This work, so full of biological references, charms, voices from the natural world, is a memorable first collection. From its opening poem, ‘Bats’, which, like ‘Hare’, deals with creatures popular in contemporary poetry, Sarah Westcott’s surprising imagery, ‘wombed and jeweled / with kidneys, ovaries, / rows of studded teats.’; arresting language, ‘turning widdershins,’; and chilling, ‘…you’ll feel / our hunting song across your teeth’, sets the tone for the way she exposes similarities between humans and other animals, and reveals her keen eye and depth of scientific knowledge.

The collection is carefully composed with poems highlighting human characteristics placed beside poems which reference to animals and plants: ‘Inklings’, dealing with conception, rejoices in creation, ‘moulding them out of our hearts like clay,’, but is also visceral ‘and thighbones working like engines all greased with blood and longing,’ comes immediately after ‘Bats’.

As a non-biologist, despite the use of language such as ‘mycelium’, ‘hyaline’, and sporocarps’ (‘Downy Mildew’), I didn’t feel alienated from content, I was taken down the microscope, and pleasure in language, a playfulness in parts, ‘epithelial with a tensile foot / like a surfboard with nerves.’ (‘Form’) draws the reader into the work.

The poems deal with opposites and contrast: conception, in ‘Lily’, ‘Inklings’, and ‘Sentinel’ (concerned with chance, ‘how one seed might pierce its seamless skin, / set it dividing, tumbling into a stranger, strange as the man in the moon, the women / three-mothers-back, …’); miscarriage, in ‘Little Red’; and death in ‘The Green Flash’.

In poems which explore and reveal plant and animal life, we are taken into a wildness; whilst those written from a human perspective reveal focus on a taming of wildness, present for instance in ‘Black and Blue’, here there is a conflict between love and duty, apparent also in ‘The Faithful Couple’.

I loved ‘Lily’: in just ten lines, Sarah combines the keen observation of the botanist with the skilled use of metaphor, ‘ planting deep gold, / seeds that will root and bloom / into white lilies…’ In poems which make use of anthropomorphism, a biologist’s wonder is revealed alongside the empathy of a poet. A potent mix.

Throughout the work, there is a quest for an answer to questions about ourselves, ‘…in stars and tides, in the past and in ‘a dialogue between bar codes and desire’. [‘We are Listening’]

I’ve read three previous collections from Pavilion Press and each has been memorable for its precision, craft, and unique voice. Sarah Wescott’s collection is no exception. There is so much more I could comment on: the cover and font using harmonious shades of green – so fitting given the content; the dimensions of the collection making it so portable; the pace, tone, and form of each poem; further discussion of voice. However, there are limitations here, so I aim to just whet your appetite and recommend ‘Slant Light’.

In forty-nine carefully wrought fluent poems, the longest of 30 lines, When the Tree Falls communicates space left by the poet’s father within the family, the home, and the land he farmed. In so doing, Jane Clarke shows how an integrated life, though unremarkable to many, is woven into so many aspects of other people’s lives in the family and outside, into life cycles, the fields, and animals.

The first of the spare, carefully formed sequence of poems is an elegy to the father constructed with repetition touching on the natural world and the life that the father had. The poems follow the journey of the man moving away from the home in which he lived,

‘in the house where he was born//
and swore he would never leave.
...He stood at the top
of the stairs in a fever that came on him
as fast as nightfall in winter,’

[‘He stood at the top of the stairs’]

A sequence of poems is deftly constructed around images of a stick, a rod, a scythe. Even poems linked to hospital use metaphors of the land and farming, for instance, in ‘That I could’, there is, ‘the digging for a vein in his arm,’. Throughout, metaphors of nature are knitted into references to the man described as, ‘horse chestnut petals falling pink in the yard, / the well hidden in a blackthorn thicket.’ (‘That I could’)

The collection contains a sequence linked to the poet’s mother (nine poems from ‘Metastasis’ to ‘Mammogram’). Here we see Jane Clarke’s subtle use of land as metaphor,

‘The way couch grass takes hold of a garden,
spreads seeds, runners, white rhizomes
long before we notice, the way it grows//
more tenacious when we begin to dig.’

