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North Flight by Lynne Wycherley
(Shoestring Press, £8.95)
Available from www.shoestringpress.co.uk


Lynne Wycherley’s North Flight is her second collection and there is an echo in its title of her previous book, At the Edge of Light.  Light is again very much in evidence all the way through North Flight, hard-edged, clean, sharp, northern light; light from a variety of locations falling on a variety of different things.  Usually, when I read in reviews about poems that ‘take us on a journey’ I let out a little groan and move wearily on; other people’s travel notes or diary entries from personal spiritual odysseys are, in my experience, rarely gripping. But these poems do follow a genuinely engaging and compelling path.  From the Fens to Orkney, Shetland and eventually to Iceland, landscape and place are evoked with vivid precision.  I feel as if can comment with some vague authority about the Iceland poems, because Iceland is somewhere I’ve actually been.  This is from the opening poem of the Iceland sequence, ‘Truants’:

     Night never happened.  A white wind
     blew from west to east.  Keflavik
     to Langanes, thieving our sleep.

That effectively captures for me the never-quite-getting-dark quality of the Icelandic summer.  But it’s the ‘white wind’ that’s surprising and accurate, and I like the way the tempo is slowed and made to sound a little sleep-deprived by the long ‘ee’ sounds in ‘thieving our sleep’

And this is from ‘Service Station’, a little later in the sequence:

     Behind you the shield mountain
     hardens its heaven,
     palagonite revetted with ice.

You get hints here of the alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse tradition that rings through many of these poems.  North Flight has an insistent, percussive music that could, under less confident language-handling hands, get a bit … well … boring, I suppose.  But it’s never allowed to pall or overwhelm the subject matter.  Poems about place and time and distance all done with a keen eye, a steady hand and a thinking heart: if that’s what you like in your poetry then North Flight could be for you.