Advance Reviews Of Archery In The UK

I am very grateful to Elizabeth Gauffreau and Merril D. Smith for providing advance reviews of Archery In The UK. As they are both talented authors in their own right, I very much value and appreciate their opinion of the collection. You can find highlights of their reviews below, and a link to the full reviews on their respective blogs.

Review by Elizabeth Gauffreau

Archery In The UK: New Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems by Ingrid Wilson and Nick Reeves was a lesson in reading and experiencing poetry for me. I’d never read a collaborative poetry collection before, and I began reading with a false assumption: that each poem would be attributed to one poet or the other.

Disabusing myself of this false assumption then raised the question of whether both poets wrote every poem together, or whether the collaboration was a matter of curation. As I continued to read, I had even more questions. Were the poems speaking to each other in a call-and-response kind of way? Was there a narrative arc to this series of poems that was supposed to tell a love story of two people? Who were these people? What was the chronology of their story?

Continue reading on Elizabeth’s blog.

Review by Merril D. Smith

The initial goal of the full-length poetry collection that became Archery in the UK: New Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems by Nick Reeves and Ingrid Wilson (EIF Publishing, 2023) was “to write a contemporary homage to Lyrical Ballads.” However, as the opening statement notes: “the poems had their own ideas, and told our story.”  And what a story it is! Readers of this collection will find themselves immersed in courtship and partings, despair and joy. The poems explore nature, art, and music, traverse the countryside and towns of England, and a lover’s body. It is birdcalls and bedclothes….

Continue reading on Merril’s blog.

Thank you once again to Elizabeth and Merril! It is humbling to read of the impact these poems have had on others, as they mean so much to me personally. I have more advance reviews to bring you next week, and some other little tasters of the collection. In the meantime, here’s a link to a playlist of the readings Nick and I have given so far: