Poetry review – MAPPING BROKEN ROADS
Sue Wallace-Shaddad finds a reassuring humanity among the various unfamiliar forms and layouts used in Roger Bloor’s collection
Mapping Broken Roads
Roger Bloor
Barnard Publishing Ltd
ISBN 978-1-0683961-0-6
136pp £8.99
The introductory comments at the front of this varied and innovative collection speak of Danielle Schaub’s discussion of ‘mapping the concept the topography of trauma’. According to Wiktionary, the word ‘topography’ derives from the Greek ‘topo,’ meaning ‘place’, and ‘graphia’, meaning ‘to write or to record’. Roger Bloor states “From this concept arises the rationale of mapping broken roads to discover a route back home from the house of silence’’. This informs the poems presented to the reader.
The collection is divided into three sections: ‘Entrances’, ‘Sub Rosa’ and ‘Exits’. The poem “Prologue” (in a cleave form) speaks of ‘sorrow’, ‘parting’ and ‘love’. The split form mirrors emotional tension and the line ‘my search to find that place’ evokes the idea of journeying ‘home’.
The first section focuses on youthful experiences and relationship(s), with an opening prose poem full of humour about learning ‘selected’ facts of life. It has an impressive title: “The Young Boy’s Guide to Living on the Surface of the Sun and Other Difficult Things”. Humour is also evident in the succinct five-line poem poem “Hug – From Hugga to Comfort or Console” which considers body heat and sex. “Beach Huts for Hire” contains wry older adult comments with regard to courting on the beach:
“a few hard pebbles
and some damp sand
never put us off”
“The Weather for Today” is a beautiful lyrical poem suffused with colour: ‘This Monday afternoon of scarlet silk/ flounces yellow polka dots across the park’. Bloor riffs on the theme of ‘the day’: ‘This is a day for passionate affairs’ and ‘This is an ice-cream day of sun and sand’, ending ‘this is the day we meet and fall in love’.
Musical references in the poems add a strong sense of time and place. “The Force of Attraction” deftly conjures up the atmosphere of a club, incorporating words from the Rolling Stones’ song “Jumping Jack Flash” e.g. ‘gas gas gas’. The music group Abba is summoned up in “Side B Track 2” describing a road trip in ‘the summer of 82’. In “Did Blue Flamingos exist”, students in the 60s ‘played records at maxplus volume’.
The tone becomes darker at the end of this first section. The poem “Monologue” picks up on “Prologue”, bringing the reader back to ‘sorrow’:
I am a heart dead friendless wanderer
here I live alone in this lonely place
The mournful “Epilogue” later ends the collection. These three poems, based on Bloor’s own translation of the ‘Old English Elegy’, “The Wife’s Lament”, are an interesting frame for the collection, adding a timeless element.
It is very clear from reading the middle section, ‘Sub Rosa’, that Bloor is a poet who works hard at his craft and likes to push boundaries. He emphasises a change of focus in the collection with a radical shift in forms being used. Speech bubbles feature, as if in a comic book, with words in white sitting in sharp contrast to black background. There is also an interesting literal spotlight on text from two of Shakespeare’s sonnets (18 and 130) incorporated in two of these pages.
The poem “LYT”, a pantoum, uses a version of text speak e.g. ‘W calmin wrds 2 heal yr rage/ I rOt deez lines 2 mke a mark’. The notes state that “Threading with Tancredi” can be read as a monologue or duet and is in a form invented by Bloor that he calls ‘Throperetto’. “Retro” uses synonyms in brackets to emphasise points:
you leave
[drift]
storm out never looking back
The section title ‘Sub Rosa’ is a reference to ‘secrecy’. By way of an introduction here, Bloor sets out the risk that emergency front-line workers face from exposure to blood-borne viruses. Several ‘found’ poems have titles beginning with the word ‘Criterion’ (A/B/C/D/E) followed by terms such as ‘stressor’, ‘intrusion symptoms’, ‘avoidance’, ‘negative alterations in cognitions and mood’. Bloor highlights words in the prose text in black leaving others faded — a form of incomplete ‘erasure’ which highlights key aspects of trauma.
The poet uses many images of roses e.g. the short poem “In Which the Event is Experienced” has the lines
a spray of roses
violates
my mouth
In the later powerful poem, “All Floral Tributes Will Be Removed after Seven Days”, there is an effective repetition of the lines ‘and no-one knows which jade-black rose/ is nourished by them now” referring to bones, blood, memories and burnt letters.
