Fleeting
This pamphlet — written with an erudite lightness of touch — is permeated with a fascination for all that is short-lived in the natural world, from morning frost to complete lives. Birds feature prominently, insects even more so, and folklore contributes as importantly as observation.
Eleanor Page borrows from Frazer’s Golden Bough the belief that a person’s soul is in their shadow, or reflection, and is at risk of being taken by spirits from the environment — temporarily during sleep, or permanently after death. This idea lies behind several poems, and in a lovely short sequence prompted by an art installation, it’s used extensively. From ‘While You Were Sleeping’:
The spirit slips its net
of skeleton, flesh, nightdress
in a guise of white butterflies,
their shadows left grounded
[ … ] are you
this Grayling, that Speckled Wood?
Elsewhere, human lives cut short — or never begun — are recorded. One poem enters, briefly and movingly, into the world of a Celtic noblewoman who suffers a miscarriage but is convinced that her child lives as a flower and could still be found somewhere.
In ‘Memories of You’, stranded jellyfish are used as a somewhat startling image for recollections that the writer cannot bring herself to bury.
Conversely, the poet imagines, in ‘Whispers’ (evocative title) that everything once in the mind of a street-attack victim might be able to take on a life of its own after his death:
At the spot, I pause and step around,
imagining the gaps gathered your thoughts,
complexities and hopes as they unwound.
I scan the stones for whispers that remain
in hope that they — instead of total loss —
may start to grow unharmed among the moss.
An added attraction is the apt use of verse forms. Poems about the brief lives of insects are in couplets, looking suitably ‘here-and-gone’ on the page, while the laments for people who died young are sonnets. A piece celebrating an ability to cling on to life despite the odds appears as a long thin line.
So, poems that appeal to both ear and eye, while engaging hearts and minds — all boxes ticked.
Rob Lock