Poems from The North, Magma, Poetry Wales, etc, from a Bridport winner.
First impressions are good. I think I understand what's going on, even if sometimes the work is rather low octane. "Going Under" is striking - "While they are cracking your breast-bone open ... I'm drifting through the sea" says the opening stanza. The parallel threads continue until the final couplet - "They close you up and stem the seeping tide;/ your mouth still tastes of salt, the tang of sea". The quality eases off after the 1st quarter of the book - poems like "The Warrener" do little for me. The imagery of "Shadow-Play" loses cohesion - "Spiders moth the house, wrapping each corner/ in geometrics/ the spin of algebra and physics/ as flies slip the shell of their wings"
The imagery's sometimes predictable -
- From "Seahorse" - "A slow dressage between the reeds,/ his neck bridled by seagrass"
- From "Selkie Wife" - "Us Selkie wives stick together. On Saturdays/ we gather for a girls' night out, dress in our// best pelts, the glittery ones with sequins,/ that make us seems like a harem of fallen stars" (the sequin dresses are too obvious. The harem's good.
I like this from "Shift" - "I saw you shift this summer, your cheekbones harvesting the shadows ... Each night I listen for your breath as your lungs cast out their lines, over and over, and I wait for the moment there's that gentle tug"
"Leaving Earth" and "The Music Room" are both longer than a page. Neither work for me. From then on the book fades - or maybe I've become too used to her habits - e.g. extended imagery as in "Walking the Words" - I slip my tongue between the language/ of ridge and cwm, taste their consonants./ And here I swallow verbs, delicate// as meadowsweet, read the rifted books/ of stone, sprung dictions of tree and leaf
