Poems from Poetry Review, Poetry London, etc. The first part is about places, returning to the past, recapturing lost moments, and her mother's decline. The second part (which I didn't think as good) is about adopting in a hot country.
The title poem begins with "I love your old age". Here's stanza 4 -
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The seals have grown old here too, in the worn-out quilts of the sea, gusts. We breathe the same air. Some nights they look in at us from the galleries of their whiskers, streaked with salt, with mating. |
Note how "Seals" are equated to "you" and then to "we". "galleries" is audacious - I suppose their eyes above their whiskers are like spectators above a box at a theatre. I don't get "with mating" though I don't know anything about seal sex.
Here's the start of "Cape Porpoise, Maine" - "I go back to that walk,/ island to island/ across the mind at low tide". The substitution of "mud" by "mind" changes a lot. The penultimate stanza continues the figurative thread - "I go back so I can walk/ past my own past into hers"
Later, in section 6 of "Overlays", the seals and islands are brought together - "the seals are see-through, like an anguish.// My boy follows a wavy line with his fingers./ At low tide we can still walk out to the islands./ We can walk as far as we can see,/ as far as you can remember"
At times there's very deliberate juxtaposing that I don't get. "I climb into a boat on the pond ... On the steep hill above the pond a harvester is gathering hay ... My boat is bent flat, gathered as if to fit into a bottle/ and the harvester is loading the high fields/ with tiny bales of hay" (p.16)
Punchlines can appear anywhere - e.g. "Stroke" has "I go in search of what is missing" 6 lines from the end, whereas "In the certainty that everything can change/ in a moment" (p.43) is line 2.
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