[‘Metastasis’]

The poet narrator’s difficult relationship with her mother is expressed in poems such as ‘Camping at Bearna’, a poem in which the mother’s unbending nature, reinforced also in ‘Point of Departure’, is revealed,

‘My father is taking me to the train
because my mother can’t; her heart
is broken over what I told her.’

Despite the apparent difficulties, Jane Clarke reveals a tenderness for her mother, painting her portrait in ‘Hers’ which begins with an expression of intimacy, ‘My mother said she knew, just knew I was going to be a girl,’ and throughout the poem the secret domain of how a woman cares for a home, ‘She taught me her tricks of the trade.’ However, we’re left with the sense that the poet narrator has or will have no use for these tricks.

Jane Clarke’s wonderful metaphors texture the collection, ‘Ballymoe Church is tumbling now, stone by stone,’ (‘Promise’). Here, as in many poems, she conflates the external world, often the land, with the experience of her parents. This happens again in ‘Cypress’ in which a tree

‘...survived
every winter’s wind,
its trunk ridged
as a raised bed ready for seed,
... exposed roots,
worn bare as bones,’

I can’t recommend highly enough this sensitive, thought-provoking, and ultimately life-affirming collection.

There’s no ordained route through bereavement, and Mona Arshi’s latest collection, Dear Big Gods, continues the elegy and memorial for her brother Deepak, started in her 2014 work, Small Hands.

In this second collection there’s a reflection on the five-year anniversary, ‘Five-Year Update’, a poem turned 45 degrees due to its line length, yes, but also mirroring the way Arshi visits and experiences the separation from her brother from every angle in this book. The poem is written with the intimacy of a letter, ‘I hope it’s fine to contact you, to tell you that I still watch the gaps in the carriages’. She refers to him as, ‘O supersonic boy’, and reveals the continual presence of her brother, how she relives not only the loss, ‘Five years ago the American women overheard my call just before Colchester.’, but also incidents from their lives, ‘remember we counted yellow cars in our Fiat 128,’.

In addition to the unusual layout of Five-Year Update, Arshi uses a variety of forms and layouts to emulate grief and loss. I had a sense that the range is akin to a search to express the unspeakable from many perspectives (‘The Humble Insistence’ is right-justified; ‘Tanka: I Loved You Best in Spring’; ‘Something’, in two columns’; ‘Dear Big Gods’ right-justified and indented.)

Throughout the collection Arshi gives a sense of her brother’s presence becoming more pervasive. An omnipresence is hinted at in flashbacks in for instance, ‘The Wasps’, and there’s a sense of porosity between this world in which she’s living and the afterlife. She communicates this powerfully in poems such as, ‘A Pear from the Afterlife’, “Too bad you have to go back,’ I say, / and he sighs like an old man’; and in ‘Everywhere’,

After rain, we lift up sheets of
canvas, nothing stirs,
like our own private church.
We expect no answer –
though he must be there.

Poems stagger between the liminal entering and leaving the world, ‘Ask anyone who’s experienced birth pangs or / reverse birth pangs’ (‘Because you left no note’)

A sense of lamentation is created through the repetition of motifs of fruit, flowers, and creatures: ‘Narcissi’; ‘The Lilies’; ‘The Wasps’; ‘Fish’; ‘A Pear from the Afterlife’; ‘In Mexico the women are marrying trees’; ‘Now I know the Truth about Octopuses’; ‘The Mango’; ‘Let the Parts of the Flower Speak’; and ‘Pomegranate’.

Dear Big Gods explores aftermath: the continued elegy, prayers, memorial; and a deepening of the presence of the lost one. Grief is personal and specific, and Arshi successfully and movingly immerses us in her unique experience of loss. It’s a book for both those who have read, Small Hands and those new to Mona Arshi’s writing.

