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In Waterlight by Donald Atkinson.
Arc Publications, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden, Lancs 0L14 6DA £10.95.


In Waterlight is a major collection of Donald Atkinson's poetry comprising 196 pages of a wide variety of his work over several years.  The poems are finely constructed with assured music. His particular strength is to combine vivid and immediate imagery, often containing much warmth, with an overall perspective of an event. As in Cast Off and Repeat, 'By winter fires in wartime, mothers not middle-aged / are knitting gloves for us. Flame-light salivates / loose wrinkling skin, back of chapped hands / that dicker as the needles criss-and-cross / The gloves mine knits for me have finger-ends left open / for doing up buttons, shoe-laces, finding tickets...' This tender picture develops to fears about his own daughter and concludes 'Mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, still / with purl and plain of love we knit our selves / in one another's flesh. / And the stitches burn, / against the foreknown unravelling.' Many are portraits of people, relationships studied in depth and fictional characters, such as a whole section on Othello and other characters from the play.  Imagery is always combined with movement, 'October: time of turning leaves. / Our fast train to London dives / through a gorge lined thick with them...they panic in our on-rush, / the tawny yellows, the startled sallows, / make car wash at our windows.' (from Closure 1993). There is humour and acerbic wit in many poems.  This is a substantial, intelligent collection, that delights with unexpected but apt imagery, 'Pale laser hands move blindfold through the brain, / carving his shape from silence like cut breath, / Loose as all water, patient as sculpted stone' (from Exequy).