No Doves by Lesley Saunders (Mulfran) J. BROOKES
Say a poem is keeping a ball in the air with the end of a foot. Each kick represents a new turn in the poem, and hopefully the ball sails neatly up once more. Often though, as anyone who’s ever written a poem will know, it will slump into the gutter, or disappear over a garden wall, never to be seen again.
Lesley Saunders keeps the ball in the air. Her toe is precisely placed and the poems swing on, line after intelligent line – meditations on stone, cold, blackbirds, a red lipstick, an ear of wheat – all deftly and accurately set out.
And she loves words. Dark is “humungous”, hunger “starvatious”, a female blackbird’s eye is that of a corybant (“a priest of Phyrgian worship of Cybele, performed with extravagant dances” says my Concise Oxford), and bees are “scumbling” in the Roman sky. Lovely. And if, once or twice, I caught myself thinking I was reading a poem by Heaney – “the river-verb/had puckered into a noun” – well, the occasions were rare.
In “Some Languages are Hard to Dream in”, a longer sequences, she puts her best foot forward. I’ll quote in full part vi.
Sparrows rustle in the grass like winter leaves while an old leaf sits like a bird on the wall saying nothing that anyone can hear.
Don’t you wish you’d written that? I do. And each part of the sequence is good. Yes, Lesley Saunders is very worth reading, and re-reading, for she’s not going to make it easy for us, however easy she makes keeping that ball in the air seem.
Square Rating 80% No Doves
170 X
Zen Cymru 31
80% Tag
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