Sasquatches, dinosaurs, buried animals in a pet cemetery: Rebecca Perry’s poems are filled with creatures we can never approach. She focuses on them, dreams of their presences, gives them lives connected to her own. In “Poor Sasquatch”, she writes: “When I walked through a shopping centre, he was behind me, / peering in through the shop windows at the colourful cakes, / which he longed for.” The sasquatch, as we know, is elusive quarry, but here it tracks the poet, a shadow figure or second self. It even acts as a kind of benevolent protector as “when I walked along a pavement / he was on the traffic side, taking the hits”. The beast plays its role to the poet’s Beauty/Beauty.
All of the poems in this debut, shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, search for the impossible-to-find, what Perry describes as her “habit / of seeking love where there is none”. This can lead to frustration and tears – and often does. Yet it also suggests empathy and humanity: “Last week a woman was crying beside me on the bus; / I willed my body to generate heat for her. / This felt like a common reaction.”
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