Book Reviews
A Review of Patrycja Humienik’s We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025)
Patrycja Humienik’s debut collection We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025) is a work of mesmerising detail and passion for the ever changing terrain of belonging. In the constant remaking of identity, we trace histories of immigration, love and displacement, encountering the climatic sensibilities of natural landscapes which are innately one with our interior. Humienik deploys letters and other unique forms including her original “Cradle” form illustrated by the poem ‘Magnolia’ to converse with lovers and immigrant daughters bound intergenerationally with a longing for the untameable "heartland". Whilst leveraging emotional distance, these poems remain attentive to proximities both organic and surreal. The poet navigates alternate paths to self-love that challenge conventional citizenship: kinship with horses, affinities with “names of plants that please” and a flowing dialogue with water and Earth’s circadian rhythms. Dreaming towards potential, the poet’s gaze is framed by the rush of landscapes through train windows and a “mode of conveyance” devoted to crossing boundaries of form and knowing. In witnessing, we are subject to a different timescale, communing where passing scenes are both protracted and stolen at once: Let landscapes skip rocks across our faces pressed up against the glass. Tell me a story. Tell me everything. Your laugh widens the gaze. If the trees watch us in one flicker they see where breath is held [23-24]. It is cinematics like this that sweep the reader’s conscience leaving us altered, awakened on the other side of revolution itself. The startling motifs of trains and constant motion reminiscent of Nabokov, converge with the surreal timelapse of Tarkovsky, placing us in a breathtaking liminality. “Migration is the story of longing is the story. To risk rupture for rapture.” Humienik’s vibrant voice is one of embodied truth, evoking the transformative nature of memory and the multitudes we contain. In travelling these landscapes, we are rewarded cathartically — with a profound love for the “other” we will become.
Through its startling motifs, Between My Spine & the River considers a young mother’s fears and desires alongside a sublime ecological landscape under threat and indifference of mankind. Hammon Los writes presciently from a complex world of nature and myth that both nurtures and consumes the speaker’s body, vividly shaping concerns of pregnancy, miscarriage and rupture.
These elegiac poems rage and recede with Earth’s circadian rhythms to reimagine the often unseen trials of a mother’s body and psyche. From deeply embodied origins, the poet conjures the profound thin spaces between womb and shadowland, fairytale and fever dream.
Both exile and long-awaited homecoming, this collection captures one woman’s pained childbearing and isolation with beauty and brutal honesty. We witness that which surrounds her haunting “Watershed Lullaby”, is a powerful torrent of maternal instinct. A singular voice of survival, reclamation and ultimately faith — to surmount the chaos that birthed Gaia herself. “You will know when it’s ready. Let the seed detach with the wind. Let the seed become its own flower.”
Between My Spine & the River is published by Ridge Books and is available on Amazon.
By Vikki C.
The blend of flowing narrative and shorter, distilled vignettes embody the poet's nuanced and evolving landscape, where what is longed for is gleaned — in cameos of intimacy, geological rifts and the natural microcosms perishing before us. These poems are at once grounding and enlightening – the poet's "beloved" envisioned as both female lover and facets of the elusive landscape that surround. Visions of beauty one hopes to prolong — to preserve in the face of climate change, crisis and life's vulnerabilities:
"But here, you said, at the time of our intrusion, / you said this zone here is not one of the earth's sentences / but an overdub of stutters..."
(…)
"you said here, and you watched me / as the taste, part you part earth, brought a change to my face."
Gander’s lines signpost paths of affirmation whilst also pointing to precarious and challenging terrain. Spaces of inquiry into paradox, aging and our labour towards revelation. He brings a constant assessment of self which allows for no easy resolution. That ultimately we move towards death with a quiet reverence. That the arresting beauty we witness in the shifting light on canyons, in the delicate shadows of a Joshua tree, in pale, patterned fossils...is the same beauty that breaks us down with a certain faith.
