The Poet Spells Her Name by Sarah Connor

But I wish, just once, she would gorge herself, and turn laughing, with juice-stained lips …

I said of Sarah Connor’s debut poetry chapbook, The Crow Gods, published by Sídhe Press, that it was a significant collection, never anything less than sensory, a debut far from novice territory, one that I’d bookmarked into the memory.

Her follow-up full poetry collection, The Poet Spells her Name, just published by Black Bough Poetry, takes all the courage The Crow Gods never claimed but we all knew was there and takes us on a fierce flight of unapologetic force in the face of fear, through a rocky desert where we gaze at stars as if we are travelling in a small boat across an empty sea whose map, we are about to learn, is impossible to fathom.

I first read this collection over Halloween, sharp mornings were the sea wiped the pane of the passing train, and it haunted me, not because of the season I was sweeping through, but when I looked out at the force of nature, the depravity of humanity all around me, that day, a week earlier, a month earlier, a year earlier, I was reminded life is that freaking scary every single day. This is not a seasonal read but an exploration of everyday life, drinking sunlight, kissing bakers, a memory of movement. This is the illuminating tale of how the fox hunts on the corners of our dreams, looking for ways to extend its shadows into the light of our darkening days of swarms, plagues, storms.

Sarah gathers hunters, hares, foxes, dogs, red blood, black feathers, brown leaves, ugly yellows, wolves’ teeth, wings, hurricanes that tear at lips, secret places left empty, poisoned but still beating, snarling, biting, devouring, and mixes it with soot, the final reminds of things already burnt. This is a collection whose entrance is through a scar but this is not the story of that scar – this is the ferociousness that has grown around it, fierce and feeding on its own fear.

This is the stream that once ran through parts of the body now turned to desert, deserted, dissected, the jolting bus travelling out of the night, the hunters, the hunted, holding out, the root of a tree creeping down into the darkest places finding life dancing on the edges of cliffs, the rattling bones of a crone, husked and hollowed – that dead thing woven out of life, still living, still counting, accounting, learning, teaching, leaving lessons in her path, reminding us of those juice-stained lips and all there is to gorge on.

In these pages, Sarah’s skill at language, lyricism, and lining up life on a page, captures the impossible light, so light, so impossible to hold – early morning, the sun just coming up, and the world fading into colour, but when it catches your skin, your breath, your being, it seeps inside, never to be truly removed.

When you finish the final poem of frost and stars, you close the cover, you place it on the shelf and then, days later, it catches you, some parts you first cradled have crumbled like pockets of lost things, but other lines, like sprigs of rosemary, have left their scent in the lining, never to be removed, and in relief, you let out that long-held sigh.

This is a collection of all that is flawed, but beautiful.

Find out how to buy your copy of The Poetry Spells Her Name at Black Bough… https://www.blackboughpoetry.com/sarah-connor-the-poet-spells-her-name

Follow Sarah on Twitter at https://twitter.com/sacosw

Follow Black Bough on Twitter at https://twitter.com/blackboughpoems

Follow Sarah via her website https://fmmewritespoems.wordpress.com/

For all things Sidhe Press and The Crow Gods check out https://sidhe-press.eu/