She's a short-liner. "Ice" (the first poem) begins "Some eight thousand miles west/ of our window (where/ an ashen moon// hangs brightly)". Some poets' stanzas equate to prose paragraphs. Here the stanzas often equate to sentences, the lines too short to contain a complete clause. For example, "Photo in Edinburgh" (20 lines) has "dad's flat cap/ tilted north,/ a handful/ of wind/ ruffling his hair", and ends gently with "their glasses are similar/ their smiles alike/ years of being close". There may well be subtle effects at play here, too subtle for me.
"East Preston Street Cemetery" is 10 little stanzas in a 2 by 5 grid - burial plots, maybe. "At Waverley" (the Edinburgh train station) is in 2 columns, the 2nd line of the 2-lined stanzas on the left being on the same line as the 1st line of a 2-lined stanza on the right. "Settlement" has space within lines and indentation - so much so that I wonder if it's a shape poem. A key?
"Traveling" (my favourite - an extract's below) and "Hard to know" (which I also like) seem different to the other pieces in the book - more fragmentation, but also more interesting connections between parts.
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your hand on my back the din of others round us minutes sliding past * nothing so difficult as getting further further away the landscape from the window hard ice to ocean * daylight wakes me light spills over me into the aisles |
Other reviews
- Afric McGlinchey (Sabotage Reviews)
- Charles Whalley, Ben Parker and Nick Asbury (Sphinx)
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