“The fissures / run through everything, even through / my remaining years — which I can count, probably, / on my fingers.”
(…)
“What / is left of experience that hasn’t / been measured?
(…)
“As I continue my descent / along the canyon’s seam. As I sip / and hold a quick breath. As I slip from sight / into a chimney of rock.”
Mojave Ghost is full of honest observations on the fragile roots of relationships: between a man and woman, between Man and Earth, life and death. It extends a genuine spiritual hand to cross the unknowable. An invitation to feel for that humbling foothold over what has been irredeemably ruptured. Through this consummate poet, we grow attuned to another way of loving, buried beneath the visible…closer to the edge of both death and imagination — yet so ineffably free.
Mojave Ghost is published by New Directions Publishing and is available on Amazon.
I’ve long admired Laurie Sheck for her ability to elevate the everyday narrative of struggle and human inquiry into luminous, intellectual reveries. Her poetics are not only beautiful, but rooted deeply in the sublime scoring of precise images braided elegantly into a fluent, philosophical vernacular. One whose orchestral effect transcends the bounds of knowledge, ever searching new ways of contemplating our tenor on Earth.
The long-lined sequences in Black Series leverage a sensuous blend of human and non-human voicings, both cinematic and resonant. Sheck distils time, giving alchemy and tension to the quiet of every encounter. I was mesmerised by the animated framing of non-human objects such as mannequins in “The Store Windows Glitter”:
“Look how the store windows glitter. Irradiated / mirrors, strenuous slashings over the false alarms / of the mannequins’ smooth faces.
[..]
Then there’s quiet again. Then flashing sirens — / the mannequins putting on colour as red lights twist past their windows / giving them red wings, red wings growing out of each shoulder, rippling /
and lifting / over the envious/ silver, prisoned glass” [3-4].
Her ascribing of textures to air and blurring of thresholds too makes each scene an alternate world viewed through a defamiliarized lens:
“Then a dusk like this, a subversion of surfaces, / a vague expectancy of absence. Blurrings. Wings. I watch the edges break and flee; they are Ophelias.
Soft town that settles on this land, town of inconclusiveness / encryption, I touch your gateless air, your scaffoldless / upholding.” [5]
These poems interrogate and project the subconscious onto geometries both real and imagined where myth and modernity collide to reclaim the parts of our lives eroded by rote. This is a journey of lyric and spirit pushing delicately against the borders we have grown too accustomed to. In this, Sheck invokes a metaphysical glance we cannot turn away from. These poems invite a stunning spectrum of meaning, and with each reading, a radiance and music both startling and sacred.
Black Series is published by Alfree A. Knopf and is available on Amazon.
***
Exploring the interface of human experience and non-human other, Sean Borodale’s Inmates is deeply attentive to details which place us as witness to a surreal insect-human vernacular. Through a sequence referencing insect and bug variants, we are elevated in not only sensing, but processing the world with both heightened pleasure and instinct. This sensitivity draws us into deep compassion for these small creatures often constrained by their habitats like the book's many insects which occupy spaces within the poet's own home.
For one, their easily overlooked life-death cycles are foregrounded in fresh, unexpected ways that magnify the challenges and dwindling populations faced by these non-human captives. Likewise, Borodale’s metaphors extend seamlessly to the trappings of our human lives where the poet's treatment is equally light-handed and adept.
Many of the book's poems deal with the subject's death and transience, alluding organically to our urgent ecological crisis. This dioramic approach seamlessly marries human experience with both non-human and wider ecological terrain, as depicted in 'Voice Residue of a Mayfly at the Site of its Empty Exoskeleton'. The poem builds an interior landscape (post death) from an external landscape which has nourished the "speaker" throughout its life. The subject traverses seasonal memories to intuit its origins whilst demonstrating that even what remains physically – a remnant “skin” – has a voice which too persists with a yearning to belong.
Inmates was published by Jonathan Cape in 2020 and title aside, is a work which is clearly aware and empathetic of a broader world in pandemic lockdown.
