Quite a variety of effects, right from the start -
- It begins with "Costa Coffee", a poem that has an "aba cbc ded fef gege" rhyme scheme. There are many non-formal poems too.
- Then there's "Morning", which after some nature observations ends with "daffodils ring out their bells/ of hope and love and sadness too./ It's March and I am missing you.". A familiar trope.
- "Not much love" has a more interesting punch-line. The persona tells us that s/he buried their parents' ashes side by side - might as well, because they'd been married 50 years, though they didn't get on. S/he doesn't visit the graves - "There was never much love" says the poem at the end, meaning presumably that there wasn't much between them and the persona either.
- In "Hollyhocks" the flowers are described as "a legion of rowdy spires", which I like.
- But then there's "Moments", an insight which reveals nothing new to me.
The mix continues through the book. "From the cliff top" is a near-specular. The first-person persona is "Liverpool Street Station" on p.56. My local car park stars in "Trumpington Car Park". There are poems that, without being ambitious, succeed in what they set out to do - "Sycamore", "There will come a tim", etc. I like "Each day". I'm less keen on poems that end with "Oh, please shine on me./ I am February inside and need the sun" (p.29) or "joking about everything/ except the darkness that lies ahead" (p.42). I prefer "Evening sunlight falls asleep/ wrapping the trees in gold" (p.39) as an ending, though it uses symbolism that by this stage in the book is familiar. Anthropomorphic imagery (birds - seagulls in particular; flowers budding, opening petals to the sky) is used by a solitary "I" surrounded by nature to describe moments that can't be captured or recalled in their full richness.
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