Behind the Lines

Reviews / Votes

This new collection from Chris Considine is mostly made up of sequences exploring personal and family history. The opening group, though not as closely bound, all have a sense of the fragility of life and happiness; a sense that one is always skating on thin ice and that that pitch of brightness, cannot be trusted (Skater). There is also fragility in the chances caught or missed which determine the course of a life and these themes reappear in the later sequences. Ill Winter vividly charts a brush with death (a cancer) in which the poets own experiences of dread and loneliness are rendered through the ancient imagery of Persephones descent into the underworld, and the earth in the grip of winter. The Ghost Sonnets are a most poignant, painfully honest group on late, unexpected and unfulfilled love. Less personally, Considine recognises the same qualities in a short literary trio on Railway Romance. (In Anna Karenina, Not to have seized that waiting brightness, / that one real thing impossible.) The title sequence traces the experiences of the poets parents through their war-time separation to her fathers return to a changed / wife, a child he hadnt met... Considine uses her fathers letters, entering both his adventures and his longing for home, but also surmising her mothers loneliness in the stagnant time. These are followed by some very tender poems on her mothers old age, fading and death. In the final five poems she draws back a little to imagine other artists experiences Michelangelo patiently learning to look at a man, or Carrington capturing the mind and soul of her beloved in paint. This is a collection of fine poems which explore a range of mature experiences and affections with precision, emotional honesty and deftly chosen words. The poet is never obscure or affected; she captures scenes and feelings with a clarity and intensity born of knowing that nothing is for ever, / the grey road could turn to river, / friends.../ to voices in the wind.(Lone Thorn). Caroline Clark It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council. Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru. -- Welsh Books Council