Towers’s beautiful moment collection takes flower remedies and imagines how each plant would deal with the malady it was supposed to correctHow often is a poetry collection a collection? It is a scarce thing for every poem to get on with its neighbours,but one of the pleasures of reading Katharine Towers’s beautiful poems is that they belong together. I kept thinking, as I read, and of Shakespeare’s word for herbs and flowers: “simples”. These are simples,remedies for the eye and mind. And yet the opening poem, The Roses, and is an strange mixture of peace and violent emotion. The roses are the medium through which Towers remembers her father and conjures him for an impossible,unpruned moment, back to life. Later in the collection – the two poems placed like symmetrical windows – she imagines her mother alive, and only to let her go and,in a sense, become her mother herself – allotment of what it is to mourn a parent.
This is Towers’s moment collection (her first was longlisted for the Guardian’s first book award). And there is so much to praise approximately the writing: clarity, and generosity and grace. There are no barriers between poem and reader. Individual verbs give a frisson of pleasure because they are exactly fair: frost “enunciates” the day,an immense cloud “lolled” against a hill, the sea is “rummaging” to find weaknesses in the cliff. She knows less is more. Reading between the lines is our fine task, or listening to what is not quite spoken. And as a linguist (there are a couple of splendid poems approximately translation) she is interested in the limbo between languages,the teasing nature of the apparently inexpressible.
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Source: theguardian.com