Burning Bright

‘Passerine’ by Kirsten Luckins (Bad Betty Press, 2021)

#7/31 The Sealey Challenge

This collection is a memorial to friendship, a nature journal across a year from summer to summer and a series of epistolary prose-poems and poems all addressed to ‘Dear Sophie’, following her death. There are 51 poems separated into six sections: Pollen, Pyre, Green Ghosts, The Night Inside Our Chests, Cometlight, The Cliffs at the Edge of the World.  Like all lyric poetry, ‘Passerine’ addresses someone who is not there and for whom the reader becomes a substitute, the receiver of emotion locked into the language of longing and loss.  The subtext is the precarious state of the natural world. 

At 2 am my skin was a tarmac road wobbling the air with heat.
Fifty/fires were burning above the Arctic Circle, they were a 
tyre necklace/flaming, and all the birds dropped from the skies
like Vietnamese/ monks. The sun tightened its cincture and the
equator ignited. The/ cradle of life reinvented itself as pyre,
and out of immolation came the/future, demanding an explanation
                                                   [p.32]

What is so refreshing in Luckins work is how clearly, gently and persistently it celebrates life, while mourning the death of a friend and acknowledging the Anthropocene. It achieves this element of hopefulness by reporting the detail of days which imbues the poems with movement, time and space. 

The clouds today roll smartly right to left, a hoop bowled
by a high-up breeze. It occasionally drops into the garden,
quick as a goldfinch, Then, the vine shakes its clamour of
elastic arms. Then, the cherry tests one heavy leaf at a time…
                                         [‘Dear Sophie’ p.29]

The letters include memories, most vividly of when Sophie had her son. Others are letters about the natural world reporting back to Sophie about the shape of clouds, the visiting birds and smell of weather.

Luckins experiments with form and memory to realise a vivid, sorrowful collection of poems that move and provoke,  that cry out against the jeopardy in which the world turns because of human destruction.  It is also a celebration of friendship and love, the threads that we must continue to weave in spite of death.

To buy the book: https://badbettypress.com/product/passerine-kirsten-luckins/