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    Ebook103 pages33 minutes

    Then

    By Alison Brackenbury

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In her latest collection, Alison Brackenbury draws on her lifetime’s experience of rural England, its people, and its ways. From the lapwings of her childhood Lincolnshire to the recent floods in Gloucestershire and the signs of a changing climate, the poems reach urgently to both past and future. Keenly aware of both the beauty and the harshness of the natural world, Brackenbury reminds us of our own fragility and responsibility.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCarcanet Press Ltd.
    Release dateMay 1, 2013
    ISBN9781847777713
    Unavailable
    Then
    Author

    Alison Brackenbury

    Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953, from a long line of skilled farm workers. For the last forty years she has lived in Gloucestershire, where her varied jobs included twenty-three years working with her husband as a metal finisher. Her poems (written in small gaps between work, child, horses, addictions to music and grassroots politi) have won an Eric Gregory and a Cholmondeley Award. Recently retired from her day job, she has become increasingly interested in performing her poetry, usually by heart.

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    Reviews for Then

    3/5

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    • 3/5
      Some wonderful poems in the first third of this collection, but there's a severe drop-off of quality towards the later end. It's not a long book either (only 90 pages or so) so that's disappointing. The better poems are those where Brackenbury (great name) uses her excellent ear for rhyme and rhythm, and writes with a quiet emotion: like in the excellent 'Bath Cubes', which turns a potentially-tasteless symbol of cheap fragrance into one of bittersweet sadness for lost friends. Elsewhere, sadly (particularly in a run of late poems about her horse) Brackenbury's poems lose all delicacy, and read like the musings of a blinkered Home Counties grandmother. A lesson about quality over quantity perhaps.