"Deborah Sheldon’s The Broonie and Other Dark Poems (Hiraeth Publishing, April 2025) stands out as a poetry collection in at least two ways that I quite like. As Sheldon explains in her introduction, first, “each poem is a deep dive into a specific poetic form,� and second, each poem has a narrative dimension derived from “a drabble, flash fiction piece, or short story� Sheldon has already published. In a world of poetry clogged with navel-gazing free verse, I welcome Sheldon’s appreciations for form and for storytelling through prosody in addition to prose.

Even though she didn’t start publishing poetry until 2020, Sheldon has gone beyond mere appreciation and developed quite the knack for verse, choosing and mastering difficult forms throughout the collection. The title poem, first in the volume, is a very good villanelle, which is one of the most notoriously difficult classic forms to write (Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night� might be the most popular one today). Sheldon uses the form’s required repetitions to increase the creepiness of the poem’s monster step by step. I’ve read a lot of poetry, but Sheldon still manages to come up with forms that were unfamiliar to me: the strambotto, the cethramtu rannaigechta moire (which is really cool, at least as she uses the form in “Witchcraft Doll�), and others, all of which she kindly explains in her Afterword. She also leaves room for my personal faves such as the sonnet and rondeau. For readers who love poetry throughout the centuries and across cultures, the collection is a smorgasbord.

The stories the poems tell, which never feel forced into their formal constraints, are also enjoyable and often provocative. “Parasitic Births� is among the most striking for me because it deals with deeply intimate subject matter—a woman suffering with uterine fibroids—and conveys her suffering powerfully through formal choices. For an entirely different reason, another favorite is “The Coach from Castlemaine,� a “bush ballad� that pits a brave, headstrong woman against a monster that feels like it’s sprung from folklore. Even though they all have dark elements, the range of emotions in these poetic tales spans from the serious and scary to the wild and lighthearted, a variety of sensations to match the variety of forms.

Sheldon’s poetry collection impresses with its linguistic dexterity but, perhaps more importantly, dazzles with each poem’s capacity to entertain while the words do their dances. If you believe that, as someone (wrongly) said to me recently, “contemporary poetry doesn’t rhyme,� maybe The Broonie and Other Dark Poems isn’t for you. But if you admire poetic skill and enjoy dark jaunts of the imagination, I recommend giving it a try."