Coming back to the idea of journeying, in “Just Before It Happened”, the reader will find reference to location ‘in co-ordinates of latitude and longitude/ expressed as minutes and degrees’. This idea then finds expression in the poem “20:58 (53, –2.21)” capturing a moment of risk in a particular place:
I’m positive
and know
those petals of the sea rose
taste of salt
These co-ordinates also feature in “Today” and “Journey 2”. In the latter poem, Bloor writes ‘the safe word is forgotten’ and uses the imagery of ‘fast rewind’, auto-stop’ and ‘repeat loops’. “Today” also loops back to text in the poem “In Which the Event is Experienced”. These are examples of the way Bloor adds complex layers to his writing.
In the last section ‘Exits’, Bloor continues to showcase and experiment with different forms and even different fonts (although not reproduced here), including his ‘Twonnet’ form with fourteen lines of ten letters justified with no spaces: “Lost” ends
Comemydove
tobemylove
Bloor has almost no punctuation anywhere in the collection, apart from a few question marks, vertical strokes and brackets, so his line breaks and stanza breaks have to be particularly effective. This uninterrupted flow suits the idea of thought processes, memory and the subconscious.
The poems in this final section speak of leaving, destinations and letting go. “The Invisible Girl” has a lovely image of skating. Bloor repeats the first stanza at the end of the poem almost as a mantra, but it could be argued that the instruction is an impossibility:
feel the breath of her
as she passes
now hold that tight
Although I have concentrated mainly on the use of form in this review, I should emphasize the humanity in these poems — there is joy, sex, humour, confusion, love and loss but it is worth emphasising that Bloor also shares insights into trauma (PTSD) as a medical health condition. In writing about these topics, he makes us more aware of the complexities of human emotion. A poet can write about, re-write and re-imagine both past and future as part of life’s journey. To my mind, the final lines in the poem “The Art of Divination” intimate that we all have the capacity to survive these journeys:
is there a name
for those who write
new endings to the past
new futures for themselves
Mar 23 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Roger Bloor
Poetry review – MAPPING BROKEN ROADS
Sue Wallace-Shaddad finds a reassuring humanity among the various unfamiliar forms and layouts used in Roger Bloor’s collection
Mapping Broken Roads
Roger Bloor
Barnard Publishing Ltd
ISBN 978-1-0683961-0-6
136pp £8.99
The introductory comments at the front of this varied and innovative collection speak of Danielle Schaub’s discussion of ‘mapping the concept the topography of trauma’. According to Wiktionary, the word ‘topography’ derives from the Greek ‘topo,’ meaning ‘place’, and ‘graphia’, meaning ‘to write or to record’. Roger Bloor states “From this concept arises the rationale of mapping broken roads to discover a route back home from the house of silence’’. This informs the poems presented to the reader.
The collection is divided into three sections: ‘Entrances’, ‘Sub Rosa’ and ‘Exits’. The poem “Prologue” (in a cleave form) speaks of ‘sorrow’, ‘parting’ and ‘love’. The split form mirrors emotional tension and the line ‘my search to find that place’ evokes the idea of journeying ‘home’.
The first section focuses on youthful experiences and relationship(s), with an opening prose poem full of humour about learning ‘selected’ facts of life. It has an impressive title: “The Young Boy’s Guide to Living on the Surface of the Sun and Other Difficult Things”. Humour is also evident in the succinct five-line poem poem “Hug – From Hugga to Comfort or Console” which considers body heat and sex. “Beach Huts for Hire” contains wry older adult comments with regard to courting on the beach:
“a few hard pebbles
and some damp sand
never put us off”
“The Weather for Today” is a beautiful lyrical poem suffused with colour: ‘This Monday afternoon of scarlet silk/ flounces yellow polka dots across the park’. Bloor riffs on the theme of ‘the day’: ‘This is a day for passionate affairs’ and ‘This is an ice-cream day of sun and sand’, ending ‘this is the day we meet and fall in love’.
