Left past the moon

By filtering memories of childhood and projections of old age through a dislocated urban landscape, while a strong sense of continuity holds the collection together, the poems in this volume seek to achieve both originality and coherence. Cultural stereotypes are questioned, and the speaker adopts a range of perspectives, including the ‘child point of view’, the adolescent and the disempowered old woman, to examine the impact of age and status on social experience. The language is given texture and depth by a balance of precision and underlying ambiguity which, if correctly judged, might contribute significantly to the academic practice of creative writing. The extensive use of direct and free indirect speech, assumed perspective, and involuntary memory is ordered by a close attention to line breaks, designed both for emphasis and to draw attention to what may remain unsaid. The poems are written entirely in free verse, in order to bring out the rhythms and pauses of natural speech, with a range of poetic techniques maintaining formal rigour throughout; elision and half rhyme or verbal echo are used to insinuate, as an undertow to the traditional certainties that the work both promotes and in places questions, the indefinite and the implicit.