Skies is Alison Brackenbury's ninth Carcanet collection. In these
poems, Brackenbury sustains delicate proximities between war and
love, joy and sadness, summer and winter. Starting out as the first
trees 'chatter into leaf', the poems cross through July's 'dripping
amber' to January's 'false thaw'. The seasonal shift is reflected
in the poet's larder, its variegating hues and tastes: honeycomb,
parsnips, apples, broad beans, sprouts, jams and spices summon an
air of harvest. But it is also the seasons of life that concern
Brackenbury here: the poet's irrecoverable past, her youth 'which I
can never visit, like a star', is at the same time the thing that
never stops revisiting: in an unexpected letter from an old lover,
in a half-remembered playground song. The poems in Skies are
attuned to this musicality, to time's echoes and refrains, the old
errors that still 'flower and flower'.Finally, it is the poet's
quiet conviction to savour life, to take seriously its succulent
variety, that defines this collection: the poems attest to the
special privileges of age: wisdom, self-sufficiency, a deepening
patience with the world; the ability to be, as the poet says of an
apple, 'self-sweet'. The communal warmth of the kitchen finds its
double in the exquisite loneliness of rising early, of hearing the
barking of town foxes at dawn, or in the contemplation of a garden
in autumn, its rows of hips swelled by rain, a rose 'whose name I
think means happiness'.
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