Marvellous reviews for ‘Safe Ground’ have arrived since it was published in March, 2025. Not all literary magazines keep their reviews online for long, so I repeat some in full below. Many thanks to all reviewers who have taken the time to do this:
The High Window magazine (Colin Pink),
London Grip (Jennifer Johnson),
Ultramarine Literary Review (Setareh Ebrahimi) and
Elliptical Movements blog (Billy Mills).
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Colin Pink’s review in full of SAFE GROUND in The High Window magazine, June 2025:
Safe ground is increasingly hard to find in the current state of the world. Rosie Johnston’s collection of 27 poems and one short story delves into the elusive possibilities of finding safe ground in the wake of growing up in Belfast during the euphemistically termed ‘Troubles’ in a fractured family with a dysfunctional mother and a charming but unreliable father. The volatile relationship of the father and mother reminded me strongly of Caitlin and Dylan Thomas. In the poem ‘In Good Hands’ the mother is characterised like this:
She’s a stove you look after
day and night
or her tolerance blows out.
Both eyes drip, her come-with-me fist
grips
your arm: ‘When I leave him, you’re mine.’
Johnston is a masterly story-teller. There’s a strong filmic quality to the poem ‘She’s Staying’ where the tensions within the family, the infidelity of the parents, is subtly conveyed as a storm rages outside, echoing the stormy relationship of the parents:
A wail above it all – my mother’s curled on the carpet
round the whiskey bottle, new black dress rucked up. ‘Your father’s
gone’, she wails, she wants to die, ‘where is he, Rosie, find him’
Gales screech off Donegal, tangle my hair over my face.
My teacher’s car, lamplit outside our house, spindrift on the roof,
two heads inside, in silhouette against the moon gleam road.
Sleet cuts the breath from me. I judder. Coward, I go back inside.
The adjacent poem, ‘Abercorn, 4 March 1972: Six O’Clock’ is about one of the worst atrocities during the Northern Ireland troubles when a bomb was planted in a crowded tea room full of local women and children. The poem describes a TV reporter on the six O’Clock news struggling to control his emotions as he reports on the dead and maimed until, unable to control himself any more, he stumbles out of shot. This poem resonated for me with what is currently happening in Gaza with so many women and children being blown to pieces. The poem reflects on the monstrous violence that has been let loose:
Over his shoulder we’d all seen it: the beast was out of its cage.
Chill control, red-eyed in our homes, ready to clot our lives.
The lowest we can be was loose. Nothing mattered now but blood.
Most had no choice but to stay – even when they’d
lost all – to hirple on, patch up, work for peace
in the throat of that stinking scorch-breath.
There is humour too in the poetry especially ‘Cleopatra on Port Stewart Strand’, where the reckless mother drives her car straight onto the beach and leaps into the sea ‘to lose her usual scent of chip fat and onions in the surf’. The car is stuck in the sand so the mother enlists the children to push the car who are soon helped by nearby men, urged by the mother to push harder ‘and high above the racket / seagulls cackled / and all the men /adored her’.
Growing up amidst domestic and societal violence inevitably leaves psychological scars. In ‘Bloodstains on the Stones’ recurrent traumatic memories are represented as wolves:
Wolf-memories weave around my legs.
Docile now.
I tiptoe. Whisper.
Wolf-memories startle. Leap up, snap,
shove me over,
rip at my throat.
A gardening metaphor is employed in ‘Breathe in the View’ where ‘I pull up my past by the thickest stems. / A tough pull, both arms. My back into it.’
An apt sub-title for this book might be families and how to survive them, both the ones we by necessity are born into and the ones we create ourselves. The title poem traces in four sections the relationship of love and anxiety between parent and child from first steps: ‘A gleam. Breath held I watch / my baby / reach – two steps, one step, three – and walk.’ to teenage rebellion: ‘Minefield child, I never knew when / my tread / or yours could slaughter us both.’ to wary détente and the persistence of love: ‘Our eyes see our children grown. / Our hearts / still cradle our swaddled newborns.’ I feel sure parents struggling with rebellious teenagers will relate strongly to this poem.
Other poems, such as ‘Off the Map’ (about her father climbing Slieve Lamagan in 1949) and a series of poems set by the sea such as ‘Seasalter’, ‘Away in a Beach Hut’ and ‘Oyster Seventeens’ where the sea and sky ‘aligns the mind’s horizon’ all celebrate the healing power of being immersed in nature:
This fresh day. Let’s shuck it
open, feel
gusto pour between our fingers.
