Most (maybe all) of the poems in this pamphlet have been previously published - in Frogmore Papers, Interpreter's House, Magma (Model in love), The North, Orbis, Poetry Salzburg Review, Rialto, South, Under the Radar etc.
Some poems use loosely rhymed couplets, some have gaps between words.
"Clair de Lune" begins with "She trailed me three miles home/ with her Geisha face, always one step ahead/ as if drawn along// like a child's balloon". Then later "Every slate and puddled gutter// became her slave that night,/ laid their hopeful mirrors at her feet". This rather straightforward treatment of a common theme isn't typical. More common are poems that start like
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Why Mama Beke Held On to Her Wardrobe Strange fruit indeed hangs in this tree. I've heard its riddle spaded into yellow grit eyed it on the page inked flat inside a rectangle of brisk news |
or
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Red Hair At six, they gave her a doll with real eyes. See - open, closed. Open. Closed. Its vinyl ears were perfect conconctions. Father perched on the sofa, gulped words like a pelican. Whole sentences wriggled to death in his gullet. Mummy, more jolly, twirled rings on each finger, whirled that flat smile round until they all fell giddy. |
What does "all" refer to in that final line? The poem turns out to be about that girl meeting her biological father? Or maybe not.
They're poems that I need to re-read. However I sense that they needn't have been so puzzling, that they could at least have been made more tantalising.
Other reviews
- Grant Tarbard (a restrained effort exploring time, death and dream, and how this dream plays on our own kitchen-sink realism)
- Alan Price (Booker has her influences – for me that’s early Samuel Beckett. ... a genuinely original poet who takes great calculated risks and is able to quietly master her risk-taking)
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