Lyn Moir
Review
From the Body of the Green Girl, Paula Jennings
From the Body of the Green Girl, Paula Jennings, 2008, HappenStance. £4 ISBN 978-1-9059392-4 4
Paula Jennings’ second collection is a veritable Tardis, lightweight in format (32pp) but certainly not in content. Its poems show a remarkable sensitivity.
Jennings is adept at getting into other people’s skin. The cover notes say that she ‘works creatively with people who have dementia’. My favourite poem, At the Day Centre, is a triptych of characters, Bruce, Alison and Malcolm, who explode off the page. Bruce, “blind and coiled tight / as an ammonite / … / in his left eye a pearl / in his right / a crimson sea anemone”, is drawn with delicacy and power, each word weighed and correctly valued. Alison speaks in her own voice: “every day I speak jewellery and fireworks / every day you ask, What is she saying?” Malcolm too is precisely, economically drawn.
There are humorous poems, but the overall impression is one of almost other-worldly delicacy, Driving in Autumn, Ice. Imbolc, First of May and Autumn Equinox, celebrating the Triple Goddess, form another triptych. The final sequence, The Change: Woman as Several Kinds of Bird, is made up of four poems of intense beauty and power.
Small is beautiful. It really is. Read these and see for yourselves.
Page(s) 57
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