White Wife

It is rare to find a ghost story so convincingly wedded to the present as "White Wife".  The poem runs along a knife-edge, between despair, the "black dog" and humour, between the laconic and the lyric.

 The ghost, or woman, is as startling, "white as a pillowcase", and as shocking, with her breath of "long dead yeast" as any apparition I have encountered in modern poetry.  The music of the last lines is the final seduction, even for a reader, like me, who has never heard the word "voe".  As this poet knows, literal understanding of every detail is not necessary - and may even endanger - the hypnotic power of a poem.

Alison Brackenbury