Sarah Maguire’s Almost the Equinox is a bouquet gathered over time. These beautiful poems belong together – in a way that is rarely the case with selected poems. She is our finest gardener-poet, her botanical knowledge evident but unostentatious in her poems about flowers. You see her recalcitrant gardenia as if it were in front of you: “One lopsided, scorched-brown bloom…” Her secretive African violet is vividly present, too: “Hirsute secret hoods/ ease back/ the gauzy, veiled flesh/ to a star of opening mauve,/ pierced at the heart / with sheer gold…” And oranges, souvenirs of Taliouine, are described with tart truthfulness: “Oh, they were sharp! like hybrid grapefruit…”
With Maguire, blossoms are unpredictable. And ripeness is not all. The Florist’s at Midnight – a wonderful poem – acknowledges the violence of uprooting flowers, “cargoed across continents/ to fade far from home”. At night, in the shop, the flowers are not required to put on a show. She finds apt, unfanciful adjectives for the lily – “solitary, alert”. And there is a dazzling instability about the last line: “the streetlights/ in pieces/ on the floor”. She is a poet who summons mysterious atmospheres precisely.
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