South Reviews
Angela Kirby
Dirty Work – Angela Kirby; Shoestring Press, £8.95
Those two eternal subjects that haunt the writer’s notebook according, allegedly to Yeats, are very much on display in this collection. Dirty Work appears to be all about sex and/or death and what a fine read it is too. The sex is international taking place across the globe but most of the death is here at home, close to Kirby’s heart, ‘They do not sleep, they are not/ just in the next room,/ they have not passed peace fully/ on before, they are gone,/ clearly and terribly,’ summoning up that awful realisation that it is the living that have to go through grief, at the start of 'I have looked on the faces of the dead'.
These poems are expertly crafted, deploying an honest language with disarming accuracy when aimed at the whole point of the poem. The final verse of 'Tapas' for instance, where two long-standing friends of opposite sex meet for a meal and one, at last offers ‘afters’; it is declined with, ‘in that familiar and intimate way of an old lover,/ though we stand like gobsmacked teenagers,/ muchos gracias, but no.’
Kirby’s work contains humour too. Some of it vicious and, ‘Crammed in, as Jason says,/ like ferrets in a posing pouch,’ when detailing the landlord ‘Old Nick’ and his travels in Thailand in 'Happy Hour At The Pig And Polecat'. Some of it visual, describing a partner, ‘…prancing starkers/ round our room, my knickers on your head…’ in 'Thanks To You Charlie Chester'. The sand dance will never be the same.
There’s a welcome in this collection, one that kept calling me back as sure as responding ‘yes’ to the end of 'Letter From Rathcoursey', ‘…we wait for you/ the Aga kettle sings, the whisky’s poured.’
Page(s) 59
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