An utterly mesmerising collection crafted from beautiful language and perceptions that point inwards to the spirit and the sublime music of the non-human other. And as reader, we are better for this overlapping microcosm where we learn to envision ourselves in the resilience of small wonders.
A beautiful poetic lament interweaving landscapes of myth, oblivion, ecology and the soul, Averno journeys deep into an elegiac realm between ruin and spirit. Glück's stream-of-consciousness style brings a sense of protracted time and discovery. A state which examines the elusive rift in the human condition.
"Winter emptied the trees, filled them again with snow.
Because I couldn't feel, snow fell, the lake froze over.
Because I was afraid, I didn't move;
my breath was white, a description of silence."
(...)
"The world / was bleached like a negative; the light passed / directly through it. Then / the image faded."
The vernacular here is one of post-memory, where overland seasons meet underworld evocations of the Greek myth of Persephone and her marriage to Hades. A breathtaking vision into the rapture of both ancient footprint and starkness of ages to come. Glück invokes boundlessness, a poetry of revelation—and we will go on querying beyond the last line "To what would you lose a year of your life?"
Averno is published by Farrar, Straux & Giroux and is available on Amazon.
Eye Level is published by Graywolf Press and is available on Amazon.
I first encountered Leah Naomi Green’s The More Extravagant Feast during the pandemic years, a time of disorder, vulnerability and moral questioning regarding global systems and our place on Earth.
Selected by Li-Young Lee as winner of The Walt Whitman Award, the collection felt then like a book of prayer. One written to those in isolation, for its deep empathy and appreciation of the trophic exchanges and interconnectivity of the human body with the natural world.
I find myself continually returning to these lyrical poems crafted with great attention to the expansiveness of language as bearer of life, death and epiphany. Leah Naomi Green takes us to the wellspring of human rituals, where themes of motherhood, childbearing and marriage segue into a wider study of the more-than-human interior.
The poet draws on experiences of self-sufficiency and fertility to harvest an awareness of the ecological blueprint and our interdependency with the bodies that surround. One that reconciles the visual palette of everyday wanderings with an enriching spiritual realm.
I admired her skilful blurring of lines where the reader becomes the (inquisitive) child, who in turn, enacts a voice of multitudes:
“Every moment of this is true
though nobody knows the next word.
And my daughter, nearly
a person, almost a story,
is full of comprehension.”
All the while, our conscience is the subject turning inside the poet’s meticulous eye. It is here we feel the pulse of existence at work. There is pain in every blessing and these poems carry this complex binding with intuition and a long lasting reverence.
The More Extravagant Feast is published by GrayWolf Press and is available on Amazon.
The beautiful hybrid collection Audacity of Form by Robert Frede Kenter is an affecting poetic narrative combined with visual art and expanded photography, weaving intersections of friendship, family histories, illness and caregiving with vibrant cameos of NOLA, music, art, and the intimate culture of the heartland.
The mixed poetic forms and arresting visuals emulate the juxtaposition of joy and melancholia voiced through people and places pivotal to the poet’s life. Here, the weight of loss and absence is held close within an animated language, a kaleidoscope of inquiry that continues to shape both the author and reader’s landscape far beyond the physical page.
This is a book about the fragility of the human experience, a fearless and dialectic embrace of its complex relationships whilst navigating a world in chaos. A homage to a life celebrated amid the disparities of society and self rupture, and in the poet’s words: “...a dance a questioning of God / a marathon of endurance.”
There is music to be heard in difficult times and undoubtedly, Kenter is master of the lyric — scoring beauty from dissonance with a vision that transcends spirit and zeitgeist.
Audacity of Form is available from Ice Floe Press. For further details visit: https://icefloepress.net/0rder-audacity-of-form/
***
By Vikki C.
