"Grey time" by Julia Webb (Nine arches press, 2025)

Poems from Atrium, Finished creatures, Poetry Wales, Under the radar, etc.

The notes mention about 10 poems by others that provided inspiration or a quote. They also point out that one poem is a centina (a form new to me) - 100 words, starting and ending with the same 3 words.

I like the first poem, "I have spent years falling out of each window", but not so much the sequences that soon follow it. I think I've a bias against sequences. They contain recurrent themes/phrases - e.g.

• "I remember nothing of the journey// Nothing even of the summoning phone call, though there must have been one." (p.20)
• "I think we might have taken the train home and come back again// but I can't be sure" (p.24)
• "I barely remember now/ the shape and colour of her coffin/ though I know I must have picked it out" (p.32)

When a poet feeds from the past as much as this one does, keeping the quality high is an achievement in itself. From about p.34 onwards, nearly all the poems have something to like - the title, the ending (on p.72, after his uncle died, her son feeds the caged guinea pigs, "the sunlight dancing across my son's face/ as he hunted for the lushest, greenest leaves"), sometimes an image or the idea of the poem ("When you tell me how you feel" is a specular poem whose theme excellently matches the form), sometimes the emotive content. There a several different reasons for the successes, which is good.

The prevailing themes are familiar - grief; expected responses; being a mother; being a daughter. Previous books haunt this one. The owls of "Bird sisters" are here. In "The Telling" there was the horror of domestic space invaded by water, a reconstruction of the mother from things around the house. Houses (as refuge), doors and windows (the latter not always a good thing) appear here -

• "I have spent years falling out of each window"
• "who was the stained-glass gift to the meanest window"
• "The same mother// who taught you to be a house and not a tree"
• "The house contained a hurricane ... It was a house that welcomed bad news/ and the grief that came with it"
• "The sun was trying to get into the house/ blue at the windows/ blue at the open door"
• "Mourning is a young horse/ careening wildly about the house"

My favourites are "I have spent years falling out of each window", "Mourning is a young horse", "I find my dead lover by the side of the motorway", "If", "without".