Paul Lee
Reviews
With an Eye on the Edge by Patricia Adelman
ISBN 1 900397 56 0, 40pp A5, £3.00. Flarestack Publishing, 41 Buckley’s Green, Alvechurch, Birmingham, B48 7NG, UK, E-mail , phone +44(0)1214452110.
Patricia Adelman writes poems that are primarily descriptions of, or commentaries on, people and relationships. She proves a gentle and kindly observer, somewhat inclined to the sentimental, and more concerned with what she’s saying, rather than equally with how she’s saying it. In one poem though, clear-eyed and not the least part sentimental, all her gifts work together to produce that sought after happy marriage of form and content. It is a memoir of a hospital patient ( Adelman was – or is still — a nurse), a survivor from wartime Warsaw, who shows her two photos of children, one fat and happy, the other thin, and dead in its cot.
My blurt of ‘consolation’ — reference to / her other lovely one – sets off / a peal of words clean as bells in frost / in the air of rubbled city spaces: ‘no other one. Both my one same baby — / food for me – no milk in breast for baby / No blame to me. Please? Nurse?’ / My words break as they fall. At last.
(Broken English)
Page(s) 32
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