Transcending memory, spirit and time, we enter a lucid, dream-like catharsis of history and a natural world awaiting its explorer’s own introspection and pilgrimage. We sense life’s unknowability shift hourly with the horizon, where our own imprints mark "a humming oasis / with eyes of invisible perception".
Wherever we have traveled from, we are found anew, edified by the poet’s enduring vignettes, listening to the prowess of how "Light breaks upon the bonds of salted land". Where doorways to chapels and saloons open in shades of isolation – yet invite us to "sip on the end of summer / like vagabonds with borrowed wine".
Ebner yields each precise line like a “wind-compass” navigating an alluring terrain whose mystery and climatic vagaries mirror our own.
And wherever we must travel from here, we’ll never quite abandon the land’s philosophical undulations whose dust colours our very emotions with a startling transience. We shall certainly overstay – as humans, as eagles…as “half-leopards prowling the sea”. Stay, entangled in its mirages and reliced silhouettes.
Here, we are disciples to the poet's luminous vision, where “We remember rain and handsome youth / and the past sweetens the present.”
Prescient and intimate in its address, Mountains that See in the Dark interrogates the liminal spaces weathered and resculpted by the magic of both the elements and the sheer mastery of a poet’s mind.
Mountains that See in the Dark is available on Amazon in e-book and in print. Further details can be found on Black Bough Poetry’s website:
https://www.blackboughpoetry.com/regine-ebner-s-collection
***
An intimate and powerful exploration into the grief-stricken spaces arising from the trauma of miscarriage and stillbirth, Fruitful pulls the audience into an arresting and surreal sequence. Lines rife with images that address a mother’s body in the context of fertility and the trials of pregnancy and associated loss whilst raising a family.
These poems also cast an essential light on the pivotal yet often undervalued role of motherhood and women’s bodies within the scope of modern society. From early in the collection, “The Uterus Belongs To The Family” speculates the womb’s capacity in what it can bear and is expected to bear:
In a uterus: a set of keys. Ask me what I’ve
got to unlock. Ask me what else is inside:
this spooling chain–link fence, a buried
spade. A knife for paring fruit or carving
anything hollow. A chest with enough
drawers to store winter layers. A tidal flood.
[3]
Images which allude to myriad roles from labour to nurturing, safeguarding and providing ample nourishment – even conferring a “miracle/Act of God” (tidal flood) upon her offspring. At the same time, this “tidal flood” perhaps harbours a potentially destructive force beyond her control, one which she must contend with in parallel to the challenges of motherhood. We are immediately confronted with a picture of the inherent risk women endure during pregnancy.
It is Kirby's innate ability to map the function of the womb to the larger maternal identity and purpose, that hones a sense of empathy with our own losses – furnishing the reader with immediate visions of everyday scenes that expand into the greater fabric of existence. Each line precisely taut in its construction, draws on a sort of metaphysical cinema where life and death play out in close proximity. Within these deft spiritual layers, Kirby projects the microcosm of a mother’s pain alongside acute images of broader ecological concerns.
The poem “Abruption” specifically considers the physical trauma of the speaker’s miscarriage within an extended metaphor on climate emergency:
Sometimes I want a clean break rather than
tearing membrane, webbed with vein
and vessel set to burst. Would rather
hemorrhage like ice into wave, no pushing
required. Except
icebergs detach like afterbirth, the glacier
a plate, the flat surface from which placenta
derives. Does similarity end there? I’d argue
melt mimics decay in gradual temperature
shifts that promote shapelessness. The slide
between legs or tides: a symptom of
destruction. [7]
As we read, the poems unravel a marked emptiness left behind by the event. A void which renders the womb a site of grief that consumes and disorientates, alternating between dreamlike prayer and lament and more disturbing visions of death. The poet however approaches this difficult subject with skill and beauty deploying intertextuality to portray the conflicting nature of grief:
In “This Womb, Hollow”, we gain a slow moving sense of what is removed, what decays and is taken almost organically by time:
like teeth birds line the bridge, divide
into wings to become hours falling in
on themselves grain by grain. A gradual
burial in time, where sand curves
into a belly. Into an abdomen of sky. [18]
These ethereal, almost heavenly allusions, are a stark contrast to the dislocating urgent images in the preceding poem “If My Womb Shot Bullets” where the speaker asserts: “ I know nothing about loading guns, but my womb/ seems comfortable chambering rounds.”
