Salt Modern Poets
1 total work
In Chrissie Gittins' second collection she dresses in the guise of the grandson of Hitler's bodyguard, Samuel Pepys's mistress, the lover of Shakespeare's youngest brother, and the cook at a lavish dinner held in the belly of a model dinosaur. What undercuts these evocations of vivid living is the certain knowledge of death. How does Alcyone survive without her beloved husband? How does Triptolemus feel on his deathbed knowing that eternal life was once within his reach? These poems try to replace what is lost, or about to be lost, with the laying down of memory etched by the imagination.
The book includes three sequences. The title sequence is a tender lament for her mother. The second, called `Cloth', tells of Mary Hindle - a woman made a savage example after the machine breakers riots in East Lancashire. The third, `Herbal Source', welds stories to the anonymous words listed on a pavement sign outside a Chinese herbalist.
At once unflinching, sensual, delicate and elegiac, these poems inhabit the fluid spaces left between the present and the past.
What undercuts these evocations of vivid living is the certain knowledge of death. These poems try to replace what is lost, or about to be lost, with the laying down of memory etched with the imagination. At once unflinching, sensual, delicate and elegiac, these poems inhabit the fluid spaces left between the present and the past.