The Missing Months

A master of elegy and eulogy who finds during lockdown the space to take stock.

Many of the poems in The Missing Months occupy the strange hiatus afforded by lockdown. They look forward as well as back, toying with possible futures, enthused by utopian dreams or fearing cultural and bodily entropy. They celebrate and mourn the lives of friends and relatives, captivated by carefully tended images from the past. Lockdown’s ‘missing months’ in the world of a four-year-old granddaughter are laid down and remembered for her. Familiar objects – a park bench, stones, grass, stars, windows – are reanimated. This poetry of imaginative journeying ‘stretches/Banks on a slope of air and turns’ like the heron it watches. Between the crackle of radio signals and rain, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and the American singer Miranda Lambert, here is a poet in search of points of reference, the ‘bright fresh leaves’ of sunlight among the ruins.

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