The symbolic image of birds in the previous poem now meets a more brutal fate: “Speckled in camouflage, she takes pot-shots at headstones. A few birds scatter, their descent almost wingless. She reloads, hoists the rifle to the crook of her neck, aims for sky. I wonder what she’ll shatter, which bodies will fall.”
There’s a keen sense of loss of control and anger where the womb is in a sort of retaliation and later, detachment from the body and persona. Something which manifests as a “womb in ebb: no longer residential, a windowless/shell. The best ruins remain/unforgiving, their brick carved/ into a lidless eye.” (“Study With Mouth & Walls”)
The chapbook’s titular poem “Fruitful” further extends the metaphorical radius of loss by considering the “faltering” body as a polluted city in which the womb is the centre of production:
The body at the center of the city, red lights
ripe as seeds after the flesh falls away. At
the center of the city: the womb, a factory in
this city of smoke.
[...]
The lake is oil loosed by this body, the waste
of production like ash or light or profit or
rind. At the center of the city: all this fruit
that pollutes.
These poems awaken the reader to a collective responsibility, to acknowledge personal wounds but also the impact of our lives on the milieu of the wider social landscape, namely how we protect and conserve it as if an extension of our bodies. A motif which emerges in the closing sequence where the speaker slowly brings her daughters into the picture: “To explain fruitfulness to my daughter/ I take out/my womb, set it between us like an apple or rock” (“Illumination”). “All of the daughters I didn’t have/ join you, the daughters I did” (“Ants”).
Lastly, the handing down of this legacy of awareness to the next generation in “I Ask My Daughter To Consider Her Body” where “the belief that to fill is better/ than to concede emptiness. To pack insides with glass and filament, shells and bones: what you should break to yield another body.”
We however take home more than a mere aphorism. We cradle with collective consciousness the vision the poet has set out to pave — to carry loss and build a fortress to protect ourselves from further rupture. To reconcile historical wounds with healing and a certain call to action. One that preserves and cherishes the precious gifts bestowed on our bodies and the earth. Ultimately, how to hold the shape of gifts eroded too soon.
Reconceptualizing the landscape of rupture and grief, Fruitful leads us to the wellspring of pain with boldness, care, affirmation and seeds of startling beauty to plant anew.
Stefanie Kirby's Fruitful was selected as the winning chapbook in the 2023 Adrift Chapbook Contest held by Driftwood Press and was later published in June 2024. For more details on the book, click here.
***
A Review of Rachel Deering's In the Shadow of Gods (Black Bough Poetry, 2024)
By Vikki C.
 |
Through its rich interweaving of imagery, reminiscence and fragments of deep time, Deering’s sophisticated and sensorial poetics examine the human condition via the natural world and its ineffable stories of survival, death and rebirth. Stories which transcend not only the four seasons, but also the “subliminal seasons” of our interstitial lives.
Like a tome open to the wilderness, we traverse a shifting narrative of five distinct tableaux which blend seamlessly to speak through the god-like presence of trees, birds, fish and other creatures of Deering’s enchanting and philosophically nuanced landscape.
Senses attuned, we immerse in natural microcosms often overlooked in our daily movements such as detailed observations of decay and growth which extend to our humanscapes — our losses, our fears as well as the magic of healing and reclamation. From the outset of the journey, the poem “Oak” illustrates these “eco-human” parallels:
For the oak, there is no remedy
for humanity; every tree speaks its history
from creation myth to the fall
of an arboreal empire
(...)
between wind and leaf
before the amber losses
of November and the long promise
entrusted to each acorn [30].
