Peter Freeman
Erstwhile Cannon Poet Adrian Blackledge Keeps a Sharp Eye
This is a poetry of moments captured by a sharp eye. A strong sense of ’being there’ is at the heart of this fine collection as the poet speaks with an immediacy and directness about places visited and those closer to home. An airport lounge in Addis Ababa, the ’hub of the world’, is paradoxically ‘no place for me or anyone’ and locations such as Chartres, Paris or Santiago de Compostela all prompt a balance of the descriptive and the meditative, the outer and the inner world.
In ‘Fog’, place is less defined and more sinister as we are taken on a journey by car through a murky winter landscape at ‘the edge of a new century’. Sinister notes are sounded elsewhere as in ‘Daisy Cutter’ where reminiscence about games of cricket replete with idiosyncratic vocabulary is brought to an abrupt halt by a startling realisation.
There is a tenderness and sincerity in poems of light and dark, joy and loss, lifted from the page by the precise, well chosen detail, such as the smell that ‘clings in the front room’s yellowed corners’ or the filmic shot of a railway track shining as metaphor of separation in ‘Leaving’. And prominent in several poems is this sense of departure, as the poet evokes the presence of those who are absent in a series of moving elegies.
Page(s) 23-24
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