Something, I Forget

Angela Leighton's sixth book of poems turns on the curious arts of remembering and forgetting. "A poem will be written", James Longenbach writes, "if in the grip of memory we are able to forget". A poem may be read in the same spirit, of remembering, to forget, and so read again. These poems, composed in strict form, free form, bird-form or cruciform, experiment with the sound-shapes of language, always attentive to the rhythms that keep them singing. There are love poems to the earth, its stones, gardens, cities, weathers; and elegies for creatures, human and animal, that survive on its surface. There are poems about war, love, age, and the wiping of memories they (differently) encourage. Each closely worked poem is its own imaginable place, where words have the keen touch of things, yet things – the CDs hanging on a tree, star moss on a stone wall, a glass harp played in a back street, a three-thousand year old clay doll – resonate as if remembering other moments, other places. These varied, arresting, musical poems try to catch what lies out there, on the mind's dark seas.