Linda Saunders' The Watchers

Linda Saunders' second collection, The Watchers, has just been published by Arrowhead Press. I must admit in this case to a personal bias: Linda has been in my private Poetry School seminar, meeting at my home once a month through the academic year, since 2005.

"Sideways" brings together Linda's principal strengths: a distinctive, precise visual perspective, arising at least in part, I assume, from her former career as an art critic; pleasing wit; a tightly-focused lyricism; and an abiding interest in the philosophy of language. It makes me eager to read the entire collection.

Sideways

poem starting with a line by Jack Gilbert

We use them sideways.

Words, he meant, that will do for now,

slipping them through or between

to prise a way towards

what we don’t know yet how to say.

*

My mother cut sideways through water –

she’d swim in any weather, any sea,

her right cheek pillowed on the waves.

Once she hooked back a man from drowning,

brought him to shore on her strong sidestroke,

legs scissoring the undertow.

*

Tacking

is a strategy of cunning,

making headway in adversity,

catching the gale sideways

and using it.

*

After the stroke, she was often lost

for a word – she the linguist who loved a cryptic

crossword. I took the slant of her meaning

and how she strove by indirection

to arrive at it, like a small craft

in a contrary wind.

*

Some things, faintest stars, we see more brightly

if we just look

glancingly,

so a mist, a smudge, resolves

into points of light, sidereal

in the corner of the eye.

It’s the way our eyes are made,

near the edge more densely receptive,

so we always have this sense of what escapes

our scrutiny,

a truth askance and facetted,

a love so far unsaid.

*

Using them, even the blanks in her mind –

“Almost...” she said once, exhausted,

gripping both my hands and waiting

like the poet for the word that will tend

his passion, then hooking the prize at last

with an intake of wonder, “...inexhaustible.”

Which was about the size of it.

Linda Saunders' The Watchers can be purchased from Amazon.co.uk.