An interesting collection of speculative poetry.

A bit too much obsessed with body horror and lust and sex, all by way of Ovid, but also draws some thought-provoking connections between past myths and future truths.

Sometimes the poems intended to put a new spin on old folklore were a bit obvious, but many of the space exploration poems echoed Robert W. Service and Banjo Patterson about frontier life and hardscrabble folks carving out a living quite nicely.

What an interesting juxtaposition of history, art, and modernity! With a little bit of magic sprinkled within, The Gates of Never is a fascinating read. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys poetry, space, mythology, magical realism, or history.

The Gates of Never is a fantasy themed poetry collection that I requested for review ages ago, enjoyed, and then forgot about. It’s more in a modern, light-hearted about fantasy stereotypes vein than in a poem that is a fantasy vein – and I’d have preferred the latter – but for anyone who likes the sound of the former, this comes recommended.

This was a very niche but very interesting read on a topic I know depressingly little about. The author's writing style was lush and beautiful, and I felt that I learned a great deal about the history, mytholgoy, and folklore she covers. Would recommend for anyone with even a passing interest in these subjects!

Thank you for the opportunity to read this book. A full review will be posted on Amazon and Goodreads

I don't read poetry often. I had to study it at university and it was my first true introduction to its potential beauty. Unlike many other bibliophiles and wannabe-writers, I have never written poetry myself because I always had a secret inkling that I would be horrible at it. So poetry became something I never explored independently. But now I've decided I should do something about that and I couldn't have chosen better than Davitt's The Gates of Never. Thanks to Finishing Line Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this collection in exchange for an honest review.

In The Gates of Never Davitt brings together mythology and poetry, magic and astronomy. There is mystery, there is beauty, there is also some real tragedy in these poems. The collection is split into different "Gates": 'The Gate of Sandstone', 'The Gate of Marble', 'The Gate of Wood', 'The Gate of Steel' and 'The Gate of Stars'. Some of these gates link very directly to the poems contained within them. 'The Gate of Stars', for example, is full of poems dedicated to and inspired by the stars and planets in our solar system. The other 'Gates' aren't always as straightforward, but together they work up to something celestial, as if the poems carry us higher and higher.

One of my favourite poems was 'The Sea-Wolf of Brittany', about a Breton warlord called the 'sea-wolf'. They attempt to tame him through marriage, but betrayed by two brides he abandons human form forever. I think it is a brilliant exmaple of how Davitt brings together history, mythology and, surprisingly, some suspense. The same can be said for poems like 'The Pyre', which is probably my actual favourite poem from The Gates of Never, 'Russalka', 'Jade Mask' and 'Dragon Teeth'.

Another example of how Davitt plays with different themes is 'Storms of the King' from 'The Gate of Stars'. As far as I can tell, it is about Jupiter. Davitt uses the science of the planet to tell a beautiful story in only two stanzas. NASA is full of beautiful nerds who love mythology as much as I do and Davitt has used this to her advantage to combine astronomy and mythology into poems that strike a perfect balance between the two.

As I said above, poetry doesn't often strike a nerve with me. In the case of The Gates of Never, Davitt brought together all my favourite things in order to ensnare me. Of course not every poem will equally strike a chord, but in general this poetry collection has really struck me. The poems aren't traditional, in that they follow a clear rhyme scheme. I don't know enough about poetry to say what it is that it is doing, but it works very well. The Gates of Never feels both ancient and modern, which is a great combination.

I loved The Gates of Never which surprised me very much. Each poem draws a beautiful image and Davitt has definitely found a new fan in me. Anyone with an interest in mythology and legend will adore The Gates of Never as much as I did.

*I received an ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thanks for the free poetry collection.*

As always I didn't like all the poems, but I enjoyed reading poems which could roughly be described as speculative fiction, be it Greek mythology retellings or poems about space. Some poems were quite weird (sex with a tree???), other quite beautiful.

In contrasts to other poems that I have read lately, these poems where quite heavy on the language side, rich and full of references, allusions and hidden hints at mythology, religion, cultures, or literatures. I liked that. This, however, also led to me not getting some of the poems, not being able to connect properly with them.

But as this was quite short and entertaining, it's

3,5 stars

I don’t read a lot of poetry, but I do enjoy the occasional collection, especially if the poems share similar themes or at least related topics.

This collection is in the speculative vein and focuses on history, mythology and space.

