And She Was

Reviews / Votes

On Sarah Corbett's previous collection, The Red Wardrobe (Seren, 1998):

Poetry as white knuckle ride. * Poetry Wales * Reviews
'A romance, a thriller, a myth, Sarah Corbett's new poem will have her readers hurrying through its pages to find out what happens before returning more slowly to the pleasures of her stepped, tilting stanzas and their line-by-line transformations of her characters and their places in the world. "Step in", she writes, "and the space unfolds / one box opening into others".'

John Mcauliffe 'Can memory be put in a box?' asks one of the characters in Sarah Corbett's mysterious, condensed and achingly beautiful narrative tale. This lyrical, unsettling, and arresting poem about passion, memory and loss possesses an hallucinatory quality. Corbett creates an extraordinary urban world where a man reaching for his past finds it ever out of reach. The erotic writing captures the complexity of sexual connection and 'the inner silk of memory'. Corbett writes fluid and irresistible poetry, to be read, re-read and savoured.'

Patricia Duncker 'In this dazzling tour de force, Sarah Corbett reworks the verse-novel into a contemporary odyssey through a labyrinthine underworld where myth and the unconscious collide. With effortless formal dexterity, her poetry is by turns mysterious, disturbing, startling and intensely sensuous, and if a poetry book can be a page- turner then this is that book. At its heart this is a narrative of loss and redemption as deeply humane as it is ambitious: you will want to read it in a single sitting, then re-read to savour its impeccable craft. An exciting development in contemporary narrative poetry, and a must-read.'

Tiffany Atkinson On Sarah Corbett's previous collection, Other Beasts (Seren, 2008):

'This new collection (Other Beasts) has all the hallmarks of a fine poet truly coming into her own, exploring her themes in a distinctive voice that is at once powerful and tender. The images rea striking - the sky unleashing 'the long whip/of its mountains, its river's black ribbons'; Hale-Bopp as a 'fist of flung glitter'; a mountain village at night hanging 'like a lantern/in some unnamed crevice of the hills'. Light and darkness - natural, artificial and metaphorical - recur. Many times I'd weighed you against other lovers, like handfuls of soil/equally dark and rough.' Colour and sound speak together, as in 'the clap of brown shoes ont he green lino'. The rhthms and structures are sometimes gut-wrenchingly perfect (the finest example is in 'Fox at Midnight',).

Boundaries, borders and divisions; uniqueness and unity; intimacy and distance - whether she is contemplating our relatioships with each other, with anials and the natural world, with our ancestors, or with space and time, Corbett conveys the acheing sense of being both a part of and aprt from, perhaps most tenderly in these lines from 'Rainbow': whne you left me, turning to the wall for sleep,'I smoothed the skin of your small tanned back.'

The themes are deeply personal, but they are also political and universal, and the entire collection is suffused with a sense of the smallness and greatness of all things. A slim volume of short poems spoken in a soft voice. They are, quite simply, shamanic.'

Suzy Ceulan Hughes On Sarah Corbett's previous collection, Other Beasts (Seren, 2008):

'By this, her third collection, it is clear that Sarah Corbett has gathered around her a compelling set of personal motifs; childhood, animals (horses, in particular), hills, moors and the night. It would be lazy to call her work Gothic, because it doesn't deliberately set out to create unease, but her poems accept the blood-and-guts surrounding life (a single eyeball, a dead hare), and often find solace in the strangeness that night brings.

Corbett is adept at the well-placed, acute image; two girls caught by lightning are 'a puzzle in each others' arms' in 'Lightning', rabbits have unnerving, 'bead-berry eyes' in 'Nocturne', and she uses juxtapositions that are often startling - and startlingly beautiful. For example, a fox tosses a sheep corpse over its back 'like a crown of blossom' in 'Fox at Midnight', and the 'Mountain Pony' settles 'the bird of its fear' on a concrete floor.

There's a density to the diction, caused by strong consonance. Follow the recurrence of f, t and l sounds in these two other examples of beautiful, acute imagery: Hale Bopp is 'a fist of flung glitter' in 'Comet', and in 'Rivers, Roads', '...the city just left' is '...frost on leaf, just that'. The packed repetition of consonants slows the line down, forcing the reader to enunciate clearly and giving the words a deliberated weight, which underscores the evident rhythmic control of the lines. Corbett shares that control with her presiding spirit, Elizabeth Bishop, whose work furnishes several of the poems with epigraphs.

This is how I'd scan the end of 'Birthday', the first poem in the book (the italicised syllables being those with the heaviest stress):

' I bark, bark. Other beasts
complain back under the weight of dark.'

I'm aware there are other scansion possibilities, especially at the start of that last line, but this is how I'd read it. Notice the slip back into iambic rhythm at the end, releasing the narrator into the night through which she runs. Notice also, the dense patterning of those hard consonants, not to mention the use of rhyme. When this occurs, the poem seems a solid, precise thing, shaped by axes and chisels. This is distinctively Corbett; her music.

I wonder what Corbett's imagination might do outside the confines of the modern lyric poem. I'm looking forward to the appearance of the verse novel on which she's currently working.

I don't find the closed, charged chamber of the confessional poem in Other Beasts, nor a meander through the past's titbits. Instead, I find a series of beautiful, unsettling, lyric moments, and several compelling sequences that look outwards to the contemporary and wider world.'

Meryl Pugh 'Corbett's book is proof that whenever there is something difficult to say, there is always another 'and' that can be used to force the words out of your self and onto the page.'

Annie Muir, The Manchester Review 'The kaleidoscopic variations in form and the narrative ambiguity, result in a work that's both compelling and frustrating. Instinctively, we want to locate the heart of the story, but in many of the poems this heart is obscured or withheld. Yet this is the point: rather than a linear narrative, And She Was is cinematic and strange, an exploration of how memory deals - or fails to deal - with passion and hurt.
New Welsh Review 'And She Was is remarkable. I have never read a book of poetry in one sitting - absolutely gripped - and then read it all over again.'

Nicky Arscott, Poetry Wales 'There is much to admire in this verse novel's stylistic richness, its condensed incident and drama, and in the audacity of its experiment.'
Linda West, Text Journal