"New and selected poems" by Anne Ridler (Faber, 1988)

Poems from Critical Quarterly, Listener, PN Review, Yale Review, etc.

There are parts I don't understand because I've not read this sort of poetry for a while. Here's a stanza from "A dream observed" -

Easy an act to cover him warm:   Such a lover's small success Like the heaped mind so humble in sleep   But points our actual powerlessness.

The stanza before is about a camel being dreamt by a sleeping male. I understand the first line, contorted though it is. Maybe "heaped" alludes to the camel. Maybe the final 2 lines mean that asleep you can't do much, but you can't do much when you're awake either.

Some of the punchlines are less striking than I'd expect. This is the last stanza of the 7 in "Nothing is Lost"

Thus what we see, or know, Is only a tiny portion, at the best, Of the life in which we share; an iceberg's crest   Our sunlit present, our partial sense,     With deep supporting multitudes below.

Passages like "even the fossil shells/ Uncovered by the tide twice a day,/ Immortal in clay their grave and their preservative, Shall all be worn away" from "Lyme Regis - Golden Cap" do little for me.

I like "Anniversary" - 2 stanzas. Stanza 1 begins with "This fig-tree spreads all hands toward the light" and stanza 2 begins with "These fifteen years I have spread my hands to the light of your love". "Corneal Graft" has a less successful extended metaphor. A man, blind for 50 years, sees again and fears what he can now see. This is compared to what might happen if "The hand of God should touch us to eternal light"!

"Free Fall" starts by telling us about the French tailor who in 1900 was filmed jumping off the Eiffel tower in a robe he'd designed to help him fly. He could have changed his mind right up to the final moment when he was shaking his robe. The last stanza is "He mimed what each man must in private try,/ Poised on the parapet of darkness -/Each in that crowd, and you, reader, and I" which I like.