Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

In The Geometric - Carol Ann Darling
Indigo Dreams Publishing, 48pp, £5.00 (Chqs to Carol Ann Darling
Send to IDP.) 

                                                                         

We are the writers in the world’s 
anthology, oozing fragrance, colour, 
fragility, climbing dangerously 
high then plunging deep. We belong, 
coming together on perfect pages. 
Sailing an Ocean Sky

There is the very essence of precision to be discerned within those
geometrical principles that have so effectively inspired and shaped the
ever changing outlines of our enlightened world; and here within a virtual
microcosm, we have the shapings of a thoughtfully constructed poetry
collection, a collection specifically drawn from a twenty year span of
emotion. It is indeed often the case that some poets tend to reveal their
true potential in those rare occasions where a number of their individual
poems collectively come together, and Carol Ann, a long-standing,
regular contributor to REACH POETRY, is one of those remarkable
poets in point of reference. 

A far-reaching love of the countryside is exemplified in many of her
poems, into which tranquil settings of Nature are deftly interwoven with
moments of welcome solitude:

                With just the birds for company, 
                let me be,
                alone under a tree.
                Hugging the trunk,
                feeling the bark, 
                talking to the listening leaves,
                or branches bare.
                With Just the Birds for Company

The pent-up emotions of one who has long suffered, in aftermath, the
inevitable pangs of remorse from the broken romance of a former trusted,
close relationship, are incisively released in the course of Carol Ann's
included verse offerings:

                So you think you can invade my space time,
                breathing my air,
                playing games
                on my
                fields;
                pitch
                your tent
                on my hopes,
                my cabbage patch ?
                Damn you, no ! You're not camping in my dreams.
                Calling On Me

In her poem, 'THE OLD ROAD', she gives clear instance of the changes
that have necessarily had to be made in her lifestyle, a life that may never
now be traversed, as it had been in former days. The metaphorical
representation here is most appropriate in every detail:

                 The 
                 old road is happy grass 
                 grows over,
                 sweet wild blooms root as breeze sways tranquil air.
                 The Old Road

Carol Ann is one of REACH POETRY's previous monthly Readers'
Votes winners, and her poetry, though largely self-centred, has that
familiar flavour of appeal with which most fellow writers can readily
empathise. She uses winter imagery to express the harsh bitterness of an
unrequited love:

               Bitter falls the snow
               silent no mercy
               bitter is the taste
               of cold cruelty.
               Bitter

 - A sad poem, it is true, but one that rings with poignant force in a
striking litany of cold seasonal effects as the key-word, ‘bitter’ repeatedly
sounds its measured interspersal through five well-crafted verses. - This
poem was, for me, a real winner!

It has long been held that the sweetest song of the nightingale is that of
the bird, when pierced by thorns of the briars; and in like manner (dare I
say it ?) it would very much seem that this determined writer’s creative
endeavours have been decidedly heightened by those former
paradoxically disarming instances of circumstance. 

A neatly-crafted collection, sensitively assembled.