Dilys Wood
Review
Windfall, Miriam Darlington
Windfall, Miriam Darlington, 2008, Oversteps Books. £8 ISBN 978-0-9552424-9-6
A sense of spontaneity in poetry and of a voice speaking intimately to the reader are often achieved with blood, sweat and tears. Rock has this gift and I also find it in several poems in Miriam Darlington’s Windfall, a collection of poems mainly about emotions and people. Darlington sets out to achieve the effect of spontaneity in her work by, for example, omitting punctuation, including capital letters, and relying on line-breaks to indicate natural pauses. Her skills come into their own when there is also significant content in poems like If I Close My Eyes, The Quiet Room, Galanthus Nivalis, Source, Thoughts on a Broken Rainbow Umbrella, and To My Dog: all poems which have something to say about distress, loneliness, inadequacy. A few other poems stand out for their rich, sensual detail but I thought too many poems here were closer to ‘exercises’ than poems of genuine feeling, making this book, at 52 pages, somewhat too long.
Page(s) 63-64
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