This November sees the long awaited release of Sarah Barr’s stunning collection, January.
Review copies are now being sent out into the world and we’ve already received this wonderful endorsement from award winning poet, John McCullough.
Sarah Barr writes subtle poems that probe the edges of uncertainties, the details of objects and landscapes gradually revealing her speakers’ unease. The disjunctions in the title piece evoke the sudden leaps of a mind actively thinking, the white spaces between stanzas inviting us to imagine what’s going on beneath the clipped surface of the language. Elsewhere, simple phrasing holds carefully nuanced images: the menace of cracking ice, a long-married couple surrounded by ‘masks / and stiff-limbed, velvet-dressed dolls.’ The writing carries on unfolding inside the reader long after their eyes have left the page.
January
This time I’m taking more notice –
the sandbags, submerged fields,
flooded crypt, the marooned town.
There’s more water than the land
can use, or the skies hold.
Perhaps it’s natural
to shiver with excitement
at this odd, reflective world.
A swan wings upward, abandons
its mirror-image on the bright lagoon.
Are there going to be two
of everything, including me?
I think about new surfaces
and new below-the-surfaces.
Don’t miss out – January 27/11/20