Poetry review – DREAM LOGIC: Vanessa Napolitano is enthusiastic about a debut collection from Satya Bosman
Dream Logic
Satya Bosman
Crumps Barn Studio
ISBN: 978-1-915067-77-7
54 pages
Satya Bosman’s Dream Logic is an aptly titled collection – it is full of imagination, and features vignettes unmoored from linear time as if the stuff of dreams, but with no hint of dreamy vagueness. Rather, the precision of the imagery, language, and recurring themes provide a counterpoint of logic. In combination, the result is an arresting, vivid, and moving book of poetry.
The first poem in the book, “Last night I dreamt I was Emily Bronte”, establishes the poetic landscape of the collection well. Once the scene is set through the title, we dive immediately into the physical ‘hanging linen on the line, washed the old fashioned way…’; but the interpersonal dynamic of the speaker quickly follows as we learn ‘The wind was in a rage, expressed what I could not.’ There is complexity here as we imagine whether the speaker of the poem means their own rage, or Emily Bronte’s, or both.
Making a deceptively simple line carry significant weight and meaning is a trick Bosman repeats in various ways throughout the collection – every piece of punctuation and line ending seems to have been properly considered to serve the poem to the fullest. Take, for instance “Seapoint” in which the speaker reflects on the life of their grandfather. The last two-line stanza is incredibly affecting: ‘When his father died the whole town turned up to the funeral./When my grandfather died, I.’ I re-read the last line of the poem several times, stuck on the interjection of ‘I’, the hard physical stop of it linguistically, and the meaning it underlined.
I was equally impressed with the prose poems that intersperse the collection. Take for instance “Russian Dolls” which describes briefly a detail of each doll – the outer doll ‘can open jars on her own’ and another doll ‘is still crying about the fringe that she cut’. The details here are specific and relate to common female experience but in a way that feels fresh and completely removed from cliché about either women or nesting dolls. Bosman inserts dry observational humour and moments of the surreal into several of her poems – such as “Maybe we have met before” or “First date in a 50s diner” where the speaker reflects, ‘what hurt could one more/milkshake do?’
As a lover of myth and folklore, I am delighted by another element in this collection, namely the invocation of mythic characters and the interweaving of historic detail. The poem “Spinner at the Mill” takes Circe as its inspiration, and “Clootie Well” invokes ritual, a celtic well, a fire that stops as if by choice before it reaches a ‘hand-stitched wish bearing your name –’. Again, there is never anything lazy about Bosman’s rich use of myth or tradition, and specific references to unique words or traditions are explained in brief factual footnotes which helps with just enough context for anyone curious – but the poems where this is the case would stand alone without explanation.
Bosman also brings to bear a formal expertise in her poems that is never showy but skillfully underpins her writing. In “A Kitchen Window”, a contrapuntal poem, the words scan both across and down while exploring a kitchen table scene, the perspective shifting with the readings like the light or the wind while ‘the day … ticks/slowly by’. The form is fundamental to the impact of this poem without feeling forced in any line or moment.
This collection feels cohesive whilst resisting a reduction into an easy summary. The speaker of “Two names etched on a wall” says ‘Candlelight lets me pretend/I’m not a 21st century woman’; and this struck a real chord for me. Bosman’s poems exist in spaces occupied by women of the past (real and imagined) as well as vignettes that almost exist outside time; and yet the poetry feels very necessary and relevant to the world of today. There is a through-line of memory that gives the collection a fully realised emotional core – for instance, in “Farm Pantry”, the speaker recalls a highly specific moment in time, described in sensory details, where there are ‘packs of powdered jelly/ that stained our tongues and fingers red and blue’ and ‘the sky is crammed with stars’. The poem ends on the line ‘…friends, looking out for me behind glass’ so that the image of the friends is pressed flat twice – once in the photograph, and once in the recollection committed to the page with all the complexity that entails. The specific worlds Bosman draws upon – memories of family and friends, myth and lore, authorial figures and grief as landscape (as in “My Grief is a Marshland”) give an incredible richness to the tapestry of the overall text, Poignant, engaging, and thoroughly enjoyable to read – lines from this first collection continue to resonate well beyond first reading.
Vanessa Napolitano is a Yorkshire-based poet and works in Higher Education. She was a New Northern Poet 2025. Her latest book, the lives we had before is available from Stanchion Press.
