Short poems - sometimes 3 on a page. Hair gets many mentions. She's not my type of writer. Usually I like some of her lines/similes, though this book is rather short of good examples of those.
I somewhat liked "Night-room", July 2nd (top of p.13); "Night-room", July 21st (bottom of p.25); "Night-room", July 22nd (top of p.26); "In a Hedge"; "Office", July 26th (bottom of p.30). My favourite was "Day-room", September 7th (top of p.54) - They smile at us/ like they'd smile at sheep/ they can't believe aren't bred/ to smile back.
Other reviews
- Robin Geddie (The darkest moments are always met with the lightest surveillance ... Hill's fusillade of unbalanced similes treat all objects indiscriminately, as if she is attempting to desensitize the reader to the speaker's unsympathetic reality. ... Because Hill is such an original writer, her verse is verily unencumbered by the sensitive matter of mental breakdown.)
- Imogen Shaw (They leave the collective identity and deep, shared psychological understanding of the other patients, and re-emerge into a vast world of far too may jostling individual identities for such a close collective identity to be developed, so they must signal their identity with outward markers. Yet, they still take with them their experiences on the ward; their hair was done for them, there, to prepare them to leave. Hill’s implication is that they’ve now to see if they can replicate the same effect at home.)
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