There’s a strong lyrical momentum in Johnston’s verse which is brought to the fore in rhyming poems such as ‘Happy the Woman’ (after one of Horace’s Odes) and ‘Just the Ticket (a villanelle after Dylan Thomas) which cautions young girls to ‘not go reckless into love’.
The book concludes with ‘Laughing and Grief: Paris 2020’ a perfectly paced short story about a trip to Paris to visit the grave of Samuel Beckett in Montparnasse Cemetery. It is also a story about grief over the death of the narrator’s father. The narrator struggles to find Beckett’s gravestone. I can vouch for this, having made the same pilgrimage myself and finding it hard to locate; in true Beckett style the gravestone is horizontal rather the vertical and very plain, making it easy to overlook. A local old gentleman offers her assistance and they commune among the graves of the famous, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Seberg for whom the old man has an enduring love. It is a very tender and understated story and all the more powerful for it. The past and present are interweaved in a subtle dance of reconciliation and healing.
At the end of the day perhaps the only ‘safe ground’ in an age of trauma is the refuge of being able to write about it. There is tenderness, trauma and wisdom in these pages (‘Reflection’):
Veiled dreams. That need to please,
appease, make good, make safe.
Make it out of there.
Colin Pink is a poet and art historian. His books of poems are: Acrobats of Sound (2016), The Ventriloquist Dummy’s Lament (2019), Typicity (2021) and Wreck of the Jeanne Gougy (2021).
Jennifer Johnson has reviewed SAFE GROUND in London Grip, June 2025. You can find samples of Johnson’s reviews and own poetry here. Johnson writes:
I had not previously come across the work of Rosie Johnston but recognise her name as someone who has reviewed books for London Grip for longer than I have. In this collection I was happy to find poetry that communicates strongly.
This collection consists of 28 poems and a moving prose piece. The poems are written in a variety of styles and are easily accessible. I want to focus on a few poems to highlight some of the techniques successfully used by Johnston in this collection.
The sea, in one way or another, appears in several poems. Johnston writes at the end of the first poem “Carnlough Bay”
Constant in it all, so many years, the need for sea.
Beside the sea earlier in the same poem Johnston writes
Here, where no people are I breathe. Expand again, at last, to my full size.
By means of an Alice in Wonderland change in size, these lines express the feeling the poet has in this place where she feels most fully herself. The last longer line adds to the sense of expansion and the unequal line lengths throughout the poem reflect the ebb and flow of the waves. This fundamental identification with the sea can also be found at the end of “Glitterball” when even in London
in every tube-train’s creak, a seagull laughs. With every passing van, a swish of surf.
The sea is also central to the poem “Nayland Rock Shelter, 2022” which is set in Margate. It begins with Eliot’s famous quote (‘On Margate sands/I can connect/Nothing with nothing’) and offers a contradictory point of view
Blousy old girl, yellowed fingers, a cough, Margate embraces us all.
“‘Reflection’” introduces another long-lasting companion, an old mirror. The poem begins
Mirror, you old jobsworth, you know all my fractures and keep your counsel.
The poem moves on from the poet’s childhood to reach a more painful adulthood when
Between my brows one line of anguish cut two years later when he left. Sly memory: it skims the worst away as if it never happened.
The title poem “Safe Ground” is made up of four parts. Part 1 begins
Gravid time. Still air. A drop hanging from a leaf. A wish unspoken.
The word ‘hanging’ on its own line emphasises the sense of suspension and even tension. More positively, the experience of being delighted with a new baby is touchingly expressed in the lines
I hold the clock’s hands, wrest this hour to a stop while you sleep in my lap.
This sense of time standing still is later echoed in ‘Breath held I watch / my baby’.
The second part of “Safe Ground” records a very different experience. It makes effective use of the metaphorical combined with the literal as in the lines
Your teens thunder through me, blades on your wheels harrowing your world and mine.
The word ‘harrowing’ is used both metaphorically (like blades harrowing the soil) and literally in the emotional sense. Several more powerful images are then used to describe a painful family break-up – for instance ‘crash-dive sea’ and ‘father’s quicksand’. This unhappy section ends on a happier note with a simple expression of the poet’s love for her son despite the destructive nature of the parental relationship.
