What Readers Are Saying
"Malone is a Romantic at heart, feeling the landscape, living the language, catching the drift."
Simon Armitage
"Any attempt to forge a new nature poetry in the English lyric tradition is a bold undertaking, but Malone's sensibility and assurance make this possible."
Michael Symmons Roberts
"Martin Malone's debut is breathtakingly assured, a rich, attractively male excavation of time and place, landscape and language, every word alert to the elements without and those emotions within."
Carole Ann Duffy
"A writer with a thrilling commitment to seeing just what it is that poetry can do."
Jonathan Edwards, poet & editor
"An Under Milk Wood reimagined by W. S. Graham on a far northern coast, Martin Malone’s remarkable Gardenstown surveys the horizon with a hyper-attuned ear for the seasonal music of what happens. With its vertically stacked houses, the village is confined yet open to the vast panoramas captured by the poet’s unwavering gaze. Gardenstown has grasped the passionate transitory and fashioned it into something tough and durable as Aberdeenshire granite."
David Wheatley, poet & academic
"Here is that good poetry both finely crafted and with something to say."
Niall Campbell, poet & editor
The Unreturning is a powerful, stunning piece of work. It has to be essential reading for anyone interested either in the writing of the First World War or in its history. But more than that, this is the work of a master craftsman, someone who is sure of his aim and sure of his talent. A poet of rare distinction, a book of rare skill; that encapsulates The Unreturning.
Siegfried's Journal,
(Journal of the Siegfried Sassoon Society)