Alison Brackenbury’s poetry is hospitable: open to all. She was born in 1953, the daughter of a Lincolnshire farmer. This is her ninth collection and could not have been written by a novice poet. It is modest, robust, humorous – often touching – and filled with accumulated wisdom. She is an unfashionable rhymer and it is a particular treat to encounter the musicality and seasoned craft in the best of her rhymes. Half-Fledged begins with a description of clumsily trying to embroider “half a daisy” before giving up and, in the second stanza, sighting a baby greenfinch in the lane outside: “For half a mile, it bobs below the showers, / flits to a tree; embroiders elderflowers.” What is pleasing is the stitching together of the first and second verses with the verb “embroiders”. “Elderflowers” then strikes a unifying chord.
In her moving poem January 7th, she writes about receiving a letter from a former lover, after 30 years of silence. It is one of several poems about returning and at the same time being unable to return. It has an unfussy feel and is told with everyday composure. Here the rhymes are simple – more invisible mending than flamboyant stitching. Every detail has been strictly considered, including the decisive punctuation: “although I cannot see you / and will not again.” The full stop comes earlier than expected – a full stop that, movingly, means just that.
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