In Brenda Shaughnessy's Our Andromeda, playful musicality and deadpan humour meld with blunt questions and a plea for an alternate galaxy in which merciful do-overs are possible. In this imagined world, the speaker has a band of sisters, "enough to fight with and still / have plenty to confess to"; access to past and future selves; and, finally, a chance to protect her newborn baby from irrevocable harm. Throughout these poems, Shaughnessy blasts apart our typical expectations while she maintains the familiar and consoles sufferers in the real world of hostile truths. As when she imagines a world where she is "magical and can cook lamb and rice/pudding and pour many drinks" without taking her hands off the ones she loves, she proves herself a fierce, oracular guardian of family: "Be strange to yourself, / in your love, your grief."
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(@CopperCanyonPrs, 11 December 2012, ebook, 96 pages, borrowed from @natpoetrylib via @OverDriveInc)
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This is a new poet for me. I really enjoyed Our Andromeda. I really enjoyed the blend of light and dark tinged with darkness and humour. The poems are inventive in theme, subject and style and I enjoyed the time I spent lost between the pages. The poems are full of love, sorrow, anger and happiness. My favourites included All Possible Pain, Miracles, Card 0 The Fool, Magi and The New People.
