Linda Black: Root
Published 15 June 2011
Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611702
This is a collection in search of origins, a kind of 'delving', 'trying to get to the bottom of it'. In a series of unsettling prose poems Black offers pieces of a fractured past. The effect is memorable and often menacing, each poem glinting like a sliver from a broken mirror; language enacting the struggle to retrieve and reassemble an unauthorised past. The difficulties of truth finding and telling are explored through shifts in identity and a syntax of qualifications and hesitations where everyday phrases take on a new and frightening resonance. Domestic objects and rituals loom large in the distorted reflections of the poems, conveying a sense of wonderland gone wrong.
"In a wonderful poem towards the end of the collection, Black's protagonist stands up to read her poems in front of an audience but finds the paper on which they are written is shredded. She offers fragments instead, 'drawing out as if from a magician's bag those symbols that confound her, crafted, adorned, embellished…' I can't think of a better description of how this startling collection unfolds – Black is indeed a magician of words, presenting her dark materials with a kind of unflinching showmanship which is both exhilarating and moving." —Esther Morgan
Download a sample PDF from this book here.
Read a review by Ian Seed at Stride Magazine here.
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