'Flannelgraphs' by Joan McGavin

This is Joan's debut collection, available from bookshops published by Oversteps Books . Titles beguiled me from the list of contents  - 'My Career as a Musical Instrument', 'Living with the Water-table', 'Shantung' - like a menu when I'm hungry. To quote Julian Stannard on the back cover: '...These are beautifully made poems which slip into our consciousness without fanfare or swagger and, again and again, they make their mark'. While Matthew Francis promises: 'These poems are full of subtle surprises, a word askew, a line ajar. When you put them down you'll find that the world is not quite where you left it.'  Indeed. There are ghosts in the collection as naturally as there are people, cars and animals. It's no good being startled - Joan brings them to your attention. They're there all right, They've brought their landscapes with them as we have our jackets... ('Dining With the Dead'). They speak to us clearly...Re-wind the videos I took of good men tipped over balconies. Re-build their unpieced bodies... ('A Corpse Leaves Instructions for a Working Funeral') and ...It was necessary to deaprt. The hiss of the fire on the flag of the hearth, as they were drowning it, reached my heart... ('The Wrens' House').

I've been reading about the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer on the Bloodaxe blog and was struck by the description there of how: ...'Many of his poems use compressed description and concentrate on a single distinct image as a catalyst for psychological insight and metaphysical interpretation. This acts as a meeting-point or threshold between conflicting elements or forces: sea and land, man and nature, freedom and control....' It seems to me that in some of Joan's poems too there are such meeting points. I'm not sure they are conflicting elements but humans meet swollen rivers ('Flood Warning, River Almond') and earthquakes ('Biography')  and are jolted into a close encounter with their own mortality. We see a hare: ...he stared ahead, as if to memorise the spot in the air in front of him he intended to punch... then find ourselevs face to face with the passing of time.

The deceptively gentle language can convey profoundest pain; as in the grief of 'Soft', the grim fortitude of  'Scullery' or the agony of 'One Use of a Painting' all the while retaining a seductive ability to find the true path that allows you, as a reader, to encounter these truths without flinching.  And the book is brimming with enchanting images: ...the names of places we may never visit move through the air like butterflies in the folds of clothing carried along the Great Wall from fort to fort.

It's a wonderful first collection and another thing I love about it is the way that Scotland appears in it. Huzza, Joan -  Thank you!