I’ve read Pauline Rowe’s, The Ghost Hospital, and heard her read from her powerful pamphlet at the Open Eye Gallery and the Athenaeum (as part of Liverpool’s Light Night, 2019), but it was when returning to it yesterday that the full force of the sense of isolation and abandonment [often caused by people who were carers/experts] expressed in the poems hit me and brought home how much of our own context we bring to reading.

It’s comforting to think that heath-care has moved on since the 1800s, and yet, reading The Ghost Hospital in April 2019, I sense links to the present context of the Corvid 19 pandemic. There are increasing numbers of vulnerable people isolated, particularly apparent when we hear news of people being treated but having to die alone.

Pauline’s powerful exposition of life experienced by those in asylums is given historical and contemporary context in a poem that expresses a harrowing experience across the world. A Madhouse Air quotes Charles Dickens in 1842, ‘the terrible crowd... terribly painful, / everything had a madhouse air... this sad refuge of degraded humans’.

The fragmented layout of the title poem opening the collection, with the use of short sentences creates a sense of anxiety and unrest. It’s a poem in which everything comes in fits and starts and movies to the longer penultimate sentence to create a sense of dissolution, of lives dissolving. In this opening poem, the reader is welcomed into the detached world of those in The Ghost Hospital, those who will accompany us throughout the ‘tour’.

Themes of being silenced/locked away are prevalent, we encounter patients unable to communicate with self or others – ‘defies the broken skin to leave me bound/ up.’ (Tell-Tale), ‘I see a crowd of women trapped/who can’t return a look’, (The Ghost Hospital) ‘Walking in circles searching for their names’, (A Madhouse Air)

The poems are punctuated throughout with religious references, (St. Blaise, benediction, stations of the cross, Lenten ashes, and Scripture (‘Have you come to kill us?’) adding an ongoing plea for help; and in poems such as Treatment, Pauline takes us inside the isolated world of a patient who tries to be what she thinks others want her to be [when she responds as a dog, although she is a cat, and the failure of the professionals to reach into this isolation] ‘I see the master has fine whiskers/ yet he cannot see the cat in me.’

Cutting the Stone brings together religion, a sense of surreality in terms of the judgment of mental health and the terror of the patient

‘... a red book and a pouring jug.
A surgeon and a monk attend, assisted by a nun
who wears the book upon her head.

They bind each subject to a chair,
monk and nun pretend to pray
a mime of incantations,
the surgeon drills the skull,
in which a tulip bulb pretends
to be a stone
through which the victim’s heart
is terrified.

Both Pilgrim and Self-portrait are powerful poems that reveal compulsion to assert the self. Despite uncertainty and fear, the poet-narrator goes out of her way, ‘her bones precarious’, to avoid annihilation.

I love especially Self-portrait, which seems such an important poem to write. Powerful self-awareness, an antidote to victimhood,

Never able to choose
I just left both minds
bumping against each //
other like tethered boats.

Yet there is the sense that the identity is not choice, is beyond,

I was cut out
of a picture book
in 1963 //

made to stand
at the top of the class
clean, unlovable.

The Ghost Hospital causes us to face what we may wish to avoid, the echo of voices between its pages is powerful. We would prefer not to countenance some things, but, at present, spring and early summer 2020, we are forced to look.

The poetry collection, After Cézanne, an illustrated meditation on Cézanne’s life is unlike any other I’ve reviewed. The book has a substantial Foreword written by Art Historian Christopher Lloyd, an essay in itself outlining Cézanne’s temperament, passion, and struggles confirmed and asserted through the poetry later, ‘In a rage with everything, exhausted / and defeated by working on the mountain,’ (‘Cézanne in the Studio’)

‘Angle End’, and ‘Round the Block’, each almost voyeuristic and concerned with an overview of a neighbourhood, are accessible poems which hold more than is initially apparent beneath the surface. Both poems made me want to write on a similar theme. The rhythm of ‘Round the Block’ had me almost reaching for my trainers ‘…anti-clockwise: / fourteen minutes on go-slow’, and I was left wondering about characters such as Mrs Bulgar, Mr Lamper, Grandad (from ‘Round the Block’), Dr Bilby, The Pope, and ‘The Heyworth-Harmers’ (from ‘Angle End’).

