Search results for ""Author Jane Griffiths""

The poems in "Terrestrial Variations" respond to the sheer chanciness of life. They are elegies for friends, relations, dead selves, and unrealised lives, but - like Jane Griffiths' previous poems - they are also full of things, both real and remembered, whose importance is as much literal as it is symbolic. Linguistically playful and sometimes ironically impatient with their own attention to detail, they record repeated attempts to make sense of the world and the strange business of getting on from day to day. Their slant perspective invites the reader too to realise: 'You'll never again say this is where I stand, and mean it.' Jane Griffiths' previous book "Another Country: New & Selected Poems" was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. "Terrestrial Variations" shows her extending her explorations of people and place with delight at being in the world, despite the threat of loss.

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The recurrent themes of Little Silver are inheritance, loss, and the relationship between real and imagined lives. Moments of crisis – a near-drowning, a fall down a mine-shaft, the death of a friend – prompt reflection on the stories ‘we tell ourselves about our / selves’, and on the sheer strangeness of existing in our bodies and in time. The book’s title sequence responds to the recent demolition of Jane Griffiths’ childhood home, whose absence appears as ‘a little silvering between the trees’. Setting its absence against the memory of ‘Little Silver’, a small enclave of houses in Exeter that she passed on the way home from school (and whose name fascinated her), she considers the gap between the two as the space of the imagination: the origins of her writing. Other poems centre on the theme of childlessness and the relationship between that and other kinds of making; a sequence centred on conversations between an artist and her imaginary children concludes when the daughter asks ‘So if we existed the tree could stand alone?’ The emphasis in these poems is on inventiveness and endeavour, on lifelines and human traces.

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The houses and landscapes of childhood exert a strong presence in Silent in Finisterre. Recalled by name, in incantation, or described in ways that recapture their irreducible reality to a child for whom they are the totality of the world, they become a kind of memory theatre: for Jane Griffiths physical things are remembered both for their own sake and to explore how they continue to shape the self. Style impresses as much as content in her resonantly evocative poems, with sentences played against line breaks to create constant small disruptions of the expected sense, while predictable phrases and forms of words are summoned only to be rewritten. Here language is not a transparent means of conveying a message but a medium that - no less than charcoal or oil paint - materially affects what is expressed through it. Form and subject are as inextricably entwined as 'the echo of port in the night's starboard, / the terra firma that is silent in Finisterre'. Jane Griffiths' Another Country: New & Selected Poems was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2008, and followed by Terrestrial Variations in 2012. Silent in Finisterre shows her extending her explorations of people and place with delight at being in the world, despite the threat of loss. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

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