Echoes of our Lives by Anita Jackson is the latest poetry chapbook in the TRA[verse] series by Bearded Badger Publishing.
At first glance these poems might appear matter-of-fact, quotidian. But they reveal themselves, dealing with The Big Stuff: life and death, love and loss, the corporeal and cosmic.
The language in the collection is direct and spare, little given to flowery metaphor. Thus the images employed are those of its central concerns: the life and death of the body, along with our places in nature, in families and in the universe.
The title, from the last line of the final poem Old Photographs, gives a clue to the structure of this collection. Elements of the poems echo across the pages, calling back to us from a later poem. Or an earlier one, if we don’t read in sequence. That’s the thing with echoes – if you’re not there at the start, it can be hard to know call from answer. No matter. It’s all communication.
These echoes seem to radiate from the middle outwards. In the centre pages, two contemporary issues with fatal consequences are juxtaposed, literally facing one another across the held and read chapbook. But as these are the 11th and 12th of 24 poems, I think others might chime in sympathy across a different scheme.
The bodily imagery of drinking, drawing breath and chewing, along with a circulatory awareness is shared in The Love of Trees and Starstruck. Those questioning third stanzas, ringing and spiralling out in the fourth.
I remember the lost imaginary childhood landscapes of Our Oasis, and how these return with “memories of loved ones” as in Eternal Questions. These poems ask more questions than they answer, which is one reason they’re so involving.
There are echoes of other poets, too. Winter Nights shows us hoarfrost and rime as nature’s tinsel. This is a gentler, non-hyperbolic alternative to October Dawn by Ted Hughes. Here the ice is no harbinger of an Age all its own, rather a transient enchantment. January opens with an echo of T.S. Eliot, but most affectingly for me, being a creature of the greenwood, Paths Parted is effectively The Road Not Taken…Yet. That unwalked track we pass each day, knowing our turn will come to step along it, never to return. So softly tread, as the opening poem advises.
And that advice calls back again from Old Photographs at the end of the collection. Those dreams can only be retained if we go gently, to preserve them.
David Gladwin 