Musical references in the poems add a strong sense of time and place. “The Force of Attraction” deftly conjures up the atmosphere of a club, incorporating words from the Rolling Stones’ song “Jumping Jack Flash” e.g. ‘gas gas gas’. The music group Abba is summoned up in “Side B Track 2” describing a road trip in ‘the summer of 82’. In “Did Blue Flamingos exist”, students in the 60s ‘played records at maxplus volume’.
The tone becomes darker at the end of this first section. The poem “Monologue” picks up on “Prologue”, bringing the reader back to ‘sorrow’:
I am a heart dead friendless wanderer
here I live alone in this lonely place
The mournful “Epilogue” later ends the collection. These three poems, based on Bloor’s own translation of the ‘Old English Elegy’, “The Wife’s Lament”, are an interesting frame for the collection, adding a timeless element.
It is very clear from reading the middle section, ‘Sub Rosa’, that Bloor is a poet who works hard at his craft and likes to push boundaries. He emphasises a change of focus in the collection with a radical shift in forms being used. Speech bubbles feature, as if in a comic book, with words in white sitting in sharp contrast to black background. There is also an interesting literal spotlight on text from two of Shakespeare’s sonnets (18 and 130) incorporated in two of these pages.
The poem “LYT”, a pantoum, uses a version of text speak e.g. ‘W calmin wrds 2 heal yr rage/ I rOt deez lines 2 mke a mark’. The notes state that “Threading with Tancredi” can be read as a monologue or duet and is in a form invented by Bloor that he calls ‘Throperetto’. “Retro” uses synonyms in brackets to emphasise points:
you leave
[drift]
storm out never looking back
The section title ‘Sub Rosa’ is a reference to ‘secrecy’. By way of an introduction here, Bloor sets out the risk that emergency front-line workers face from exposure to blood-borne viruses. Several ‘found’ poems have titles beginning with the word ‘Criterion’ (A/B/C/D/E) followed by terms such as ‘stressor’, ‘intrusion symptoms’, ‘avoidance’, ‘negative alterations in cognitions and mood’. Bloor highlights words in the prose text in black leaving others faded — a form of incomplete ‘erasure’ which highlights key aspects of trauma.
The poet uses many images of roses e.g. the short poem “In Which the Event is Experienced” has the lines
a spray of roses
violates
my mouth
In the later powerful poem, “All Floral Tributes Will Be Removed after Seven Days”, there is an effective repetition of the lines ‘and no-one knows which jade-black rose/ is nourished by them now” referring to bones, blood, memories and burnt letters.
Coming back to the idea of journeying, in “Just Before It Happened”, the reader will find reference to location ‘in co-ordinates of latitude and longitude/ expressed as minutes and degrees’. This idea then finds expression in the poem “20:58 (53, –2.21)” capturing a moment of risk in a particular place:
I’m positive
and know
those petals of the sea rose
taste of salt
These co-ordinates also feature in “Today” and “Journey 2”. In the latter poem, Bloor writes ‘the safe word is forgotten’ and uses the imagery of ‘fast rewind’, auto-stop’ and ‘repeat loops’. “Today” also loops back to text in the poem “In Which the Event is Experienced”. These are examples of the way Bloor adds complex layers to his writing.
In the last section ‘Exits’, Bloor continues to showcase and experiment with different forms and even different fonts (although not reproduced here), including his ‘Twonnet’ form with fourteen lines of ten letters justified with no spaces: “Lost” ends
Comemydove
tobemylove
Bloor has almost no punctuation anywhere in the collection, apart from a few question marks, vertical strokes and brackets, so his line breaks and stanza breaks have to be particularly effective. This uninterrupted flow suits the idea of thought processes, memory and the subconscious.
The poems in this final section speak of leaving, destinations and letting go. “The Invisible Girl” has a lovely image of skating. Bloor repeats the first stanza at the end of the poem almost as a mantra, but it could be argued that the instruction is an impossibility:
feel the breath of her
as she passes
now hold that tight
Although I have concentrated mainly on the use of form in this review, I should emphasize the humanity in these poems — there is joy, sex, humour, confusion, love and loss but it is worth emphasising that Bloor also shares insights into trauma (PTSD) as a medical health condition. In writing about these topics, he makes us more aware of the complexities of human emotion. A poet can write about, re-write and re-imagine both past and future as part of life’s journey. To my mind, the final lines in the poem “The Art of Divination” intimate that we all have the capacity to survive these journeys:
is there a name
for those who write
new endings to the past
new futures for themselves