The poignancy of, ‘Professor Wright who cycled seven miles to work and / back each day, then one day only made it six miles.’ (‘Angle End’) and the ending of ‘Birthday Cards’, ‘I find the silliest, rudest, fattest one to send, / Doing my best to get hold of you.’ after its thought-provoking beginning, ‘ Today you’d be seventy if you hadn’t been / so overweight’, lingered.

The title poem with language such as stragglers, hardcore, eager beavers, party-goers, bang on, hover, dollar-hungry doppelgängers, and the wry comment that ‘Those People’, ‘…have it marked fluorescent for weeks in their diary / and make a mission of what to wear,’ is a wonderful example of Paul Stephenson’s acute observations, and he culminates in drawing the reader into the question, ‘…is there a name for them?’

I recommend ‘Those People’, a book to be savoured by reading with the same acute observation with which it was written.

Paul Stephenson’s book, ‘Those People’, is comprised of twenty-three poems revealing a fascination with language (‘Gare du Midi’, ‘Two Tannoys (A Noise A Noise)’ ), word-play and syntax, (‘Roget’, ‘Glace’, ‘As for candied fruit generally, / she can’t see the point, but then / nor can I, if I can be candid’), an acute ear (‘Wake Up And’, ‘Two Tannoys’), and an eye for the poignant in the humour of the everyday (‘Ashby-de-la-Zouch’ ‘the chiseled women wear smiles like snagged zips’), but also an eye for humour in the poignant (‘Arrangements’)

‘Angle End’, and ‘Round the Block’, each almost voyeuristic and concerned with an overview of a neighbourhood, are accessible poems which hold more than is initially apparent beneath the surface. Both poems made me want to write on a similar theme. The rhythm of ‘Round the Block’ had me almost reaching for my trainers ‘…anti-clockwise: / fourteen minutes on go-slow’, and I was left wondering about characters such as Mrs Bulgar, Mr Lamper, Grandad (from ‘Round the Block’), Dr Bilby, The Pope, and ‘The Heyworth-Harmers’ (from ‘Angle End’).

The poignancy of, ‘Professor Wright who cycled seven miles to work and / back each day, then one day only made it six miles.’ (‘Angle End’) and the ending of ‘Birthday Cards’, ‘I find the silliest, rudest, fattest one to send, / Doing my best to get hold of you.’ after its thought-provoking beginning, ‘ Today you’d be seventy if you hadn’t been / so overweight’, lingered.

The title poem with language such as stragglers, hardcore, eager beavers, party-goers, bang on, hover, dollar-hungry doppelgängers, and the wry comment that ‘Those People’, ‘…have it marked fluorescent for weeks in their diary / and make a mission of what to wear,’ is a wonderful example of Paul Stephenson’s acute observations, and he culminates in drawing the reader into the question, ‘…is there a name for them?’

I recommend ‘Those People’, a book to be savoured by reading with the same acute observation with which it was written.

Katharine Towers' latest publication, The Violin Forest, is a pamphlet of twenty short lyric poems, none longer than 20 lines. Bursting with music, there are references to composers, works and musical techniques, and there is also sonorous language, poems structured by looping reprise. 

