Angela Leighton, "Something, I Forget" (Carcanet, 2023)

Today a review that first appeared in The Friday Poem.

I’ve come across a few of Angela Leighton’s poems before, in various magazines, but I haven’t read any of her previous collections and I didn’t have a sense of her overall character as a poet before sitting down to read her sixth book of poetry, Something, I Forget, published by Carcanet. This is artful, precise, thoughtful and quite often beautiful poetry. Leighton is particularly good at landing an ending. Here’s the second half of the first poem, ‘Snowdrop’, which also works well as an introduction to the collection:

Something I wanted to say which slips my mind . . .
So here’s a garden instead, and a snowdrop stiffened –
its natural antifreeze anticipating zero
(survival technique), like unfeeling learned, like frozen
bedrock closeting its secret deep in the earth.
Here’s my wilding garden of remembrance. It will run
to seed. But today, deep winter clamps and leaves
just a fragile whiteness surprised in its shivering bracket.

The poem establishes two of the main preoccupations of the book – nature, and forgetting (or trying not to forget). There’s a lot to admire here, especially that precise and suprising final description: ‘a fragile whiteness surprised in its shivering bracket’. It’s hardly original to take a flower as an emblem of human fragility – we think of all those classical poppies, Biblical lillies, the daffodils of Herrick and Wordsworth, and so many others – but the familiarity of the motif is part of the point, part of what it means to forget and be forgotten, reabsorbed into the larger flow of life, language and a literary tradition.