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Last Boat To Avalon – Stella Davis; Peterloo Poets, £7.95

This is a big collection: 69 poems over 85 pages, but big in other ways too. At their best, these poems get to the very heart of the human condition.

Subjects range widely from nostalgia to fairy tales and legends, from life to death and beyond. And the poet travels: Italy, Alexandria, Russia, Germany, the USA and others. These are not easy journeys: the poet does not tell us all we want to know, makes us work hard and sometimes leaves us frustrated because we cannot find or guess her references. And her vocabulary is so wide a dictionary at the traveller’s side is helpful. I can only show why you should trouble to make the journey with her, by examples:

Writing about Dress, Brown Velvet, unaffordable but given to her, she ends movingly with the double meaning, “it seems to me miraculous/ that you, back then, absurdly young,/ not only knew its worth, but trusted/ against all probability/ that it would last.”

About a death far away, she concludes A Pisa Notebook with, “the past unrolls itself, again and again,/ the same journey infinitely varied;/ and I…// try to translate what happened/ in May, in England:/ what happens still,/ a little, every day.”

Undertaking is full of wonderful phrases, like “winter/ folds down the edge of the year” and “the past is full of hooks, will catch/ and hold us, if it can.”

The Outside Churchyard considers the effect of religion on her family: “when a God,/ intrudes upon me now, it is not/ the Being who… // … gives children a fright to last them all their lives/ but a generous impulse of the heart/ shining unquenched through disbelieving dark.”

We didn’t need to make the journey studies fellow-passengers on an evening train and concludes, “I think again how difficult it is,/ universal love; how easy to be human.”, while Somerset Laudate triumphantly affirms life: “let us praise…/ the dazed blue line that runs beyond/ the hills beyond the hills beyond”.

After such a positive poem, I do not know why she chose to end this excellent book with Last Boat To Avalon and its bitter conclusion of casual betrayal, but this book is, after all, a mixture of bitters and sweets, as is life itself.