You are loved, sweet child, wherever you are, whatever you dare become.
The next short section of “Safe Ground” provides another example of combining the metaphorical and the literal.
Grandma tightens a thread – ‘the weft of our lives.'
And in the fourth section the poet mother uses hands to convey a time of difficult relationship as the son grows older
Still my hand’s refused. Pocketed. The hand that fed you in your highchair.
But later it is the ‘simplicity’ (which perhaps includes honesty and humility?) that firms up the relationship on ‘safe ground’.
Beside a silver-quill sunset simplicity walks us to safe ground.
The final piece in the collection is a prose poem called “Laughing and Grief: Paris, 2020” which also combines the present experience with memories from the past. It starts with a description of a meal in Paris ‘supreme de volaille with dauphinoises’. The French words place the reader in the culinary culture of France with its ‘understated expertise’. Cognac follows the meal. Then the poet remembers her father: ‘I feel the warmth of you here now, Dad. Or it might be the cognac.’ She goes on to explain that ‘I was away on a literary trail to Montparnasse this morning. To find Beckett.’ After not having much success she comes across an old man, Henri, ‘his eyes all gentleness when he smiled, all loneliness when he didn’t.’ He leads her to ‘Beckett’s plain granite slab’ and then shows her a number of other notable tombs in the Père Lachaise cemetery. At one point, Henri’s gentle guided tour is disturbed by ‘an elegant young Chinese woman in a black face mask and trench coat’, about whom Johnston confesses ‘She mesmerised me. Her structured solitude, as if she carried a fortress around her more visibly than I did.’
It is after this strange interruption that the poet recalls her father again.. After Henri mutters a quotation from Horace, she tells him that her father used to teach Classics – ‘Laughing and Grief, as the Mock Turtle used to say’. Henri now has to use all his ‘flawless courtesy’ to avoid noticing how this memory has suddenly triggered in Johnston an ‘emotional collapse I did my best to hide’. In spite of this, however, the poem goes on to suggest that the encounter with Henri has provided some healing and resolution.
I highly recommend Safe Ground as it intelligently and powerfully communicates both the pain and joy of a complex life, lived by a cultured woman who has resolved ‘Like father, like daughter, I would live my life to the full and embrace love.’
Billy Mills reviews SAFE GROUND in his Elliptical Movements blog, Recent Reading April, 2025:
Rosie Johnston’s previous book, Six-Count Jive was a study in domestic abuse and escape presented in sets of haiku-like poems. Her new publication, Safe Ground sets that experience, ‘a bad case of bad, bad husband’, in a wider context of trauma and recovery that reaches back to a troubled Belfast childhood, with a much-loved womanising, hill-climbing, opera lover father and a mother whose resentments ruined her relationship with her daughter, and forward to a happier present in poems that are baggier, more discursive, than those in the earlier book.
These personal troubles are set in a background of the Troubles, and at moments the public and private seem to overlap, as in this poem on the Abercorn bombing in 1972:
Over his shoulder we’d all seen it: the beast was out of its cage.
Chill control, red-eyed in our homes, ready to clot our lives.
The lowest we can be was loose. Nothing mattered now but blood.
Her escape was, and remains, the sea, right from the very first poem here, ‘Carnlough Bay’:
I breathe. Expand again, at last, to my full size. I’m
tallest in bare feet, on sea-rolled shingle, back
heavy in my heels, cupping the weight of
whelk shells in my pockets.
Constant in it all, so
many years, the
need of
sea.
We see the breakdown of that bad marriage and the speaker’s fraught relationships with her children, but in the end, in the final poem in the book, there is a sense of wholeness, the Waste Land redeemed, its curse lifted by (and by) the sea:
We run, crabs loose from a spilt
green bucket,
back to the best of childhood.Content with plastic spades,
we burrow
where our simplest selves can find us.On Margate Sands songs and laughter
ride the winds,
connect us all with all.
That ‘loose’ brings us back to the Abercorn poem, but the worst we can be is transmogrified into the simple best in an echo of marvellous deftness.
