Alison Brackenbury's poems are haunted by horses, unseasonable love, history, hares and unreasonable hope. Brackenbury's Selected Poems begins in the almost Victorian villages of remote Lincolnshire, where her father tramped, as a ploughboy, behind great Shires and Percherons.
Her acclaimed early poem, 'Dreams of Power', gives voice to a little-known woman from the past, Arbella Stuart, and her still-contemporary choices: safe solitude, fashionable London, dangerous love. Her song-like poems draw on years of experience of bookkeeping and manual work in industry, of VAT, of trichloroethylene on 'a thrumming lorry'.
The poems take readers to northern China winters and the damp heat of Hanoi. And always the countryside returns: its mud, its huge hares, its stubborn sun. After nine books, major prizes and national broadcasts, the rush of Brackenbury's poems are a work in wonderful progress, full of surprises and renewals.
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[Wasn't walking beside her / walking with the ocean below / when you didn't know her and wanted to? - OCEAN]***
(@Carcanet, 28 March 2019, 64 pages, ebook, borrowed from @natpoetrylib via @OverDriveLibs)
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I'd never even heard of the poet before I borrowed this. I just borrow poetry books that pull my attention in some way. With this book it was the blue background on the cover, the title of the collection and the weird cover image. I'm glad I took a chance on this book. The poems in this collection are different than the poems I tend to read. Different can be good and it certainly was on this occasion. What I liked about these poems is the vivid descriptions which can be attributed to commonplace but also have a slight bizarre angle as well. One example is a crab which sits like the lid of a pie or a Starfish which creeps like expired meat. I liked the strangeness about the poems, the way ordinary things shift and change.
