The Cost of Living, by Alan Bleakley and Shane Neilson

Reviewed by Ben Robinson

(Artel Press, 2025)

The concept of The Cost of Living, a collaborative poetry collection from UK poet-physician Alan Bleakley and Canadian poet-physician Shane Neilson, is a compelling one: a transatlantic engagement between New Brunswick and Cornwall. While we could certainly benefit from further poetic conversations outside the bounds of the nation, this collection seems to oversell the similarities between these two poets.
 
The table of contents, for instance, distinguishes the respective authors of the first two poems, but beyond that, leaves it to the reader to keep track of who is speaking. I can appreciate this decision in the spirit of typographical cleanliness and a focus on the poetry, but it seems to downplay the organizing principle of the collection. That being said, despite the lack of visual distinction between the authors, for better or worse, it remained quite clear to me which poem was written by which poet.
 
One can imagine the social rationale for such a project given that Neilson and Bleakley have co-published both the Routledge Handbook of Medicine and Poetry and Poetry in the Clinic: Towards a Lyrical Medicine, and The Cost of Living is a charming publication to be sure, with evident care given to its production, but aesthetically, I’m not certain the proximity is integral to the reception of the poems or that it particularly benefits either poet here.
 
Bleakley’s lines feel overly languid in relation to Neilson’s more clipped and lively phrasing. Take, for instance, the first lines of Neilson’s “March 1, 2004”: “Caravaggio, correct - the road’s all darkness. / Paul, of Tarsus, struck blind. Seems right -”. The poem begins at full speed, a debate already in progress, and summarized so succinctly with two-and-a-half sentences in two lines. Compare this with the beginning of Bleakley’s unhurried “WAYS TO SPOT CROSS FERTILISATION”:

​Under cover of bowering cloud
Choughs the colour of concussion
Touch down on a delicate silk carpet
Woven from clusters of spinnerets.

​Lovely, but a bit staid after Neilson’s rapid-fire opening. I have no problem with a long sentence that winds between the lines, or a more descriptive poetry, but Bleakley’s tendency toward lineation that privileges discrete phrases rather than enjambing his lines further slows down poems which are already much longer and wordier than Neilson’s. Here is an example from the third stanza of the same Bleakley poem:

​Under sharper light
In a kitchen at the back of the dunes,
A pregnant woman idly pats
A block of black Irish butter
With the back of a potato ricer,
Her percussive mooning conjuring
The faintest odours of cider and treacle.

​Bleakley’s work is undoubtedly full of surprising diction and some lovely sonics like the alliterative slant rhyme of “block of black Irish butter,” but the clash of speeds between these two poets does not enhance the reading of either—Bleakley’s faint odours and idle patting are drowned out by Neilson’s restless, vatic winds.
 
The unevenness of the pairing also comes through in moments where their content and concerns are more mutual. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in a collection entitled The Cost of Living, Bleakley contributes at least two considerations of death, seemingly a parent’s. Both “The Pane Intact” and “The Making of Worry-Weather” are moving in their consideration of a loved-one’s final moments, the rattling final breath where “the heart stutters, blood pools cold // And the spirit-window creaks on its fleshly hinges.” Compare the above to a moment from one of Neilson’s stronger (and longer) poems in the book, “The Unforgetting”:

                                         …who
will let us loose from the moral
tether, the judgement that keeps
us all bound together, not mesh
but mortal coil, lashed to masts
or to the hospital bed, cross
dangling on my neck to chime
against the rail - who dares call
this restraint, this is excess - in five
points, I’m dying - they say I am bound
for my own good, but they also
say I am bad - 

Another long sentence, but this one is thrashing and winding, facing down death but with a sense of humour that never fails to see irony in the euphemisms of restraints and for your own good. Many of Bleakley’s poems are perfectly enjoyable, quieter considerations, but when read in proximity to the urgency of Neilson, the latter’s poems can feel general and distant, observations rather than enactments.
 
The question then becomes, what makes a successful collaborative match? One of my favourites that comes to mind is me, then you, then me, a chapbook publication from knife fork book by Gary Barwin and Kathryn Mockler that evokes this sequential structure even in its title. Though these poets also have divergent approaches, their differences are harnessed to draw them both into new territory, Barwin bringing his signature surrealism to Mockler’s more direct and socially-oriented work for a blend that is strange and linguistically energized, while never drifting too far from sense.
 
Prior to this volume, Neilson also published a collaborative collection with Roxanna Bennett, 2023’s The Suspect We, where the poets’ shared concerns around dis/ability were powerfully felt and enhanced through their lengthy conversation. Almost like a crown of sonnets, each poem in the collection takes its cue from the preceding: Neilson’s “By the CanLit Dumpster Fire, I Sat Down and Wept” leads into Bennett’s “Each Day I Sit in Sukhasana & Weep,” which later progresses to shared titles like “Gratitude for The Self Who Learned,” and on to further blends like the co-authored poems “Bonfire Beauteous” and “The Moon Agitating the Earth.” Though their individual cosmologies may vary, the collection offers an engaging variety of collaborative methodologies, never remaining in a single mode overlong.
 
I wonder whether part of the problem with The Cost of Living is the sequential structure, and whether, in the absence of greater conversation between the poets, separating each author into their own discrete half might have placed these poets in the other’s context while allowing for greater difference of approach (like the Penguin Modern Poets series or Contact Press’s TRIO, which brought together the early work of Gael Turnbull, Phyllis Webb, and Eli Mandel). As it stands here in The Cost of Living, the distance across the ocean still feels vast, the relationship between the Bleakley and Neilson a bit too happenstance—less of a coherent why and more of a why not?

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Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His first book, The Book of Benjamin, an essay on naming, birth, and grief was published by Palimpsest Press in 2023. His poetry collection, As Is, was published by ARP Books in September 2024. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work.