Barbara Lennox, who is a trained scientist, observes the natural world with loving and critical detail and she analyses what she observes through the lens of a poet and a philosopher. She speaks of the profound and shows us illuminating flashes of the ghost in the machine, the spirit in all living things, the delicate balance of life and death, endurance and extinction, pure joy and bittersweet loss. She teachers us about the connectivity of everything and how a single moment of true immersion in nature can give us a moment of true transcendence. We not only can experience the ghost, we are of the ghost ourselves.
In this collection of poems Lennox has arranged and placed them into four categories: Nature, The Past, (in which she shows her knowledge of both history and mythology) Ideas (thoughtful and provoking) and The Human Condition (so human).
Under Nature, you will find these riveting words from the title poem:
“I am not life or death
but the smoke of their collision,
the first breath, the last gasp.”
In her poem Brock (a badger) we read:
“They are sleek
and powerful
under the moon,
with limbs like shovels.
They are striped with midnight.”
In Past we know the dying of an orca in her poem Hulk:
“But in time she turned silent,
slipped into a doze that was half a dream
of coiling ink-black seas
beneath a firmament of night.”
Under Ideas we find the mesmerizing poem Eclipse of the Moon. Listen to these magnificent words:
“And so it seemed the moon I knew –
the serene and silver globe
that sails between the nebulae of space –
was now a bowl of blood, bleeding into a night
razor sharp with stars.”
And as an example from The Human Condition, from her poem Living in the Moment:
“I see the angle of a seagull’s wing,
The perfect green of a leaf.
I feel the warmth of a man’s sleeping body.”
This is a book not to be missed by those who love poetry, and a book to launch a love of poetry for those who may have shied away before.
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Top reviews from other countries
Steve Griffin
Nuanced, accessible, human
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 13, 2021
Discerning reader
A complete delight
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 19, 2021