It's Late

It is extraordinarily difficult to write about very young children (especially your own) without self-indulgence.  This fine poem dramatises the shocks and anger of childhood which, as adults or parents, we probably prefer to forget.  Poetry is part of our memory.  As in this poem, memory may not be comfortable, but there is strength in its courage and its arresting strangeness.

I very much admired the poem's shifts, from easy speech to the abrupt, repeated "Died?", from the detail of woodgrain to the wide focus of "her furious blue gaze", and the child's sense of her own grandmothers

 "standing in the corridor of the time before she  was even born,

  waiting for her."

 This is a poem of vision, at its best and bravest..

Alison Brackenbury