This is a tender and moving collection celebrating and memorialising two lives, the poet’s mother and her own husband, but succeeding, as all good poetry does, in finding universal truths about our common humanity and shared experience of loss.
Deftly constructing a history for her mother who died at forty-seven, and recording the emptiness after her husband’s death, these are quiet but truthful poems that bind us into the ordinary, but somehow extraordinary, emotional textures of human lives, and show us how we survive in the aftermath of tragedy.
This is from ‘Moving On’:
I mopped the kitchen floor
then went upstairs, stood awhile,
as empty as the house itself.
Julie Gardener is a fine poet, content to let her readers ‘join up the dots’ if you like, but also happy to acknowledge the influence of other poets like Grace Nichols and Jacob Polley. She is playful in terms of form in ‘Rondo,’ riffing on nursery rhyme (a motif which appears in several of these poems), but ultimately what we have in this fine collection is a poet using simple and gracefully chosen words to explore the territory of memory and grief. The almost Wordsworthian reliance on everyday language gives these poems an emotional reach and power that is refreshing and unusual.
This is from ‘For Arthur’:
and I am neither, though I will
forever wish you here.
The photograph on the front cover of the poet’s mother is blurred; the poems inside reclaim the misty lives of those who have gone before, mother and husband, and prove again and again that art can construct great memorials. The gift of this brilliant collection is that it allows us to connect to our own loss and mourning, our own ‘remembering’ if you like.
James Nash is a poet based in Leeds. He often writes in the sonnet form and his next collection, Notes of Your Music, will be published by Valley Press.
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