And it’s not quite the end, as that final poem is followed by a four-and-a-bit page prose piece, ‘Laughing and Grief: Paris, 2020’ (recalling the Mock Turtle’s tale in Alice in Wonderland) telling the story of a visit to Beckett’s grave, or at least a failed attempt to find it that was salvaged by a kindly 80-year-old Parisian gentleman, Henri, who brings her to Sam’s grave, and then that of Jean Seberg, where he shows the narrator a card he wrote and placed there earlier. The story brings us back to her father, via Horace, a shared enthusiasm, and we get to see their final interaction before his death. And the card? It read Jamais de désespoir (Horace’s nil desperandum) translated by Johnston as ‘Never lose hope’, fitting words for the book to end on.
This very well-written story (definitely not a prose poem) leaves me wondering what next for Rosie Johnston? After two fine collections navigating trauma, is she now moving away from that subject and on to a post-recovery mode in which the bright world of Margate Sands is her theme? I’m eager to see.
Setareh Ebrahmimi’s review of SAFE GROUND in the Ultramarine Literary Review, June 2025 (in full):
Safe Ground was published this year, by a well-established woman of many talents, Rosie Johnston. Rosie is a poet and a writing workshop facilitator. In her life she has been a solicitor, commissioning editor and journalist, amongst other things. Rosie regularly performs her poetry in Kent and beyond. The themes of this collection are childhood, reflection, reconciliation and moving forward – probably in that order. And of course, safety. Being able to relax, to not be on high alert all the time.
Location means so much in Safe Ground. We can see this straight away in the first poem, ‘Carnlough Bay’. Different locations pop up repeatedly, mostly near the sea. It seems as if Rosie is trying to map an emotional coastline of physical places – stitching them all together. This mapping is also a way for Rosie to look back and reflect.
At times, Safe Ground is from a child’s perspective. Girlhood is also important in this collection. It feels like a reclaiming of childhood, somewhere to be safe, hence the title. There is a counselling technique where one goes back to recreate situation to be altered or positive. I wonder if this is happening via poetry in this book.
The phrase ‘silent childhoods swing lifeless’ crystalises the concerns of this book. Rosie describes a tense, painful childhood. It is so visceral you can feel how freezing the described environment is. The character in these poems is not able to speak, but in writing a book about such moments, Rosie is. This is seen in the poem ‘In Good Hands’, where Rosie writes, ‘Little seven, you will be safe -/I will/never let go of your wee hand’.
The ghost of a mother haunts this book. She is cruel and overbearing. But there is a strong admiration of other women despite this which provides an alternative to misery. Numerous women have a dedicated poem. ‘Being with Anne’, about the speaker’s aunt, is a good example of this. Rosie shows us that there is hope in difficult situations.
The internal troubles of this book are echoed in external troubles, as Northern Ireland’s troubles are also written about. This can be seen in the poem ‘Abercorn, 4 March, 1972: Six O’Clock’ where Rosie writes of ‘Two dead. Bomb under table.’
There is a wordy, prose-like quality to many of the poems, such as ‘Breathe in the View’ and ‘Off the Map’, then again many are sparse. There is a diversity in structure and technique, and you get an impression of a poet who has written a lot of poems previously who is able to take their time to write, using all the tools in their arsenal.
The Six-Count Jive extract, Rosie’s previous book, marks a change. After this, it seems as if the girl goes into adulthood and there is reflection over being a mother, the other half of having a mother.
The sea is what offers peace and an alternative path to the difficulties presented. In ‘Oysters Seventeen’ Rosie writes, ‘The sea nestles me; my/best mother.’ Joy is found at the beach repeatedly. Little details are focussed on, in opposition to larger problems. In the poem ‘Happy the Woman’ Rosie writes, ‘Happy the woman whose sweetest days/stroll with the tide’s roll, calmly sway.’
The sun’s heat seems to have the ability to break and remake, to cleanse and to heal. In the poem ‘In the Cool of the Hottest Day’ Rosie writes, ‘Another day close its/sunset eye./At least it watched me writing.’
Billy Mills reviews SIX-COUNT JIVE in his Elliptical Movements blog, Recent Reading June 2020:
Johnston uses flexible line-length and natural rhythm within the 17-syllable limit to create a subtle range of effects that act as a measure (in every sense) of the experiences she is exploring and relating. It is, I think, telling that the moment of catharsis hinges on poetry, the two stanzas that end page 30 and begin page 31, the move of the eye from page to page being part of the release:
In the rage of a poem, where the
fury starts,
lives revolution.
In the calm of a poem, where the
struggle stops,
lies resolution.
