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Smart board covers housing slim
Times Roman quarto poetry in pocketbook size. Very much the templar way and
they are forgiven for joining the mad scrum to run poetry competitions simply
because they turn out the winners as top class chapbooks.
Pat Winslow is no exception. She writes clear, direct poetry in that free
verse, American influenced way and has enough semantic sophistry to add spice
to the more fundamental quality requirements of simple (but original) idea
and clarity of tone.
There's a different kind of minute
Where time goes
backwards,
Where diamonds re-enter rocks,
and factories suck back their waste.
Personal pacifist vision is a strong seam that runs through the collection:
In time a fist could become a hand again
as is the sequence of portraits of people dealing with incarceration -
expected when reading a poet that is one of the many currently working in the
fashionable role as writer resident in prison. Of course, writing and prison
make serious bedfellows and the grim environs - both physical and emotional -
make suitable fodder for the poet to speak with a strong melancholic tone. If
the predictability of that tone was what I considered the only downside of
the book, that is probably as much a comment on the reader and his
identification with subject as much as it is a comment on the writer and her
work.
For the most part, Winslow is a rapidly maturing poetic voice on the
UK poetry scene and deals with the froth and the frith in balanced
and equal
measure. One page we are sharing the whimsical image description of toads:
....three shuffling cowpats.
Next we are immersed in a mural depiction of the cataclysmic consequence
of global warming that is the final and majestic poem ÔImagine':
...................One
by one
what kept
us apart joins up - Persian,Aegean,
Caspian, Red, Baltic, North, Irish, Barents.
I've always liked those poets that instinctively appreciate the poetry
contained in actual language constructions such as the BBC Shipping Forecast
and the Football Results (Tooting and Barking 4 Guru Nanak 6) and Pat Winslow
is one of those. Poetic delight in the words themselves and in the order
in which they are arranged on the page:
Years can
pass in a night. This dream is a film of our lives,
which is from the title poem. Dreaming of Walls Repeating Themselve is an apt title. It's that sort of book.
© Gary
Boswell 2008
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