Separation
Sleeping by myself is curious.
The strangeness isn't the product
of your not being here,
of the cold fact of disconnectedness -
but your refusal in our severance
to be utterly away!
You persist on the edges of perception,
a distraction -
an imaginary sound that turns my head,
a shadow half-glimpsed in mirror-glass,
the wraith of a perfume in the room.
Tonight I shall douse the light,
clamber into the emptiest of sheets,
close my eyes,
and fold myself away into your absence.
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From book reviews:
An interesting and ambitious poem, "Old women living together", is a dramatic monologue in which an old woman reflects on
her life and on her probable decline into senility, which she witnesses in the person of her companion. The poem is bleak:
"old age is a hurt that never finds a cure"; but it brings stark consolations, at least. If nothing else, she has learned
compassion and self-knowledge, and the ability to endure "even the end". The poem bears comparison with Roethke's
'Meditations of an Old Woman', though Poole's poem is more firmly rooted in the realistic mode and lacks Roethke's search
(through the person of the old woman) for a mystic dimension to experience.
...one of the pleasures of Words Before Midnight is Poole's control of imagery and rhythm, and the sense of an alive,
alert mind behind the poems. In 'Lovers, wind, night', one of the finest poems here, two lovers lying in bed on a stormy
night want nothing more than their own temporary warmth and security, even though they are aware of the wind shouting "that
life is an accident, / the chance propagation of matter in time, / flesh a poor house / and love a flickering light within,
incapable / of illumining / the monarchy of nothingness, wind's black kingdom." A pessimistic view of life underlies this poem,
but pessimism is not despair. The wind may be right, but out of the poem as out of the collection as a whole, comes a sense of
the worth of living, even if we are only "poor passing facts", as Lowell said.
- John Barnie in Poetry Wales
To read the complete text of this review, click this link - http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=13431
Words before Midnight was published by Poetry Wales Press
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