Poems from Poetry Review, Poetry London, PN Review, London Magazine, Rialto, Magma, etc. The book also won the Costa Book Award for Poetry in 2019. I had trouble liking it. "Practice" was the first poem that I thought ok. The "Riposte" section contains my favourite pieces - "At the Castro", "They Would Have All That". Less so "Names (1)", "Safe Space (II), "11". Later I liked "an eternal &".
At first some of the paraphrasable matter (e.g. in "Vigilance") interested me, but too many poems go on about the same subjects (mother dealing with lesbian daughter; a women wanting to be accepted though she's mistaken for a man and likes woman; multilingualism; assimilation), arbitrary variation being introduced by way of typography - slashes instead of line-breaks; wide-margined double-aligned; stepped lines.
Analogies aren't striking - "as when a great wind / pushes a small boat out to sea / before it is ready" ("Vigilance"); my arms are weak as hand-pulled noodles"" ("song"); "all the sounds a body makes when it becomes its own instrument, rehearsing the songs it has learnt across the centuries" ("One Breath")
"Wish" uses extended analogy - "my lover often says look up!/ as she admires a canopy of green ... my languages are like roots/ gnarled in soil, one and indivisible/ except the world divides me endlessly ... lately I've been trying to write/ a poem that might birth a tree/ a genuine acceptance of the self/ continues to elude me"
The title poem and The window (Shortlisted for the Forward prize for best single poem) are online.
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