A mesmeric new collection from Linda Saunders whose previous books have been warmly praised:
'...beautifully achieved, evocative and tender with such a strong feel for the brilliance of each minute inside passing time.' - Helen Dunmore
'Saunders shows the world cherished by our watchfulness, life lived in rapt attention.' - Carrie Etter
For our souls' health, we need to go on gazing,
stopped in our tracks and sorrows, to mark
the arrivals of birds that cross the world above
our news and wars, our migrations of loss.
Long-haul passerines with their songs of summer.
The swifts twenty-four/seven on the wing.
In her latest collection of poems, Linda Saunders draws the reader into a world of quiet intensity, exploring the wildlife, countryside and community of a much loved and long explored corner of the north of England so that we feel we are intimate with it, our consciousness expanded and refreshed by it. In a Dales village where the church clock has stopped, 'the exchange of then and now' is marked by migrations of birds and the ever-varying moods of the becks between spate and drought. Here is a timeless place of the mind, made real and particular by watching and listening. Thus grounded, the poems venture into speculative territory:
...Who'd swear anyway that time exists,
but only the exchange of then and now
between noon and midnight, this late sun
throwing shadows of trees not yet in leaf
across the field, so that celandines
purse their stars in the shivering grass,
though the clock face catches brilliance
still above the rising tide of dusk.
The poems broaden out from the 'tall golden minute', now to the mysteries of time and space as illuminated by modern physics, now to a feeling of existential wonder, and above all to the human world of relationships with strangers, friends and family, profound experiences of love and grief, closeness and distance.
In a second section the collection explores a slightly more urban world, but, tuned in by the first section to harmony with the natural world, we find no shortage of wonders here, along with the larger cast of human residents and visitors encountered by chance or design. A third section looks back to childhood, celebrates and mourns parents, rejoices in grownup sons and grandchildren, and shares the grief of untimely bereavement. Time and mortality are accorded the same keen attention as a rare butterfly or a child's first word, with moving accounts of the gifts and losses of a long life. This collection runs the gamut of human emotions, and does so in the context of the affirmation and celebration of life implicit in the intensity of focus and the precision and beauty of lyrical language that are this poet's hallmarks. This is the reflective, implicitly metaphysical journey of an award-winning poet whose previous collections have been received with warmth and admiration.
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