I read this beautifully produced HappenStance pamphlet, with its emerald green endpapers, cover to cover several times over a few days. It came to remind me of one of those musical greeting cards: opening the pamphlet, music emerges from the pages. I found myself compelled to stop at each poem, to savour sound, image and what each conjured in its small space. As if arriving at a clearing in a forest, we find an entire, distinct world, shaped by the refraction of shadow and sound. Experiencing The Violin Forest awakened me anew to the life in my own small city garden, increasing awareness of the abundance of life in improvisational song-like qualities, ‘A robin tinkers with a few odd notes in the hawthorn.’ (‘Nonchalant’); ‘See how they bump and chink on the garden path like / small clay pots, busy with their urgent nothings.’ (‘Sparrows’). These are small studies of the essence of setting. Katharine encapsulates the robin-ness of robin, the sparrow-ness of a sparrow, but shows their being transformed within a specific moment ‘over minute differences… over conundrums of love’ (‘Sparrows’).  

Katharine places us over and over in autumn, with both its darkness and wonder, encouraging readers to ‘... take to heart that busy fragrant dark,’ (‘Sparrows’). In dwindling light, we encounter darkness – expecting death, and death is present but not feared, ‘And autumn is the cling of sadness in the night / and autumn-brown the turnings of the mind’ (‘Harmonium’); ‘like the soldiers in La Chanson de Roland, who don’t mind about dying.’ (‘Nonchalant’); ‘and the blackbird’s singing is a fado, and / the thrushes joining voice is like a homesick child’ (‘Harmonium’). These deaths in the full-throated song of nature are not to be feared – they are in process, continuous: singing, dying, turning. But who will forget ‘Mr Dead Fox’, his bright orange corpse, the abrupt interruption of mankind causing ‘his shame of being suddenly dead.’ 

This is the place where autumn kisses winter, a liminal space with its sense of mourning, ‘Imagine a real garden where I sit / with my soul in dead November leaves,’ (‘The Good Words’). Yet it is also a place of eternal return and latent potential; though there is silence, it is the quietness of an orchestra as it rests between movements. The images strike a note that resounds in the mind long after reading, ‘A red leaf trickles slowly through the foliage.’ (‘Nonchalant’).

Having kept diaries throughout my twenties coinciding with the births of my own children, I was especially keen to read Noctuary, and to reflect on the idea of writing at that liminal time before sleep or between bouts of sleep as is so often the case in the early years of being a parent. From this powerful beginning, trepidation about the man who replaces the dead father is established.

Sennitt Clough reveals terror as a consequence of menace, ‘...I bolt like a spooked horse / to the jackhammer of my father’s fists.’ (This Little House), and highlights menace through another image of a creature in ‘Portrait Of My Mother And Stepfather As Moths’. Creatures and nature are revisited to reveal how untamed forces are uncontrollable,

‘Even the river / puts on a sleek display
like a muscled creature / running dark
as a conscience / ...’     (Anguilla Anguilla)

The poems take the reader through the poet-narrators terrifying experiences which she faces, bears and overcomes and are uncompromising in exposing the brutality which is part of the men’s lives. From the first poem when ‘my mother’s new husband crept behind / with a cloth bag… slow, slow, grab.’ (Sightings), violence and abuse recur frequently,

‘..his knife dimpling
her throat, saying I’ll kill you and kill your
bastard of a girl.’  (Unmetered)

This violence crushes dreams and hopes,
Well-trodden lines on her palms lead me
down the grey, ruined streets of her previous lives, (The Mother);

‘and she looks out
of the window, dreams of places
she’s never been.’ (Bus Driver).

It is clear in the poems that for the mother and the daughter, dreams are distant and unfulfilled.

Sennitt Clough lifts the lid on hidden child abuse which children have to cope with (‘Germolene’, ‘And The Moon Up Above’), but must remain silent about, ‘...That I sense the glass / around my throat, the pin’s locking chafe.’ (The Glass Collar).

  Perhaps what is most tragic and most brutal is that the violence exploits the passion and longings in the young women, ‘Something flashed in your eyes, as you lower / yourself on me; attracts me like bait.’ (Bait).

The men are also ruined by their violence, with the lonely and wretched end of the bus driver alluded to in ‘its body is covered in patches of rust.’ (The Bus Driver), or committing suicide ‘And The Moon Up Above’, as well as the descent into alcoholism recurring throughout the poems.

