Description
Book SynopsisThe Silence Living in Houses unlocks the doors to houses of secrets and dreams where ghosts of the past are more real than the living. In unsettling poems rich with intrigue, Esther Morgan traces the presence of those whose stories are fading like the wallpaper: the servant girl who smashed the dinner service and disappeared; the sisters whose macabre end is still spoken of in whispers; the mistress who breathes sweet nothings from behind the roses. At the heart of the book is the darkest of interiors where the threat and practice of violence forges a bond as unbreakable as the Mafia's code. But not all these houses are unsafe: the final poems summon up the haunted blood of family, revealing how what remains unspoken is as much concerned with love as it is with loss.
Trade ReviewEsther Morgan's poems are full of hints and mysteries ...But there are joys here as well as anxieties, and it is the two that amplify each other into such clear, poignant and resonant shapes. -- George Szirtes
Morgan's voice is gentle and sensuous, lingering over images of beauty as well as horror... Her language is delicate, her images and metaphors unforced, giving the poems an organic quality. -- Rachel Elliot * PN Review *
Themes of erasure, absence and isolation are explored in a voice so ingenuous, its language and syntax so plain, that it takes a while to notice quite how disturbing the poetry is. -- Stephen Knight * TLS *