This leap from fury to calm, from revolution to resolution, a leap that can be made in both directions, is what enables the hope of the poem’s ending (and I read the entire sequence as a single poem), in that extra final stanza, one that cannot really be read without the one before it:
A tingle pulses on her tongue tip – one
word, unspoken, shelters
there:
Love. On the doorstep. Kissing its
own fingers
warm till she lifts the latch.
In the interesting times we find ourselves inhabiting, this joyful nostos is Johnston’s gift to her readers; that survival is not only possible, but desirable, that we can be agents in our own lives, and that poetry can be a part of that journey. This is an important little book. Read it.
Fiona Sinclair reviews SIX-COUNT JIVE for High Window magazine, winter 2019, eg:
[Six-Count Jive] is a superbly crafted piece of work whose language is at times sublime. The narrative is gripping because it takes us through the protagonist’s process back to happiness. In its deliberate brevity it invites us to mine for layers of meaning and rewards constant re-reading. Its back story and message of survival are life affirming but significantly, this is not an exercise in therapy, instead, Six-Count Jive is a superb piece of art.
Stephen Claughton reviews SIX-COUNT JIVE for London Grip, 13 July, 2019:
Although deeply personal, these are not the spontaneous outpourings of ‘confessional’ poetry, but tightly-controlled poems, which — as Johnston acknowledges — ‘have come together over nine to ten years.’ As the new and selected suggests, several of the stanzas are, in fact, drawn from her previous collections, sometimes unchanged, but often subtly amended and/or placed differently within the sequence. Almost all come from Sweet Seventeens and Bittersweet Seventeens, which both tell the same story as Six-Count Jive, but in very different ways. Reading them together, you can see how they plot the poet’s move towards a better understanding of the abuse she suffered, which in itself is testimony to the honesty of her writing at the time…
What is most striking about the poems is the sheer physicality of the imagery which Johnston uses to evoke mental states:
Her world is hers now, she cups it pulsing, breath-born in her hands, vital.
She also invests her compressed form with a wide range of tone from the softness of:
Her washed-out gaze wakes to kelp garlands, new moon’s high-shore embroidery
to violence on the scale of Hopkins at his most tortured:
Wind, whip anguish from her skin, strip fury from her pores, come blast her clean!
There is wit in these poems, too, for instance in:
Two magpies argue on the roof whether only two-ness brings us joy
Six-Count Jive is a brave and honest book, one which I hope will not only be enjoyed as poetry, but also give encouragement to women recovering from similar experiences. Rosie Johnston dedicates it to everyone with PTSD, ‘especially those of us traumatised in our own homes.’
You can find the review in full here.
Setareh Franklin reviews SIX-COUNT JIVE for Thanet Writers, 9 June 2019:
‘This collection would be very supportive and immediately understood by anyone experiencing or anyone who has experienced abuse. However, due to the accessible layout of the writing and the way that this allows you to really concentrate on what’s been written, as well as the considered, beautiful, delicate language and imagery used, there is plenty for any reader to take away.
… There is a fragility to the images used within Six-Count Jive, as well as natural imagery. One of my favourite lines within the collection is an example of the latter, when Johnston writes, “She lives in a glacier,” which perfectly reflects the main character’s isolation.
Six-Count Jive creates some order in writing out of the chaos of life. It also feels very healing, as writing often can be. It’s good that this collection came out of such a subject matter. It was brave of Johnston to write this collection. The lasting image of Six-Count Jive, the title idea of the jive—mentioned twice in the book—is its final, strongest, parting idea; despite everything covered in the collection, the reader is left with the idea of a dance, something joyful and freeing.
Derek Sellen reviews SIX-COUNT JIVE in The Poetry Shed, 13 May 2019:
‘The choice of seventeen-syllable stanzas (Sellen writes) is far from limiting; one of the wonders of this book is the variety and nuance which she imparts in such small packets of verse. These are not ‘haiku’ as such but, like the haiku, they are spare and densely significant, the carriers of reverberations and tensions it is important not to miss. She has used this form before in previous collections and her control of it is impressive. The narrowness of the form forces the writer to make each word count and the readers to pay special attention in our turn.’
Listen to these sound-patterns, language-choices and rhythms. First, the opening stanza:
Lie soft, gentle winged creature, roped and dazed,
you’re safe,
unless you struggle.