I will say, I found the first section a little dull, quite possibly because while I like history, I have a more general understanding of everything pre-1700, as my interest lies more on late Victorian to the Interim War Period. But the poems are short enough they kept my interest even if I did feel I was missing a couple of references.

I became more invested when the subject shifted to mythology (both ancient Greek/Roman and Western). While different interpretations of the myths are not innovative (there are many books that do this), I do enjoy a clever retelling. These were both fun and sometimes poignant.

Where the poems really took off for me was the section about space and futurism. Being a sci-fi writer myself and having named my daughter after Mars (the planet, not the God), it’s no surprise I absolutely loved the sequence comparing the planets (visually) with their mythological namesakes. These poems really drew me in. A couple I even re-read.

Overall, the collection is easy to digest, with touches of humour and sprinklings of modernity.

My favourite poems were:
Gargoyle
Russalka
The Journey
Once Human
Diaspora

There weren’t any poems I disliked, except The Storm Miners. It was too heavy-handed in its parallels to 18th-century sailing – the all-male crew didn’t make sense for a poem about the future.

I couldn't understand more than a half of what the author was writing, which her ideas were. It was a totally confusing reading.

"Centuries
after Olympus
fell to dust,
she lingers,
more immortal than those
who sentenced her so"

Cosmo Pop Quiz!

Are you interested in:
a) mythology
b) history
c) space
d) poetry
e) all of the above?

If you chose any of the options, you should probably check this poetry collection out. Unfortunately for me, I'm not particularly into any, or all, of these subjects (except for mythology and history, maybe- at least, I enjoyed those poems the most), so this book didn't really have much of an effect on me, nor do I think it was very memorable, I'm already beginning to forget most of it and I only JUST finished it. Even though I just admitted that I maybe shouldn't have requested the book at all since it wasn't really my thing from the get-go, I think it's important to get out of your comfort zone once in a while, and this book did that for me. I respect it for that.

I also had two more problems with the book: while the poems felt (and I say "felt" because I don't have any actual, concrete knowledge about poetry) technically good, if not great, the author also felt like she kept me at arm's length the entire time, and that their writing voice was rather clinical and detached. Plus, I think that the collection could have benefited from being separated into clear sections, history/ mythology and space/ science fiction, because, especially towards the end, I don't think the two subjects blended well.

However, I should also mention my favourite poems: Lamia (see excerpt above), Russalka, The Stone Garden, and Storm Miners.

The first thing I unfortunately have to note is that the formatting was off in the version I read, which clearly detracts from reading, let along critiquing, poetry. Issues of line breaks and spacing popped up, and if I looked at versions in Kindle or in Bluefire or in PDF the line breaks were different in all three, making it impossible to tell which is the author’s intended.

Setting that aside, as is often the case for me and poetry collections (or any anthology to be honest), this was a bit of a mixed bag. But since I expect that, I can’t say I was disappointed; it had about the balance of good, solid, and weak I’ve come to anticipate, though I did wish there were more examples of strong or excellent poems.

The poems are mostly myth or fairy tale based, with a number of astronomical/space-based ones coming toward the end. One’s recognition of characters, plots, or images will depend on one’s familiarity with folk tales and myths. Certainly, many are the well-known tales: Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, golems, Merlin, etc. Others are only a bit more obscure, such as the Lamia. Davitt often does a nice job of recasting the old tales in a different light, either changing up plot or giving us a perspective that evokes sympathy or compassion for characters often presented as “monsters,” such as Medusa or the afore-mentioned Lamia. That reshaping is one of the collection’s stronger points.

The style varies, with many of the poems falling into a more “prose-y” form, though others were more formalized or more traditional (though again, hard to say with surety due to the formatting issues). A few lines were startling in their originality and had me lingering over them, but these were more the exception than the rule and not as many as I prefer when I read poetry, though I’ll grant “startling” is a high bar.

Sometimes Davitt’s use of sound is a bit too on the nose for me, such as a too-blunt usage of alliteration, say, or an internal rhyme that calls too much attention to itself, but generally Davitt employs sound and rhyme to good effect, as in the assonance of “boxes in her closet” or the mix of sound techniques in “his blind eyes as her serpentine locks twined around him.” Word choice can be effectively obscure, conveying a sense of the ancient or arcane, but can also at times become a bit repetitive (not within a single poem but throughout the collection). Tone is mostly serious, but Davitt sometimes shifts gears into a more comic voice, to mixed effect (“They Pyre” I found the best of these sorts).

