It’s been a while since I posted, partly due to a disc in my back which insists on playing up. But I couldn’t resist sharing this latest review of Sometimes A River Song from poet Gillian Allnutt – whose words feel to me like a precious gift.
Listen to Aiyana. Let her voice take hold of you, hypnotic and insistent as the river, as ‘the lull and rock of moving water’. Let her telling take you to the end of this, her own unanswerable story – unanswerable as truth is and as full of event as the river is ‘full of catfish and bream, turtle and gar’.
She’ll make you think, without trying to, about the way we treat the earth; about what’s wrong with it. She’ll make you think again as from the heart. She’ll make you think, perhaps, that poetry is something ordinary and rare as grandma ‘singing to the corn while she hoe’.
Listen to her.
