The Floodmeadow draws us into a seething pastoral where lightning
threatens and thunder gathers, pylons and powerlines hum, and
steel-framed gates sing out into the wind. In these incantatory pieces,
everything is present at once. The landscape, teetering on apocalypse,
is characterised by collision and disintegration. Among fragments of
memory and history are meticulously journaled observations of the
natural world: the moorhen who 'with exaggerated delicacy steps / free
of the reedbeds'; the dragonfly that 'pushes itself through the armour /
of its body' to be born.
The world is populated by archangels and wild gods, the roar of military
aircraft, hunting dogs caught permanently suspended in the chase and a
car that veers from the road into the floodwater in which the whole
collection is saturated. Human relations are fleeting and vulnerable,
appearing in the impression of a wedding or the recurring moments
captured between a father and son, who make between them delicate
balsawood constructions, which - as the poems do themselves - take
flight in the turmoil, ecstatic one moment, plunged into darkness the
next. This is a visionary collection that invokes other times,
dimensions and soundscapes to tell out some word of beauty and abundance
in the here and now.
