Book Description
This is wild disturbing poetry and in their deceptive way, these poems are profoundly theatrical. They concern a dwarf, a giant, a dead swan, its skin turned inside out, a new born baby bought in the biggest store in Leeds; the theatrical changes achieved by The Skin Clinic, the ecclesiastical masquerades of Venice, Gozo, even St. Ives, its familiarity so spectacular to Barbara Hepworth, whom Angela Dove imagines in conversation. These are poems of exits, entrances and revelations, poems in which, like The Black Lidded Box, characters from her life are offered different versions of what they might have been or done. This is a genuinely exciting collection; a curtain raiser, certainly, to a distinguished career.
U.A. Fanthorpe
