how much there briefly is / to stop their collapse.’
The final poem “Hand Luggage” is also about mortality and brilliantly uses passing through airport security as an allegory for the passage from life to death: ‘I’ll follow single file through security’s / free-standing doorway having left every sin I’ve ever committed behind’, with the poignant last line: ‘let me walk through unshod without setting off the alarm.’
This is an intriguing collection: at times it has a glass-like clarity while at other times it becomes rather knotty and esoteric. I had to resort to a lot of googling to understand the context of the poems and felt the collection would have benefited from some endnotes to help out the reader. At its best, in poems such as “The Flyers”, “Storeys” and “Hand Luggage”, the reader can enjoy the vivid imagery and contemplate the multiple resonances of the words.
Oct 29 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Patrick Romero McCafferty
Poetry review – glass knot sun: Colin Pink reviews Patrick Romero McCafferty’s poems set in two very different locations
The poems in glass knot sun straddle two very different locations, Mexico and Scotland, and reflect the author’s dual heritage. The collection is bookended by “ASCII art” depicting Espiritu Santo in Mexico and Sgùrr Alasdair (on Syke) which reminded me of the, literally, clunky art created long ago using a typewriter keyboard, where the ‘images’ are fashioned from letters, numbers and punctuation symbols. The pictures form quirky land/seascapes at the start and end of the collection that give it a distinctly retro feel.
The first poem “A Doorway Between Explosions” refers to the San Juanico disaster in 1984 when parts of Greater Mexico City were devastated and many people killed or severely burned by an explosion in a gas storage facility. The narrator rushes to someone’s home after the explosion and finds them, miraculously, standing beneath the lintel of their house:
In the following poem, “If I Couldn’t Sleep in the Granary” the narrator waits unsuccessfully for the walls of the granary to reveal their history. The poem concludes:
which artfully exploits the ambiguity of tonnes of grain and tonnes of need.
The first part of the collection focuses on memories of places and events in Mexico such as walking on a beach and stumbling on the severed head of a baby shark that ‘the trawlers had culled accidentally for gull food.’ In the powerful poem “The Flyers”, which uses Charles Olson’s ‘projective verse’ style (where the phrases are scattered across the page), we take a trip around Mexico City, in the company of the many posters on the walls of the faces of the ‘disappeared’ which pile up in ever greater numbers:
…I’d slowly learned how not to see the faces of the disappeared the grainy ink that masked their cheeks. but wasn’t I loading the pulp into buckets before long. now I bring a shovel & in this way my work has become a constant burial of the paper that masses like dough wet clay in the pit of a cold stomach.The second part of the pamphlet refers to places in Scotland, and some of the poems have a rather dreamlike quality to them. In “Gloup, Winwick” (a gloup is a deep chasm where the land plunges into a sea cave, in places such as Orkney) McCafferty skilfully evokes the sense of summer: ‘running in my dream / you celebrate the honey / of a summer thought’. The final stanza conjures that experience of falling that can happen in dreams:
Falling is prominent in the following poem “the girl who was a foal that left the paddock without leave”:
Another poem depicts a car crash, the car rolling like a bottle ‘til by & by a jink cracked the windscreen / & showered us mind? in safety glass’.
All the poems create a strong sense of place and refer to walks in the Scottish hills (“Mountain Log”) and building a kayak in the Hebrides. One of the strongest poems in the pamphlet is “Storeys” about scaffolding, that uses the analogy of scaffolding for the body, with striking imagery such as:
The rigging of the scaffolding strains ‘in their fixings / how much there briefly is / to stop their collapse.’
The final poem “Hand Luggage” is also about mortality and brilliantly uses passing through airport security as an allegory for the passage from life to death: ‘I’ll follow single file through security’s / free-standing doorway having left every sin I’ve ever committed behind’, with the poignant last line: ‘let me walk through unshod without setting off the alarm.’
This is an intriguing collection: at times it has a glass-like clarity while at other times it becomes rather knotty and esoteric. I had to resort to a lot of googling to understand the context of the poems and felt the collection would have benefited from some endnotes to help out the reader. At its best, in poems such as “The Flyers”, “Storeys” and “Hand Luggage”, the reader can enjoy the vivid imagery and contemplate the multiple resonances of the words.