The vast majority of poems I’d put in the “solid” category. My two favorites by far were the truly excellent “Pieces of the Sky” and “The Last Swan,” both of which stood out for their strong POV voice and moving impact. While I thought these the best in the collection, the series of space-based ones toward the end were stronger on the whole I thought, more often employing original, vivid imagery and having a general sense of freshness (astronomy being far less mined by poets than myths, folk tales, and fairy tales for source material). As I noted earlier, I read poetry for those startling juxtapositions of language, an unusual yoking of images, a way of phrasing something I never would have thought of but that nailed a feeling or image just right, a playfulness with language, etc. and I didn’t find enough of that in Gates of Never. But if Davitt didn’t have me often lingering over particular imagery or phrasing, I did move smoothly through the poems, enjoying if not loving many of them, in particular for their recasting of familiar stories or characters or the way they animated bodies in space, so we see them in a different light.

The poetry in this book was simply beautiful. I loved how they each told a story. Very poetic, I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of poetry.

Rating 3

While I really enjoy poetry and several different forms, I didn’t enjoy this collection. I wasn’t enjoying it when I started it because nothing connected to each other topic wise and I was very confused. It might’ve made more sense if the collection was organized by topics but nope it wasn’t. I won’t be continuing with any of their other works if it’s published sadly because it took me 3 weeks to get through instead of in one sitting.

A brilliant mix of modern, galactic, and mythological, The Gates of Never reads in a stream-of-consciousness way that none the less calls to mind some great epic poem. The imagery and emotions behind the author's words draws the reader in.


A special thank you to Netgalley for providing me with a free advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

I don’t normally read poetry, but every so often something looks like it’ll appeal to me and I’ll give it a go. The average poetry reader will probably enjoy The Gates of Never a lot more than I did (though I far from hated it.).

Divided into sections called “Gates”, The Gates of Never is composed of myth-oriented fantasy, folklore-fantasy, and science fiction poems. The longest is a couple of pages, the shortest a couple of lines. Deborah L. Davitt’s poetry is accessible, and most of it is done in what I think of as ‘proper’ poetry format. (People like different styles, I happen to prefer proper stanzas and a good beat. This is an opinion and sometimes I do like the other styles. Just not nearly as often.)

My favorite individually poems were Covenants, Last Swan, In the Shadows of Europa, and The Dance. My overall favorite section was probably the one where she was covering creatures like the Banshee. I got a little irked with the sci-fi section because, as previously stated, I’m not a poetry reader, so I was like “They’re planets, lady! Plan-ets! They don’t yearn for anything! Stop personifying them!” (You can tell I take things a bit too literally.)

There were a couple unexpectedly naughty ones in the collection that made me crack a smile. I’ll leave you to discover which ones.

Mostly the poems in The Gates of Never fell solidly in the middle for me. There were few that I truly disliked. Mostly I either just didn’t connect with them or simply thought they were pretty. (Pretty’s probably not the right word to use, but that’s what I put in my notes, so we’ll go with that.)

Definitely check it out if you’re a poetry lover. If you’re fair-to-middling on it, your mileage may vary.

Eye opening, beautifully lyrical poetry. Has a sense of realism and fantasy tied up in one. Recommend read for anyone who loves poetic stories

"The past haunts the present, a drift of ancient scent... Each of us contains the mortal remains of ancestors ten thousand years gone. We are their lost battles, their relics, their burial grounds; we are their ghosts, haunting one another unquietly."

Searing poems about the intersections of history and mythology, magic and cosmology, future and present. Some fascinating ideas and stunning turns of phrase.

"The Gates of Never" by Deborah L Davitt can be described as modern mythology and fairy tales. There are some recognizable tales and stories she weaves into her poetry to tell new fables for modern ears.

Her poetry is deep and rich with imagery and passion filling each word. This new anthology sparks the imagination to revisit classic tales from a new perspective that is both eye-opening and stimulating.

I received this as an eBook from Finishing Line Press via NetGalley in exchange for an honest and unbiased review of the title. I did not receive any compensation from either company. The opinions expressed herein are completely my own.

The Gates of Never is an interesting and well-written collection of fantasy and science fiction verse from a poet who has had work in many notable places. A mingling of a medium and genre I love.