Review by Jenny Robb of "The Weight of Snow" by Pauline Rowe

Pauline Rowe’s new pamphlet, The Weight of Snow, is layered with generations of grief. The accidental death of a ten-year-old girl years ago affects the narrator’s life, and those of her family. The poems cleverly interweave the narrator’s past life, loves and losses against the backdrop of this tragedy, outlined starkly in 'A Letter to Nanna Bereaved':

          He saw her swept away 

          by the trailings of a lorry.  
   
          The old man writes:
          Even now I see her pennies
          spinning in the road.

Yet in this elegiac pamphlet there is also hope and redemption. In contrast to the 'silver anniversary of grief' for a son never born, we are given 'Delivery Room'; joy in the face of the pain and danger of imminent birth, where the bereaved 'Nanna' appears:

          'Pray hard that I may find eternal peace
          and yet reach heaven, reach my lovely girl.
          Pray hard that God may grant me my release.'
         

         Then as the final pain came, she was gone

         and headlong crashing into sound and light
         my glorious boy arrived, my peaceful son.

There is also a parade of sharply drawn characters that bring working-class Widnes to life, as  in 'Barnes Road, 1967': Wendy, who 'kept PG Tips cards / and badges from Robinson jam,' and Billy the lodger who 'blocked the hall / with his deafness and Triumph bike.' But the permafrost of these poems is never far away. Even in the poem celebrating a fifty-year old friend’s marriage in Spain, there is unfulfilled yearning to follow those 'whose souls must sing in the sun.'

Pauline Rowe has created a beautiful and memorable tribute to the collective grief of a family marked by tragedy, a grief that many will recognise in different forms.

About the reviewer

Jenny Robb, from Liverpool, started writing poetry after retiring from a career in Mental Health services. She has been published in both online and print magazines and in poetry anthologies. She has recent publications in Dream Catcher, Prole, Orbis, Ink, Sweat and Tears and The Dawntreader. Her debut pamphlet will be published by Yaffle Press in 2021.