Aug 26 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Satya Bosman
Poetry review – DREAM LOGIC: Vanessa Napolitano is enthusiastic about a debut collection from Satya Bosman
Dream Logic
Satya Bosman
Crumps Barn Studio
ISBN: 978-1-915067-77-7
54 pages
Satya Bosman’s Dream Logic is an aptly titled collection – it is full of imagination, and features vignettes unmoored from linear time as if the stuff of dreams, but with no hint of dreamy vagueness. Rather, the precision of the imagery, language, and recurring themes provide a counterpoint of logic. In combination, the result is an arresting, vivid, and moving book of poetry.
The first poem in the book, “Last night I dreamt I was Emily Bronte”, establishes the poetic landscape of the collection well. Once the scene is set through the title, we dive immediately into the physical ‘hanging linen on the line, washed the old fashioned way…’; but the interpersonal dynamic of the speaker quickly follows as we learn ‘The wind was in a rage, expressed what I could not.’ There is complexity here as we imagine whether the speaker of the poem means their own rage, or Emily Bronte’s, or both.
Making a deceptively simple line carry significant weight and meaning is a trick Bosman repeats in various ways throughout the collection – every piece of punctuation and line ending seems to have been properly considered to serve the poem to the fullest. Take, for instance “Seapoint” in which the speaker reflects on the life of their grandfather. The last two-line stanza is incredibly affecting: ‘When his father died the whole town turned up to the funeral./When my grandfather died, I.’ I re-read the last line of the poem several times, stuck on the interjection of ‘I’, the hard physical stop of it linguistically, and the meaning it underlined.
I was equally impressed with the prose poems that intersperse the collection. Take for instance “Russian Dolls” which describes briefly a detail of each doll – the outer doll ‘can open jars on her own’ and another doll ‘is still crying about the fringe that she cut’. The details here are specific and relate to common female experience but in a way that feels fresh and completely removed from cliché about either women or nesting dolls. Bosman inserts dry observational humour and moments of the surreal into several of her poems – such as “Maybe we have met before” or “First date in a 50s diner” where the speaker reflects, ‘what hurt could one more/milkshake do?’
As a lover of myth and folklore, I am delighted by another element in this collection, namely the invocation of mythic characters and the interweaving of historic detail. The poem “Spinner at the Mill” takes Circe as its inspiration, and “Clootie Well” invokes ritual, a celtic well, a fire that stops as if by choice before it reaches a ‘hand-stitched wish bearing your name –’. Again, there is never anything lazy about Bosman’s rich use of myth or tradition, and specific references to unique words or traditions are explained in brief factual footnotes which helps with just enough context for anyone curious – but the poems where this is the case would stand alone without explanation.
Bosman also brings to bear a formal expertise in her poems that is never showy but skillfully underpins her writing. In “A Kitchen Window”, a contrapuntal poem, the words scan both across and down while exploring a kitchen table scene, the perspective shifting with the readings like the light or the wind while ‘the day … ticks/slowly by’. The form is fundamental to the impact of this poem without feeling forced in any line or moment.
This collection feels cohesive whilst resisting a reduction into an easy summary. The speaker of “Two names etched on a wall” says ‘Candlelight lets me pretend/I’m not a 21st century woman’; and this struck a real chord for me. Bosman’s poems exist in spaces occupied by women of the past (real and imagined) as well as vignettes that almost exist outside time; and yet the poetry feels very necessary and relevant to the world of today. There is a through-line of memory that gives the collection a fully realised emotional core – for instance, in “Farm Pantry”, the speaker recalls a highly specific moment in time, described in sensory details, where there are ‘packs of powdered jelly/ that stained our tongues and fingers red and blue’ and ‘the sky is crammed with stars’. The poem ends on the line ‘…friends, looking out for me behind glass’ so that the image of the friends is pressed flat twice – once in the photograph, and once in the recollection committed to the page with all the complexity that entails. The specific worlds Bosman draws upon – memories of family and friends, myth and lore, authorial figures and grief as landscape (as in “My Grief is a Marshland”) give an incredible richness to the tapestry of the overall text, Poignant, engaging, and thoroughly enjoyable to read – lines from this first collection continue to resonate well beyond first reading.
Vanessa Napolitano is a Yorkshire-based poet and works in Higher Education. She was a New Northern Poet 2025. Her latest book, the lives we had before is available from Stanchion Press.