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Mother of Pearl, Rose Flint, 2008, PS Avalon. £10 ISBN 978-0-9552786-6-2

“On the first readings, enjoy the
feel of the physical space and
movement, feel the weather-air
about your skin...”

PS Avalon are publishers of ‘contemplative, inspirational (poetry), with a dark, challenging edge...’ Rose Flint’s engagement with the spiritual, healing and environmental is well known and recorded. Together, they present a collection of Flint’s work that breaks no promises... and with 124 pages of poetry with complex associations, prayer and blessing, myth and re-invention, historical and geographical reference, you’ll certainly get your money’s-worth of contemplation, spiritual engagement and fine reading time.

Flint’s work is formal and atmospheric – you’ll find yourself transported to places as diverse as ‘set into stone and earth’ (Now Voyager), into “a mizzle rain that mists the distant gorse / to blurred fire...” (Selkie on Lleyn), or a dust-moted domestic space where “...china sings with all its mouths / clean and wide open as nests full of thrushes / and glass celebrates itself in mirrors of light” (Domestic Goddess).

On the first readings, enjoy the feel of the physical space and movement, feel the weather-air about your skin, rally to the support of The Field, so that it “(does) not have to prove anything / by statistics and wheat-weight” and cosy up to its “thoughtfulness of hazels”. Return to unravel the complexities, both of language and associations. From Faiths:

You retreat to wait on a bank of wild narcissus
where you are Pan, playing gospels on your pipe
careful as a Jain on the small lives of beetles

as you talk to the goats in the same soft-chattering
swooping bird-speech that the lemon-leaf-gathers  [gatherers]
call to each other across the groves.

and from Women and Children at the Well:

One mother has a pierced child pale as a moonslice
who engages the water like newness, her hands an hourglass:
Time stops the heart. Some of us fall into attitudes of prayer:
what we grieve is the fearsomeness of love.

from Moonchild, winner of the Petra Kenney International Poetry Competition in 2006 (The Field won the Cardiff International in 2008):

As she was born the silence began its long roaring.
The sand-timer shocked from a hand and absence
streaming out, stopping up eyes, mouth, ears
with its grains of seconds, flowing minutes.
They called her and called with their clever hands
but she would not come, nor could not, but came too late

Flint’s poems are packed tight with people and meetings and action – characters and concepts it’s a pleasure to get to know. This last, from November Light, is, perhaps, suitably representative of Flint’s concerns: “... / slipping into everything, challenging the solidity / of oaks, of roots and rocks and human certainty.”