"Blackbird singing at dusk" by Wendy Pratt (Nine Arches Press, 2024)

Poems from The Friday Poem, Under the Radar, etc. It starts well, and continues at that level for while. Themes include identification with landscape (or parts of it - water or a boulder), grief (a daughter's death and a more recent death of a father), bird imagery, language, personal/family/geological history and the consequences of having rural upbringing.

A boulder dreams (p.13) and sings (p.17). In the final poem, "Boulder returning in echoes of self", the first 3 short stanzas begin with "If I was the boulder"; "If I was the glacier"; "If I was the valley". The final 3 stanzas those topics echo back, the 1st lines being "But the valley was opened up"; "Though I looked like I was still"; "Though I was scraped I was granite".

A few forms are used. p.18 is a duplex (a form new to me) - 8 couplets of roughly 10-syllabled lines where the 2nd line of a couplet links (often by a common final word) with the 1st line of the next couplet. The poem's first and last lines are similar. p.22 is a golden shovel. p.34 is a specular.

Overall I like the book, though I'm less sure about some early lines in poems that end with good imagery.

• I like the idea on p.24 when accompanying her father to hospital then letting him go on alone is compared to accompanying an astronaut to their rocket prior to take off.
• "Excavating the bone house" sounds too much like research until part IV - "In the valley of the glacier/ the tops are the edge/ of your world ... If you want [a] PhD/ you have to climb over the edge ... The tops form the roof of my mouth/ where my flat vowels sound themselves.// The tops are the height to which I can reach./The tops are the grimy extractor fans/ of fish and chip shops"
• "Sara Lee" is clear enough, but there's too little content.
• "Eleven" has too many unoriginal lines. It ends well with "I want you to know that today/ I carry you up to the cemetery like/ a goldfinch on my shoulder/ and that you bob away in the air/ and then back again, and that/ it makes me happy/ to imagine us this way"
• "My Woe Waters have been sleeping/ twenty-five years dry and still/ Woe tries all her tricks to tempt/ a rise, to tickle water from my chalk bones" continues the identification with landscape (p.56)
• I like "My mother, a wren at his ear, calling and calling" ("Intensive Care Unit Two") though it echoes "Eleven"
• "This year you come to me in the rain,/ ... columns of you drifting across// the distant valley of me" ("Thirteen"). I like this imagery that ends the poem.

Other reviews

• Jade Cuttle (Smell is one of the hardest senses to describe, but it is one of Pratt’s strengths. As her grief deepens and her animal senses sharpen, aromas become more present, as if attempting the impossible and compensating for her loss.)
• S the poet (It is a literal set of songs with both beauty and urgency that remind we will never escape the inevitability of our own lives, and that to live with them well is an experience that fundamentally alters our souls to the good. ... My favourite poem, amongst constant smart and astute observations of the lives, people and memories her environment contains and the lives of others, plus the grief tied to deeply personal losses, are ten lines entitled The Men Who Drive Tractors.)