A Review of my Collection "scratch"

As it seems to have been passed over in the publication of choice I'm taking the liberty of posting the review of my collection scratch, by the wonderful MulletProofPoet:

Scratch
Paul Sands

Sadly, these days, many poetry collections often come with a free side order of smart-arse, either that or they’re brimming with their own (usually misplaced) level of confidence, which gathers like dust upon their best selling, yet largely unread pages. Nottingham born Paul Sands though, with his second collection Scratch, hands us something altogether more solid, more real. This is poetry with its gloves off, an angled worldview, knocked off kilter by its own sense of disappointment and redeeming ability to spot obscured signs of beauty through rusted iron railings and filthy broken windows.
Lines like ‘pull your shoulders off guard/a silent sob sewn with angry years/asphyxiated by tea as the lizards feebly grope the summer’s eyes’ quickly assure us that there is a talent here which is so honed, so skilled, yet so down to earth, so grubby, that it’s less like reading a book and more like walking through an abandoned underpass whose walls are lined with piss and William Blake graffiti. Great stuff.

Squib

Rigid truths and squared guarantees
Texture this boy
His morseled fantasies
The graceless torrent of impotent gods
Wary as the wasp on the chameleon's
Trapeze tongue
For even as the microscope remains
Boxed, in cotton, in woollen peace
Rags may still record
Fidelity's soiled tapestry...
Once stung the swollen speech
Of reason's soured and thickened song
Bastards the condensed apprenticeship
Fields a howling, childish drove where
Dreams so quickly cloud to sheep
I could so easily...shhhh
You shall not impeach me for the rhymes
That I declined

In Need of a Revamp

May need to roll this place into the garage and give it a good service

Interest Only

all square within the confines

of the cask conditioned discothèque

from without my fitful anti-sleep

came the wasps 

and creeping hands 

that spidered across the ceiling and floor

unsure of the etiquette for trembling

delirium

yet, for three pages, I was

in the clear, gone, beyond the provincial

boots of leaden grit, though by the fourth

the interest had waned even while that 

was all that remained

Mutuality

friends of friends and an orgy of mutuality

every one ripe for the fucking until we greedily

eat our own tails 

I find myself running low on chemistry 

with so little reaction left inside of me

the water around the plug hole no longer spins, 

it only falls

written in the dirt

this autumn morning

winter’s aperitif

is served on the rocks

shaken and stirring

come downpour now

unleash your jotting scribe and

cast the showery runes of fables untried

forge scripts along our droughty lanes

of songs for all that yet remain

or wash away those pages brown,

whelm witness to our temporal sway

we’ll listen to the eager earth

as she swallows every dripping word

of this crisp & chilled September cleansing,

for she has such a slumberous summer thirst

shelter ’76 (redux)

the rain drums his fingers impatiently

along the length of a blue dusting lung busting puckered roof

and fingers the gaps where once there was glass

wire veined, designed to resist

a boot, a fist a flick of the wristy bone

trebuchet yet now carpeting this concrete nest

of surly youth in a crystal expression of boys

when they are bored

nowhere better then than this Park Drive smokeasy

for the bad ones who will always try their best,

after mocking words and a quart of cider,

to cop a feel of the big bird’s breasts