"City of Departures" by Helen Tookey (Carcanet, 2019)

Poems from Magma, Manchester Review, Shearsman, and her HappenStance pamphlet In the glasshouse from which "Prairie", "In the rose garden" (which was a Guardian poem of the week.), "At the ponds", "Quend-Plage-les-Pins" and "Mow Cop" came. 2 pages of notes!

The word dream" appears on pages 9, 11, 16, 27, etc, but even when it doesn't explicitly appear, the theme dominates the early sections - memory can't be trusted, things are strangely different, and there's synaesthesia. Halfway through the title poem the persona realises they're barefoot in a cobbled street, then "You were there in the sense of having spoken a vital word to me and then gone away, leaving me wandering the wet quaysides holding the word I couldn't use, a bright coin in the wrong currency". The ambience continues - "She said she didn't know why (p.11) ... Where were you going? You can't remember now (p.14) ... She can't say when she saw it before (p.15) ... So did you maybe dream it (p.16) ... Everything happens at a distance (p.21) ... you woke and knew at once something was different (p.27) ... You don't see any marker posts after no.3/ You begin to be a little afraid of it, this path" (p.30). When on p.50 I read "it has become a habit   not knowing/ not remembering   how to proceed" I knew what she meant.

In "Boat" a "wrecked boat uncovered by storm, by shifted sands" appears for just a day on a walk the persona often took. Someone had left them that day, so they "crept inside and lay for hours". Others later say there had never been a boat. I like the image, though 18 lines seem too many.

Even interiors aren't stable or secure -

• "one room becomes another, a string of rooms like paper dolls" (p.21)
• "At first you're a child, out of scale with the house you find yourself inside" (p.23)
• "suppose the house were only windows" (p.39)
• "doors leading only to more doors, to more rooms - interiors with no exteriors, doors and windows yet no way out" (p.67)

In "Green" the persona goes out, hides until they think they've been seen, then they go home. Dolls houses and Glasshouses aren't safe retreats either.

Nostalgia isn't reliable. In "Front" the persona tells a passing couple how she'd recalled what the sea-front was like. The couple say it was like that only before the persona was born. Nevertheless the persona is sure that s/he's seen it. There's a strange transition from "we" to "I".

I like the start of "Hotel Apostrophe" -

Apostrophe. I. Rhet. A figure of speech, by which a speaker or writer suddenly stops in his discourse, and turns to address pointedly some person or thing, either present or absent; an exclamatory address As though the ordinary business of being a hotel were the discourse, which has suddenly been abandoned, the notional hotel turning instead to address us

On p.44 is an excellent stanza that matches the cover -

As the blue comes on, the canal shivers, and just for a second all the charts go haywire. (Reflections of telegraph pole, of factory chimney.) In the ward of the white house no one will sleep. The single lamp outside will burn all night.

And she can do standard (good) analogies - "the long beach is almost empty/ and the sea is quiet, its attention elsewhere// like a small girl in Sunday school/ who sits on a hard chair, half-attending// pleating and unpleating/ the hem of her skirt" (p.55).

Yet several poems puzzle me - not for their complexity but their simplicity. I don't see anything much in p.29, p.30, p.46, p.47, p.54, etc.

I like "Prairies", "Paper birds" and "Quend-Plage-les-Pins".

The final "Skizzen / Sketches" section is 12 pages of prose - an essay really, about some female artists and poets; about representation of females by themselves and others. I liked it, and I can see how it relates in part to the poems. It's not trying to be poetry. In a book with 13 all but blank pages between the contents page and this final section, there are fewer poems than readers might normally expect.