Even the brutal stepfather had humanity in him, once. When he caught a linnet and was about to crush it,

‘but it was the small heartbeat
he felt through the gourd of his palm,
that made him set it free.’

(A Smallholding In The Fens).

Sadly, this spark of humanity is extinguished, and as a result, the mother and daughter live desperate lives at his hands. This uncompromising set of poems can’t help but arouse anger, even hatred, at the dark forces they lift the lid on, as well as the bleak desperation which traps the women in the cycle of abuse. And yet, for all that it is an uncomfortable read, it is important. It takes an accomplished poet to take the reader into this area and for them to leave disturbed, but certainly not depressed. Sennitt Clough does this, and more with her startling collection.

‘I touch his sleeve
and it comes to life,
like it’s full of swallows,

swifts, nightjars
nesting in its folds –’ ('Jacket'),
and,
‘I said everything I could before you stopped me,
sifted skin through hourglass after hourglass –’  

'Time Keeper'

The Skin Diary as a collection provides insight. It's a journal of survival despite loss, and closes with a charm-like poem,

‘…I plant for you / agapanthus, dahlia, harebell,’. Raw reality is contained between the imaginative, magical first and last poems. Throughout thoughts are raised about the power of the imagination, and of spell-like charms to help to elevate us above loss and longing.

Sightings, with its stark opening line of the title poem, informs us that we’re entering a narrative of loss, ‘After my father died...’, but a menacing threat is established too, and these powerful messages, the aftermath of the loss of a father and menace, are to be played out through scenes of contradiction, ‘...its song, a call / to summer from a November morning.’; an ‘...active hope / and hopelessness,’; ‘...Rarest of Gifts was lost,’.

From this powerful beginning, trepidation about the man who replaces the dead father is established.

Sennitt Clough reveals terror as a consequence of menace, ‘...I bolt like a spooked horse / to the jackhammer of my father’s fists.’ (This Little House), and highlights menace through another image of a creature in ‘Portrait Of My Mother And Stepfather As Moths’. Creatures and nature are revisited to reveal how untamed forces are uncontrollable,

‘Even the river / puts on a sleek display
like a muscled creature / running dark
as a conscience / ...’     (Anguilla Anguilla)

The poems take the reader through the poet-narrators terrifying experiences which she faces, bears and overcomes and are uncompromising in exposing the brutality which is part of the men’s lives. From the first poem when ‘my mother’s new husband crept behind / with a cloth bag… slow, slow, grab.’ (Sightings), violence and abuse recur frequently,

‘..his knife dimpling
her throat, saying I’ll kill you and kill your
bastard of a girl.’  (Unmetered)

This violence crushes dreams and hopes,
Well-trodden lines on her palms lead me
down the grey, ruined streets of her previous lives, (The Mother);

‘and she looks out
of the window, dreams of places
she’s never been.’ (Bus Driver).

It is clear in the poems that for the mother and the daughter, dreams are distant and unfulfilled.

Sennitt Clough lifts the lid on hidden child abuse which children have to cope with (‘Germolene’, ‘And The Moon Up Above’), but must remain silent about, ‘...That I sense the glass / around my throat, the pin’s locking chafe.’ (The Glass Collar).

  Perhaps what is most tragic and most brutal is that the violence exploits the passion and longings in the young women, ‘Something flashed in your eyes, as you lower / yourself on me; attracts me like bait.’ (Bait).

The men are also ruined by their violence, with the lonely and wretched end of the bus driver alluded to in ‘its body is covered in patches of rust.’ (The Bus Driver), or committing suicide ‘And The Moon Up Above’, as well as the descent into alcoholism recurring throughout the poems.

Even the brutal stepfather had humanity in him, once. When he caught a linnet and was about to crush it,

‘but it was the small heartbeat
he felt through the gourd of his palm,
that made him set it free.’

(A Smallholding In The Fens).

