Reviews

This slight volume contains some fifty poems whose common threads and shared metaphors include snow, ice, penguins and journeys. Bound by this tight commonality, the poems together build a strong portrayal of the polar regions, of the inseparable beauty and harshness of these ice-bound places.

Susan Richardson’s polar travellers are both human and non-human: the icebergs of ‘Calving’ as they ‘strut past Labrador’; the bird in ‘The Longest Flight’, an accomplished sequence of four poems whose fine imagery evokes the power of the migratory urge; the intrepid Gudrid the Rare and Freydis the Unafraid, two medieval Viking women whose tales are retold in another two striking sequences; and other more recent travellers who accompanied Scott and Cook’s expeditions, including the Welshman Edgar Evans, the first of Scott’s company to die, to whom Richardson pays tribute in a sequence of five heart-rending poems that depict the man’s personality and suffering with searing simplicity – ‘My hand is quite okay, sir./ Yes, I’m quite okay./I just feel such crimson hunger.’

Most of the poems in this collection are written as free verse, but Richardson also makes use, with varying success, of strict rhyme schemes, structured line repetition and unconventional formatting. She is unafraid to experiment with form and exploits both the relative freedom of the haiku and tanka and the more challenging strictures of the villanelle to good effect.

This is an interesting collection that demonstrates the poet’s ability to work with both freedom and structure – an ability that she puts to particularly good use in the various sequences.
*Suzy Ceulan Hughes @ www.gwales.com*