Emotional Support Horse by Claudine Toutoungi Matthew Sweeney “In Michael Haslam we have

“In Michael Haslam we have a genuine major poet of the north of England” —David Wheatley

the frozen past and the grim here-and-now liberated

It was a timeless fluttering

and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators

through to her last collection

Emotional Support Horse by Claudine Toutoungi Matthew Sweeney “In Michael Haslam we haveThis tragi comic, or comi tragic grief journal blends loss and low vision into poems that issue in startling joy. Emotional Support Horse tracks the course of a lived bereavement intensified by sight loss and eco stress. But wit is not only an element of style, it is a state of imagination, and it leads out of dark depth into the region of joy. A woman longs to metamorphose into Nicola Walker in a cop car, or a Hungarian Viszla or just to find an