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'In its mix of dramatic poise and control, Stoddart's writing is cool enough to warm the heart of any creature.' - David Wheatley, TLS'Her poems display a pleasing fusion of intelligence and sensuous perception with the knack of finding the right rhythmic pattern to convey it.' - Vernon Scannell, Sunday Telegraph' 'At Home in the Dark' is a fine debut collection from a poet of huge promise.' - Adam Newey, New Statesman
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At the heart of many of these poems lies an apprehension of things being lost or destroyed, and with this a need for consolation. The question of how we look for, or create, such solace - whether in faith or the rain, by doing a puzzle or watching TV - is one that threads through the book. In this work - her second collection - there is an increasing scope and depth to language as Stoddart seeks to explore paradoxes: poems of motherhood are double-edged celebrations, grief must come to some good. The ambivalence at work in her first book comes to intriguing fruition here in a collection of original and distinctive poems.
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Format:Paperback
You can almost track a whole life-cycle in Greta Stoddart's poetry, as you might, of course, in many a collection, and why not? It looks, you might say, consecutive. Here she falls in love, here she has a child, here she falls out of love. But there is often more to it than such a bare recounting might suggest. There is one superb poem - Like A Substance - which beautifully lists the moments when it (love) becomes evident, like a substance:
...as when it hardens but is still
soft like a sheet pulled between
two people easing the task
And with Monogamy - another poem with subtext that bears on a life's moment of realisation - this time with an ironic, downbeat twist:
but it wasn't enough to wake;
my heart lay sunk as a stone
and through the cut and glint of tears
a shoulder reared like land.
You were there
but love, you weren't.
There are thirty-eight poems in Salvation Jane (it's a plant, by the way, otherwise known as the purple thistle, or the dicot weed of the Boraginaceae), grounded in an ordinary life but transcending the careless, momentary nature of domesticity (standing in the playground for the first time, waiting for a child to emerge from her first day at school, for instance) with a robust use of the poignancy (never self-indulgent here) common to all moments of love and tenderness.
...as when it hardens but is still
soft like a sheet pulled between
two people easing the task
And with Monogamy - another poem with subtext that bears on a life's moment of realisation - this time with an ironic, downbeat twist:
but it wasn't enough to wake;
my heart lay sunk as a stone
and through the cut and glint of tears
a shoulder reared like land.
You were there
but love, you weren't.
There are thirty-eight poems in Salvation Jane (it's a plant, by the way, otherwise known as the purple thistle, or the dicot weed of the Boraginaceae), grounded in an ordinary life but transcending the careless, momentary nature of domesticity (standing in the playground for the first time, waiting for a child to emerge from her first day at school, for instance) with a robust use of the poignancy (never self-indulgent here) common to all moments of love and tenderness.
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