1 : from writer, critic, publisher and literary salon host Chip Martin :-
Out of performance and theatrical music come rhythm, syncopation, balanced two-stress lines, drum-beat spondees, alliteration, almost Stabreim, sharp Anglo-Saxon - ‘tart’, ‘swart’ - ever startling constructions, inventive, not for a moment dull. The content is often rebarbative but always self-knowing: seductions, betrayals by chisellers and preening preyers on the innocent, the rejects, perennial victims of an unthinking self-pleasuring. O the ‘flabster queens’ and ‘snuckers’ and ‘dotard whores’ of a down-and-out bourgeois Britain, of Dorset hamlets left by the wayside, of superannuated B & Bs. O tempora o mores! ‘Pathological narcissism’ vies with ‘the naïvété that’s totally defeated me’. ‘My signature shifts of register/and sonic tectonics of syllabic toss’ confront the ‘amnesiac emeritus goal of utterances unbound by metre or meaning’. This collection is hard, sad yet ecstatic; brilliant, awful, amazing and brave. (Chip Martin, London, 2020)
2 : from singer, Andy Bell of Erasure:
Barney and I, along with musician Chris Frost, make up the hybrid poetry, theatre and song collective ‘Andy Bell is Torsten’. That project’s undertow of mirthful, darkly poetic menace is brought into sharp focus in Barney’s concise new poetry collection, ‘Café Kaput!’ Emotionally astringent observations, the poems in ‘Café Kaput!’ claw into the aching epicentre of the thwarted hopes, dreams and ambitions of our age. The ‘against the odds’ existence of weary souls on the margins of life, where fetish, fear and phobia coalesce. It celebrates the broken souls who cling to a desperate hope despite the overarching chaos and indifference of an often cruel, judgmental world. It is the stuff of nightmares, but not without a tender mercy; it really is the dog bollocks. Read it if you dare! (Andy Bell of ‘Erasure’, London, 2020)
3: from poet, Jeremy Reed:
Barney Ashton-Bullock's poetry in ‘Cafe Kaput!’ impacts like verbal weaponry. Viscerally raw, unflinchingly targeted, lyrically sensual, its tensions operate on the boundaries of an alliterative accent compounding street, palare and spiky self-invention with optimal dexterity. 'In sleek, sleety, diamanté's drawl' is how I read him, the soft and the hard burning bright on a mission. That mission is outsider poetry. Read this book. (Jeremy Reed, London, 2020)