‘Lie soft’ and ‘gentle’ suggests the compassion of the poet’s later self now writing at a distance of the first pain. ‘Roped and dazed’ monosyllabically evoke the spider’s web with its horror for the victim. There’s the reassurance of ‘safe’, then the comma’s pause followed by the implicit threat of ‘unless you struggle’. Here is a stanza from the last page:
Among tall rococo willow
shadows
bats flit a bold fandango
The dance of the three-syllable words, the confidence of ‘tall’ and ‘bold’, the lightness of ‘flit’ – all combine to express a very different mood. The line-break throws emphasis on ‘shadows’. This might be interpreted as suggesting that shadows do not hold fear but are a place of dance, are no longer the darkness that earlier in the book spoke of ‘weariness and grief’. The changes in rhythm reflect the changes in the rhythms of the writer’s life.
‘Dance’ carries important positivity in the later poems. It is in the title ‘Six-Count Jive’ and in the language – ‘waltz’ and ‘fandango’’ ‘balletic’ and ‘pirouettes’ – and most essentially in these lines, where ‘daze’ is no longer negative (roped and dazed) but positive:
‘Birl me, sway me back to my
girl days –
daze me alive with six-count jive.’
The six footprints on the cover showing the pattern of the jive indicate that surviving PTSD is akin to learning how to dance again.
You can find the review in full here.
Emma Lee reviews BITTERSWEET SEVENTEENS in London Grip (2014)
‘It’s an apt title. The poems are each of seventeen syllables and a bittersweet feeling pervades. Loosely the poems follow a narrative from a girl searching for love to an adult woman who has missed out. The eager optimism of the girl is captured in:
Love love love, sad Rose, it’s the
only way
to grow and find your footing.
Love creeps soft as a moth’s thought,
darker
than tomcat’s breath, light as a dove.
Two magpies argue on the roof
whether
only two-ness brings us luck.’
Louise Richardson reviews ORION in Culture Northern Ireland (2012)
‘Johnston has compiled a richly rounded poem that flows beautifully as one piece, one entity. And yet, for those readers who prefer to dip in and out of a collection, each perfectly sculpted stanza can also be appreciated in isolation.’
Laura Wilson reviews THE MOST INTIMATE PLACE in The Guardian (2009)
‘On the face of it, scriptural exegesis looks like pretty unpromising material but it is transformed into the basis for a gripping, plausible and beautifully written literary thriller. This small book is nuanced, complex and wide-ranging, taking in love, hypocrisy, despair and faith. The lyrics to songs by the made-up heavy metal band Sword Rampant (such is [Johnston]’s attention to detail that the group has its own website) are worthy of Spinal Tap.’
US Publishers Weekly reviews THE MOST INTIMATE PLACE (2009)
‘British author [Johnston] follows her children’s novel, What You See Is What You Get , with a dark novel for adults that raises disturbing questions about faith and religion. Freelance journalist Patrick Price-Johnson reveals from prison, where he’s remanded on a murder charge, how he became obsessed with the Rev. Helen Halberd. In a flashback, Patrick interviews the attractive 46-year-old Anglican priest, who has written a controversial bestseller, Fire Down Below , for which she’s been denounced as “a blasphemous handmaiden of the Anti-Christ” for trashing the Virgin Mary. Meanwhile, Patrick’s girlfriend, Dr. Julia Nayler, wants Patrick to get the dirt on Helen, who may have had an affair with another unconventional Christian, the Rev. Neil Sarbridge, the dean of Lancaster College, Cambridge, in hopes of ridding Cambridge of the overbearing Sarbridge. [Johnston]’s needle-sharp characterization of the deranged Patrick is nothing short of terrifying.’
‘With free verse a popular choice among many poets today, it is somewhat comforting to know that amongst all this talented work, there is still a strong current of poetic form surging underneath.
Formerly Belfast/Portstewart and now London-based resident, Rosie Johnston is one such poet who has embraced a fixed form in her writing. She specialises in creating poetry with just 17 syllables per stanza – a style some may hasten to describe as Haiku but which, upon closer inspection, stands apart from this Japanese form.’
*
THE MOST INTIMATE PLACE
‘Very wicked and beautifully written’ – Maureen Freely
‘I doubt an ostensibly religious theme has ever been better served, or been simultaneously as scholarly, well-written, compelling, funny and, thank God, filthy. This atheist loved it.’ – Martin Rowson
‘Lyrical, thoughtful, sensual and shot through with dark humour’ – Imogen Robertson
Rosie Johnston 