Sadly, this spark of humanity is extinguished, and as a result, the mother and daughter live desperate lives at his hands. This uncompromising set of poems can’t help but arouse anger, even hatred, at the dark forces they lift the lid on, as well as the bleak desperation which traps the women in the cycle of abuse. And yet, for all that it is an uncomfortable read, it is important. It takes an accomplished poet to take the reader into this area and for them to leave disturbed, but certainly not depressed. Sennitt Clough does this, and more with her startling collection.

‘I touch his sleeve
and it comes to life,
like it’s full of swallows,

swifts, nightjars
nesting in its folds –’ ('Jacket'),
and,
‘I said everything I could before you stopped me,
sifted skin through hourglass after hourglass –’  

'Time Keeper'

The Skin Diary as a collection provides insight. It's a journal of survival despite loss, and closes with a charm-like poem,

‘…I plant for you / agapanthus, dahlia, harebell,’. Raw reality is contained between the imaginative, magical first and last poems. Throughout thoughts are raised about the power of the imagination, and of spell-like charms to help to elevate us above loss and longing.

A QUIET EXCHANGE IN WORD AND IMAGE: REVIEW BY MARIA ISAKOVA BENNETT

The English River, a journey down the Thames in poems and photographs by Virginia Astley, 2018, 94pp, £12.00, Bloodaxe Books Ltd, Eastburn, South Park, Hexham, Northumberland NE46 IBS

Virginia Astley’s first collection is a journey both of the upper reaches of the Thames, and of an intimate relationship. Although many of the poems are personal, themes of loss and of a developing awareness of the self are universal.

This is my remembered landscape,

stored in my earliest self,
and all along, I have been re-winding, re-playing,
continuing this quiet exchange.   

                                    [‘I breathe as though I’ve been submerged 

                                      and am coming up for air’]

Music flows through this carefully formed and honed work in the way Virginia judges pace, tone and rhythm, and with references to aural effects perceived as music. In ‘Lammas Land’, ‘the lark cadenzas.’, in ‘I breathe as though I’ve been submerged and am coming up for air’, ‘…the bells can be heard / falling apart’, and in ‘Source’, the notes of a train are cited.  There are also direct references to music, for instance, ‘Chopin Opus 49’, the mention of which had me listening to the track as I read.

   Prayer, as with music, is both referenced directly, for instance in titles such as, ‘Sanctuary’, and in the content of poems, ‘there is the quiet of snow / and the quiet of church’ (‘I breathe as though I’ve been submerged and am coming up for air’). These motifs of prayer and music recur like echoes in a beautiful melody.

   The half-light of winter or early mornings is a frequent backdrop, ‘unable to sleep— the weir, the wind— / I’m walking the village before dawn,’ (‘Somewhere I’m not a blow-in’); ‘In the darkness you lie awake / hearing the front panes fret,…’, (‘Night Rain’). Virginia is sensitive to the fall and rise of light, and it’s these subdued parts of day and year that feature most in both poems and photographs.

   Intimacy is revealed through both memory and via dream references which Virginia uses skilfully, ‘I’m dreaming about you, / you’ve found me: at Michael’s / somehow trapped.’   (‘Old Songs’)

   Because of the quiet but passionate tone of the work, the more dramatic references in one of the pivotal poems placed at the centre of the collection are all the more arresting, ‘Your sister has married my ex, / the one I left for you;’, and, ‘But the last time I was in this house— / I can hardy speak— the last time, / was the day we buried you.’  (‘How did I ever think this would be OK?’), but even this poem is given space and quiet with use of em dashes and its gentle conversational tone. 

   These are quiet controlled poems inspiring a desire to visit the riverscape cited. Simplicity and an air of melancholy are complemented by photographs which enhance these qualities, photographs in which there’s no glare of sunlight, no dazzle. I highly recommendThe English River. It is best read and reread cover to cover, but each poem also stands alone, powerful in its own right, speaking directly of love and loss without succumbing to ornate or melodramatic language. I found myself breathing slowly as I read.