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foggy_rosamund's review
4.0
This collection appealed to me both because it's about disability, and its imagery is particularly focused on geology. Though there are many nature poets, few concentrate on the stones and earth under our feet, and the ways in which glaciers, rainwater and rivers have created our landscape, alongside tectonic drift and volcanic activity. Many of Davis's poems use geological imagery, including found poems which take details from cartographical and geological descriptions of Cumbria. The poems about place and stone bookend the central sequence in this collection, called "The Girl Who Forgets How to Walk", and describing contracting polio and its lifelong consequences. The polio epidemics of the 1950s are rarely discussed, but should be much on our minds at the moment as we learn to live during the Covid pandemic. Davis' sequence follows a girl who contracts polio while on a seaside holiday, and her experience thereafter: "The hot, terrible dream", in which she cannot rest and is caught forever on a too-hot train, and the experience of being in a hospital ward as a child, and the discovery that she can no longer remember how to use her legs, and that on of her legs is permanently disabled. The sequence explores her reactions to herself, and the way she is treated by peers, family and hospital staff. The journey of the child relearning how to walk and how to be in the world is told in moving, spare free-verse poems, that capture her disorientation. The sequence is tenderly brought together by a final poem of the adult reflecting on her mother nursing her through the worst of the illness.
Occasionally, these poems were clumsy, or add an extra final line where none was needed, but for the most part it's an assured and imaginative collection that works very much as a complete unit. There is a strong sense of one's journey through life, and of how tiny we are in the face of the landscapes and the ever-changing earth. Though not precisely comforting, I found a lot of solace here.
Occasionally, these poems were clumsy, or add an extra final line where none was needed, but for the most part it's an assured and imaginative collection that works very much as a complete unit. There is a strong sense of one's journey through life, and of how tiny we are in the face of the landscapes and the ever-changing earth. Though not precisely comforting, I found a lot of solace here.
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