I've read some of the work in Vanessa Gebbie's Half-Life of Fathers as individual poems. Immensi tremor oceani which opens this collection won the 2012 Troubadour competition and others have appeared in places like Envoi, Eclectica and Ink, Sweat and Tears. 
 It is a different experience reading these poems as a body of work rather than single poems. They work so well together and this pamphlet has become one of my favourite books of 2013. These are haunted and haunting poems but written with a lightness of touch and a Welsh musicality. The ones that appealed most to me personally are those which reclaim the lives of men from both the world wars of the last century. There's Ezekiel Parkes who was a miner and became one of the tunnellers under La Boiselle during 1915 and David Bury who was a Hurricane pilot in WW2. 
 Half life of Fathers is beautifully produced and is somewhere between a pamphlet and a slim paperback first collection - an oversized pamphlet if you like. The cover has the ghostly image of a man's face which suits the subject matter. I have read other pamphlets from Pighog press and they do seem to be good at spotting up and coming poets. 
 I was deeply moved by the poems about Gebbie's father as would anyone who has watched their own father grow old, decline and pass away. The title poem of the collection begins 
 Thursday lunchtime. My old soldier is barricaded 
 behind safety rails on his hospital bed. I stretch 
 across acres of white space to kiss his cheek, a farewell 
 that's been three years coming through the fog. 
 It has also been reviewed here