"Holding it together" by Christina Buckton (The Lamplight Press, 2022)

Poems from Fenland Journal, North, Orbis, Stand, The Alchemy Spoon, etc.

The past

In a first book there are bound to be memories from childhood. Some of the incidents here are the sort of things that stick in the minds of many - "Holding Hands" (temporarily losing a parent; when this happened to my sister in a shop she thought her mother was an alien imposter when she returned!), "Pondskate" (nearly drowning), "Identity" (illness), "Belinda", "Uncanny Janet" (favourite dolls). The poems fall into 3 main categories -

• Poems set purely in the past - "Hold my Hand", "Identity", etc
• Poems that compare the past and the present - "Holding Hands With Myself", "Chafer's Wood", "Trust Me", "Sheep's Green Swimming Pool", etc
• Poems that mix the past and present with non-personal details - "Skin Hunger", etc

The title words come from the first poem, "Things I've Broken", which ends with "solder it with gold stronger again again". If you hold the poems of this book together an autobiography emerges. But there are characters who are having trouble holding themselves together.

The text

"//" is used instead of line-breaks in "Little One" and "Forgetmenot".

There are several lists - "Things I've broken", "Everything is Ceremony", etc.

I'd classify some of the pieces as Flash because of their length and structure - "Alabaster" for example.

The analogies aren't extravagent. Typical are "soft as a shelled pea" (p.13), "soft as a footstep in sand" (p.21)

Themes/Leit-motifs

• Eggs - p.1, p.3, p.14, p.18, p.43, etc!
• Holding hands - perhaps the most common image in the book - p.9, p.12, p.15, p.28, p.57, p.69, p.79
• Long relationships - p.51, p.58

Individual poems

"Portraits of my Mother - front back and side" and "Forgetmenot" are more stream-of-consciousness - more confused, struggling for clarity. "Forgetmenot" begins with the persona regretting not having shown more love to their late mother, ending more interestingly by finding a common language - that of plants, their names.

Several of the poems have twists. I'll mention 2, each typical in their way - moments that perhaps illustrate life-long coping strategies -

• In "Child Entering the Egg" a child cracks open an egg ("Stars crackle its surface") to find an embryo. The ending couplet is "Turn the eggshell upside down,/ Pretend it never happened"
• "Boarded Up" begins with "This is what you tell me" and recounts the person's tale of boarding school, being a homesick bedwetter. The ending is "When you read this, you tell me/ that it isn't your story. I've stolen you,/ laid my eggs in your life"

My favourites are "Blue Planet", "Identity", "Everything is Ceremony", "Old age", "Uncanny Janet".