All The Missing Names Of Love - A Review

Discovering All The Missing Names Of Love motivated me to do two things I have never done before: buy something online, and write a review. The first was easy; the second, definitely not so much.

Reading blogging friend Roselle Angwin's beautiful posts over at Qualia and Other Wildlife, I knew her new book of poetry would be worth reading, and now having read it, definitely worth sharing.

Like the tapestry by Anne Jackson on the book cover, Roselle’s poems interweave her thoughts and feelings with a sympathetic vision of the natural world to which she is clearly attuned.

In his haiku Nazuna (The Shepherd’s Purse), Basho was captured in an instant by the beauty of a lowly weed, then captured the moment in a poem:

When I look carefully –

Nazuna is blooming

Beneath the hedge.

Roselle does this too. By capturing moments that captured her, she captures us. This is from Tracks:

Now, dawn; the stillness

broken only by a clattering tractor

and its retinue of gulls.

As in On Staffa:

… It’s in these moments

that we remember the truths behind words;

and recover an ancient longing; and our

kinship, our covenant, with wild.

True to the title of the book, Roselle invites us to share her view of love from many different vantage points.

This is Rosa Canina:

Rain, milky with mist, has gently

erased the moorland distances.

Lanes are at their heartbreaking

fullest: buttercup, bluebell, campion,

Queene Anne’s lace, buds of dog rose.

And this is also an act of love:

to see another over a threshold.

Love of nature, animals, friends, lovers, parents; joy in their life, and sadness in their passing and decline.

I’m going to turn off my commentary here. These excerpts easily speak for themselves.

From Wild Garlic:

Everyone we love will leave us eventually,

or we’ll leave them. That’s what the wise vicar

said at that wedding blessing all those years ago.

Knowing that, how can I not love you fully?

From All The Missing Names Of Love:

Today I’m obsessed by things transient

or lost: the dog dead for fifteen years

who today lapped water in the kitchen

at noon, even though I couldn’t see her;

my father’s mislaid past; or the names

that slip through my mother’s grasp

like the minnows we’d try to catch

up to our childish knees in the Vellator streams …

From Rain Dharma:

Rain settling in like conversation between

lifelong friends; rain, plants, stone, birds

at ease with themselves and each other, at ease

with how the world needs to be.

From After Midsummer:

My mum is so light now I can

carry her in one chamber of my heart.

From Going into the meadow after the retreat:

the horse’s light breath on my cheek

the way he delicately politely

only just

meeting my eyes reads my face

hands hair with his gentle muzzle

as if he smells

questions, as if I were an event

blown in on the whirling wind

as if

from within the zero

of Zen in which he dwells

he barely

recognizes me, each thing wholly

new, every encounter the first.

From South Cerney Sonnets     ii Cotswold Water Park: Plate Movement:

The layers beneath our feet are provisional

as anything else; time swallows its tail

and I’m afraid. Hold me. …

From On not going over the lip of a waterfall in an oil-drum:

                               Tell me again

what you said about love;

speak it again – the one

about two bodies’ heat,

the one about crossing the water.

Tell me again.

From This rain, the window open:

Still I lie on the roomward side

of the bed

after all these years

wash the pillowslips

on which I never lie

when I wash my own

put them out to dry

billowing in the salt wind

and reinstall them

neither foam nor feathers

ever as good a pillow

as his chest

Diagnoses

for my parents:

i Alzheimer’s

Once she found a goldcrest’s nest,

tucked it carefully in a crook, made sure

the entrance was clear and open.

Recently the winds have blown it far

from the tree, are gently taking it apart.

ii Stroke

The last dominoes perch unsteadily.

The rest have fallen so that their black

sides are uppermost, the numbers

and the narrative mostly obscured.

From Whiteout:

… On that high crest

the snowdrifts fell and fell and were chest-height

and head-height and then filled the lane till

even hedges were eclipsed, the white drift a foretaste

of what later would take my mother’s brain and gently erase it.

From Let there be peace:

Let me go in a breath of applewood smoke from the mountains

Release a white mare into the hills for me

Whisper my name into her ear

Let her go.

Thank you, Roselle.