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olgareads's review
5.0
What a gorgeous, heartbreaking collection. Briony has an incredible way of putting words to the most elusive parts of life: grief, pain, loss, the feelings that are so intense, it's near impossible to really pin them down.
If a person has two deaths, then the space between the first and second is rarely such a visceral yet tender state as these poems, at once mourning a mother and keeping her alive in complicated memories, wishing to relate the fierceness of them while holding them gently on the page lest they break and fade away completely.
From the awful realisation that death, when it should bring a family closer, can create new wounds between father and daughter ("You peeled me, / dug your fingers / into my yolk until / I erupted, bled my / golden insides out / across your palms, / transmutation of / ovum and snails." — 'Confession'), to the exploration of a depression that never truly leaves ("Who would notice if you stayed in bed / and fantasised about dark passages, / the damp earth, eulogies?" — 'The Sound of Waking'), Briony's poems will pull goosebumps from your skin, like incantations, like sea breeze from a far away place you cannot touch.
If a person has two deaths, then the space between the first and second is rarely such a visceral yet tender state as these poems, at once mourning a mother and keeping her alive in complicated memories, wishing to relate the fierceness of them while holding them gently on the page lest they break and fade away completely.
From the awful realisation that death, when it should bring a family closer, can create new wounds between father and daughter ("You peeled me, / dug your fingers / into my yolk until / I erupted, bled my / golden insides out / across your palms, / transmutation of / ovum and snails." — 'Confession'), to the exploration of a depression that never truly leaves ("Who would notice if you stayed in bed / and fantasised about dark passages, / the damp earth, eulogies?" — 'The Sound of Waking'), Briony's poems will pull goosebumps from your skin, like incantations, like sea breeze from a far away place you cannot touch.
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