Learning to be Very Soft

What Writers and Critics Think

• This is a collection suffused with vivid imagery, with various forms of water ("the pool", "the floods", "the river" and "the sea") occurring throughout the text. I admired Waldron-Hall's ability to hone in on the complexity of relationships through verse at once startling and tender.

  Mary Jean Chan

• In these tender, gently surreal poems of boyhood, and brotherhood, and son-hood; Callan Waldron-Hall takes us into the intimate spaces of the body and the sore spaces of shame. There is such care with language here, such stark observation of truths, it’s as though this pamphlet were a lifeguard, jumping in to save us from the mundane horror of our ordinary lives.

  Andrew McMillan

• Unsettling, vivid and acutely observed, Waldron-Hall’s poems explore the ways in which a body, a self, can become ‘less than solid’. With tenderness and precision, Waldron-Hall shows us the embodied self learning to inhabit both its vulnerability and its potential, its ‘untouched places’.

  Helen Tookey