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

Addressing her dead mother, saying what she couldn’t say, Dooley sees herself “setting down here / my heart’s smallest secrets”. Why the smallest? one wonders. Perhaps these are the most sensitive, the still small voice, as in another poem:

It is the small wish of his ashes as they slip
                                                into the wind,
It is that moment when the bow finds the
                                                         string.

‘Lighter than a feather is love’. Identities slip into the wind. As the persona’s face goes out of her mother’s old mirror, so do the past and future, leaving only the corner of a window, and a bee visiting. In the empty playground the swings still move to and fro. Evanescence is moving - people “slipping down the cold back chute of history”, and history she doesn’t like. Absences fascinate: on the train to anywhere, a person she’ll never meet looks in from the other side of the carriage windows. Is it his bicycle in the guards van? She needs him in the empty seat beside her. Dooley’s poems deal with small moments and domestic affections but manage to suggest landscapes of the heart, including landscapes it’s never known. She writes lyrically and can create complex music out of simple words and mere echoes, half-rhymes, as in the song ‘Raft of Desires’, now permanently installed on Ryde Pier, Isle of Wight:

It’s the old, old story.
Warm wind on the night ferry,
a glass and a dark song.
let this be the one.

The path rising to meet me,
the wind always behind me,
a stroll and a dander
at the shining sea’s edge.

And it’s over, it’s over,
over the water and over,
the life I once knew
and the life I have left.