Publisher's Synopsis
The work in this collection is in many ways a distillation and a statement of her main themes, as exemplified by the landscapes she has visited. The book falls naturally into five sections, KirkAlloway, which takes its name from the poem which won the MacDiarmid Trophy, is concerned with the poet's ongoing affair of the heart with Scotland and things Scottish: Reservations chronicles her trip to Calgary, Canada: Pails is represented by a sequence of poems, each one an exquisite pointilliste gem; the section Of Ireland contains some fine observations too, notably By Patrick Kavanagh, selected by the BBC as an on-line poem in 2001. But she truly comes into her own in the section titled dark Gable in Mansfield: the poems here are a very powerful fusion of family memories and East Midland roots, the title poem recording a family memory of the Hollywood star visiting Mansfield "as if Mansfield was glamourous Palm Springs". Anyone who writes about this sort of material nowadays lives under the shadow of D. H. Lawrence, but make no mistake, Deborah Tyler Bennett speaks in her own voice, and a fine, distinctive, one it is, too.
