South Reviews
Caroline Price
Wishbone – Caroline Price; Shoestring Press, £8.95
I found myself being immersed into this book, not all at once, but slowly. I felt myself being sucked in. These are well crafted poems that make you think. I was often drawn to read them again and again because I may have missed something on a previous reading.
Price writes in a language that is all poetry. The subject matter is varied and the poems are based on a variety of situations, from The Bridge where a girl is pushed off a bridge by her father, to Bicycle race on the Goodwin Sands, 1887, where the boredom of a girl whose brother is in the race, comes through. The poems are alive with people but many are about animals. Remission is about a hen pheasant that has flown through a bedroom window smashing the glass and survives. In An English Garden a couple see a squirrel but ‘only if it crosses their path/ in full sun/ will they know for certain whether it is grey or red’. It is the anticipation in this poem that is portrayed so vividly.
You feel that Price is painting a picture and you are denied knowing what it is until it is finally finished. By this I mean that things happen gradually in her poems, as most of life happens gradually. In Last Call the husband looked after the vegetable garden less and less as the years went by, until by the end of his life it had become quite overgrown. The culmination of this ‘letting go’ is that suddenly poppies spring up the day after the wife buries his ashes ‘in the ghost/ of a vegetable garden, no more now/ than a rectangle of deeper green’.
This is a book that looks good and is well worth reading.
Page(s) 60
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The