Air for sleeping fish

Plot

From Kirkus Reviews This debut volume by a young Scottish journalist finds power in objectification. Though Ferguson pens poem after poem in which hearts bleed, nothing actually pulsates: love, grief, and fear are held up to sharp scrutiny in short, economical lines, with precise imagery, and controlled lyricism. Theres nothing sentimental in poems such as Bad News, which compares a lovers escape to a slippery fish, nor in the midwinter love of Winter Sunflowers, and especially not in I Do Not Cry Like I Used To,in which the poet imagines herself a dried-up riverbed. Fergusons thumping syllabics, with her heavy consonance and compound adjectives, lend her a full-throated sound, as she details bruises, stones, and bones. Her sense of the seasons and their flora is never pastoral; her relentlessly bleak landscapes find release in springs riot of color (Outdoor Artist). The Day You Stopped Calling Me Darling typifies her attitude to two-faced love with its mad topography, and its silences that cut like knives. So terse that her poems sometimes sacrifice meaning, Ferguson nevertheless reveals herself slantwise, and thereby deserves attention. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Product Description Gillian Ferguson's poems draw on her intense but dislocated encounters with the natural world to interpret a variety of subjects. A city-dweller, but also a wildlife artist, her imagination is rooted in the country, using a painter's palette of vivid, unexpected color and her own personal yet unsentimental symbolism of flowers. Nature is the root for her powerful love poems as well as for poems which capture a significant fragment of memory or find the mythical within the ordinary. Review Arum Lilies Autumn Seat Back To The Hills Bad News Butterfly Kisses Cleared For Sheep Cliff House, Orkney Isles Clothes Moths Comforters The Day You Stopped Calling Me Darling Dear Norman Dependent Each Man Is An Island End Of The Year Fear Of The Future First Flat First Visit To Your Mother's Grave Flower Power Grey Kirk In The Mearns Grief The Handprint The Handprint Honeymoon In St. Lucia I Do Not Cry Like I Used To In Hospital-land In Hospital-land Light And The Year The Lion Summer Love At Easter Love In Season Morning Now Night Map Opium Poet Outdoor Artist Over-fishing The Owl's Hour Perpetual Winter Reclaiming The Garden Rowan Trees Seal Virus Seeing Signals Silent As Roses Slugs Small Town Stags In Glen Clova Sunny Evening The Swimming Pool Ghost Twin Unrequited War In The Gulf Weak Where Are You Winter Flight To Thailand The Winter Rose Winter Sunflowers Winter Walk -- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®