Literary reviews by Tim Love.
Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.

Saturday, 15 December 2018

"Bookmarks" by D.A. Prince (Happenstance, 2018)

Poems from Fenland Reed, North, Stand, etc.

The first poem sets the scene with "You will return, they say,/ to our sticking place,/ here, where time stepped in/ between two pages breaking the spell ... Trust us to wait, despite your squandered time/ and all the promises you never kept". The bookmarks have their say, and come in various guises, tickets in particular - "They want to carry on, still be of use;/ they know their time's not up" (p.7). There's a ticket to Besançon's Museum of Time, train tickets, receipts, shopping lists, postcards - some hard to decipher, some contrasting hugely with the book they're in, some denoting when reading was abandoned. "Half a raffle ticket" is my favourite piece - "It's luck,/ no more, so much of us survives. That,/ and the constant need to mark a page".

"Note" (about advances in technology. Also love) starts with the finding of a note -

Back by 8. Don't wait.
I've got the milk. Love
.

It ends with

Why not a text? asks the child,
all thumbs, not looking up from his screen.
There is so much to explain.

Here's a note for "Hand-made" - in Cyprus, dolmuş are minibus taxis for sharing.

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