I read with Rhian Gallagher on the King's Lynn Poetry Festival in September and this weekend finally found the time to read her second collection, Shift. Here are my favourite passages:
Not moving an inch,
myself to myself become a mystery.
last lines of "Under the Pines"
Yet rain falling over the city
is like a hammer, a thousand pianos at the adagio.
*
I am equal to the wound of any blade.
from "The Gospel According to Longing"
...till the architecture seemed made of lights alone.
from "Becoming"
The mountains do not rescue us, or the light
or the tender microclimate of the bay below.
We have it all and are lost.
from "Crossroad"
The season bends.
from "Prospect Park"
A white wing blurs over lagoon and paddock,
flick of a magician's cloth.
from "The Big Dark"
Some days, blind to stone and wing,
more or less moving,
when I am picked up
by the scent again
and am shaken
margin of every elsewhere here.
*
The southerly boots in, flanked by coal-dark cloud
polar-particled, mean as.
from "Shore"
The sun
roaring in my head.
last words of "Sea Change"
The wind stirring above the range
and angel, a parachute with no body.
from "The High Country"
You can purchase Shift for directly from its publisher, Enitharmon Press, by going here.
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