As these fragile activities hum within the reader’s subconscious, the poet also draws on folklore and allegory to reimagine the concepts of human identity and relationships. “The Tale of the Six Swans'' after the Brothers Grimm tale The Six Swans, explores such dynamics:
I didn’t speak or laugh
for six years, each an exchange
of muteness for a swan,
the words stolen from my mouth [40].
The poem, like many in this collection, keeps the reader emotionally centred around its concerns. In this case, the female speaker relays feelings of oppression derived from a marriage or domestic relationship and perhaps, even society at large.
A motif which replicates nature’s cycles of decline and regrowth, particularly those hidden in a forest’s understory.
Through these subtle juxtapositions of darkness and light, Deering paints life’s vagaries and uncertainties with earnesty and memorable aesthetics:
No kingfisher ever promised
a single halcyon day,
nor nested on fish bones to still
an ocean. Instead, she threads light
into the darkness of a riverbank,
buries her ivory-shelled tomorrows,
where feverish hopes may take flight
from the compaction of wintered griefs
As the poet leads us through the rich foliage of observation, there is a marked sense of spiritual edification, of reacquaintance with beings and places that shape our personal histories.
Between the teeming lyricism of these seasons, Deering’s visionary verses also allow us intrinsic spaces to pause and reflect. As if reaching a forest clearing where a lone tree stands, certain pages are left minimalistic, containing only a single line – in one case, a meditative line split over two pages which acts almost like a regrouping of soul and body: “whilst light and dark dream in seasons...One bruised soul may heal another’s” [73-74].
In this example, the poet gathers us into a place of duality, suggesting that despite the isolation humans endure, we are never truly alone but connected in spirit – a continued metamorphosis and evolution of the metaphysical towards visions of hope. A hope which Deering goes on to depict as being both beautiful and brutal in construct as demonstrated in “Bluebells”:
Bluebells are so fleeting –
a river cut through shade
that runs dry
before the end of May.
(...)
I hope, I hope, I hope.
Hope has tested
the nerve endings of my solitude
to the ache of doubt [82].
There is however a remarkable sense of salvation as we journey through the last few poems: the seasons which inevitably must come to an end, seem to dovetail into an otherness.
Moreover, the mysteries deepen long after the book’s ending, in a short series of supplementary poems: Words found in a hidden nook... Here, the final poem “Fenrir'' is a piece inspired by the Norse god of the same name. A god who was associated with prophecies of end days and the world’s ultimate destruction during a series of natural disasters known as Ragnarök. These events were also rooted in the idea that once destroyed, the world would be reborn at peace. The last lines of “Fenrir” in this collection aptly inquire: “when every bond may be broken/what will become of us then?”
A notion which perhaps, only an astute existential poet may contemplate. A poet who applies the intricacies of legend and storytelling to our present human condition and ecologies with intuition, linguistic pyrotechnics and a deep knowledge and hunger for the universal beauty that connects us beyond our temporal realm.
As a result, In the Shadow of Gods is an astounding, imagistic and philosophical collection by a poet working at the highest level of artistic regard and sensitivity. An essential collection for individuals seeking revelation through unique and unparalleled perspectives. One that offers a timeless and unequivocally resonant presentation of the great human paradox.
For more details about In the Shadow of Gods, visit Black Bough Poetry’s website:
https://www.blackboughpoetry.com/rachel-deering
An arresting exploration into the complexities of mental illness, On The Edge of The Asylum unveils a powerful spectrum of human experience poised at the mercy of a metaphysical Armageddon.
Hay artfully channels the masculine voice with a postmodern flair that is both confessional and deeply philosophical. One that challenges and reinvents the nihilist vision – juxtaposing fragility, despair and terror with a clandestine world of pleasure and fantasy.
From haunting childhood cameos to dream-like prophetic monologues, readers are submerged in a deconstructed terrain – a dwindling natural world internalised by complicated familial dynamics. Hay acquaints us with the dark romanticism we both fear and covet – a life of impossible love and excess, summoned through echoes of literary forebearers: Keats, Whitman, Thomas et al.
These converge into a “Kerouac-style” stream-of-consciousness, appealing to the disconnect between body and psyche. A chorale of voices that project: “images/ too unspeakable/ to accompany/ word pictures/ would make prophets blush/ spitting out their recycled tomes…”
On The Edge of The Asylum is both ambitious and avant-garde, awakening readers to our collective wounds in an original and dignified light. Deft, forensic and revolutionary, the contrapuntal verses capture a charged beauty laced with rue and urgency: serrated fragments that align with our own fractured pursuits for agency in the greater scheme of the human paradox. A poetic masterpiece that reconciles rupture and rebellion with a profound rewilding of its own making.
On The Edge of The Asylum is available from Ballerini Book Press
***
Sarah Connor's collection The Poet Spells Her Name (Black Bough Poetry) flows from the outset with a lyrical language that pulls us deep into a swirling confluence of human vulnerability, nature and myth.
Throughout its arc of quietly arresting poems, one is struck by an elegiac beauty. A consciousness that contends open heartedly with identity, love and loss, infused with glimpses of hope and reclamation. One is led across a sublime landscape that maps the vagaries of the ecological world with the complexities of the human spirit – "As if the future is a story we can tell ourselves." Sarah paints a vivid tribute to both the fragility and resilience of life through artful portrayals such as "Three eggs….each so blue, they must be made of sky or some glorious truth –"..."swirling into galaxies and constellations, hurtling and spinning out and out…"
Whilst startling and sensorial, the poems also breathe with a remarkable duality: one of genuine introspection delicately poised against the supernatural. Such conversation elevates us to a higher awareness and empathy for everyday cameos. From the inquisitive voice in "What do the children dream of?" to the evocation of fresh yet cautious beginnings in 'White: Snowdrops' which "cling to the edge of the field the way snow clings to a window frame." we are presented with haunting images of things often overlooked through the passage of time.
Beyond its sharp and breathtaking vignettes of the natural world, also lies a commitment to larger existential issues. The poem 'You try to photograph the moon' and its subsequent lines which close with a repetition of the poem's title, is a subtle allusion to our futile attempts to capture the elusive dream. A contextualisation of our smallness in the grand design of the cosmos. On a social level, the collective, somewhat selfish desires of society are distilled through sonorous scenes of gannets who "are greedy wild plunging and plunging – every one a blade – and nothing gentle, just mad hunger - death streamlined…"
These lines, like many in the book, are often dark in substance - justifiably portraying a desperation for survival - but are also profoundly carved with an allure that pulls us closer to examine our own persona and anima amid the "chaos of white and whirling wings".
Through the journey, there is a binding that roots us organically in a universal sphere. One that addresses an entangled nostalgia such as an ordinary rowdy pub night in the west of Ireland that culminates in strangers spilling outside observing and almost bewitched by the lunar eclipse. At the other end of the spectrum, with stark realism, Sarah also takes us away from the party with poems of jarring isolation, personal illness and rupture. No matter where we walk with her, one never leaves the poet's vision to empower with enchantment and mystery.
The collection's closing is no different. The haibun 'The Owl' reinforces the sense of duality with masterful precision. Lines like "She is part of this chill night – the soundtrack to winter." and "We don't see her often, though we hear her." evoke a godlike otherness – one that leaves a faint yet palpable trail of footprints in our mind. It speaks of an ending that avoids absolute closure, but rather echoes what its earlier fragments set out to reveal — a realm left triumphantly open to the glory of the wild and the faculties of the "otherworld".
The Poet Spells Her Name is a book to accompany the soul through uncertainty and flourish – a mosaic of choral voices, faith and luminous wonder that honours the fleeting light we are made of.
For further details on The Poet Spells Her Name and purchase links, click here.
By Vikki C.
