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Thorpeness
There is something richly circumstantial about Alison Brackenbury's poems: they are often rooted in a rural world, or in townscapes which sustain communities and preserve a strong sense of their history and what it gives them. Thorpeness has delicious surprises, among them 'Aunt Margaret's Pudding', a rewarding culinary experience based on a black-covered handwritten notebook of recipes from Dorothy Eliza Barnes, 'Dot', the poet's grandmother. 'When I knew Dot, she was a Lincolnshire shepherd's wife. But, as a young woman, she had been an Edwardian professional cook,' the poet explains, making her notebook a resource for the contemporary reader. The world of nature – birds, plants, weathers – comes alive in poem after poem, but there are also important poems of nurture. Brackenbury belongs in a long line of rural and provincial poets who bring England alive in forms and rhythms of renewal. She is a familiar radio voice, performing her won poems and narrating programmes she has scripted.
Skies
Skies is Alison Brackenbury's ninth Carcanet collection. In these poems, Brackenbury sustains delicate proximities between war and love, joy and sadness, summer and winter. Starting out as the first trees 'chatter into leaf', the poems cross through July's 'dripping amber' to January's 'false thaw'. The seasonal shift is reflected in the poet's larder, its variegating hues and tastes: honeycomb, parsnips, apples, broad beans, sprouts, jams and spices summon an air of harvest. But it is also the seasons of life that concern Brackenbury here: the poet's irrecoverable past, her youth 'which I can never visit, like a star', is at the same time the thing that never stops revisiting: in an unexpec...
Gallop
Alison Brackenbury's poems are haunted by horses, unseasonable love, history, hares and unreasonable hope. Brackenbury's Selected Poems begins in the almost Victorian villages of remote Lincolnshire, where her father tramped, as a ploughboy, behind great Shires and Percherons. Her acclaimed early poem, 'Dreams of Power', gives voice to a little-known woman from the past, Arbella Stuart, and her still-contemporary choices: safe solitude, fashionable London, dangerous love. Her song-like poems draw on years of experience of bookkeeping and manual work in industry, of VAT, of trichloroethylene on 'a thrumming lorry'. The poems take readers to northern China winters and the damp heat of Hanoi. And always the countryside returns: its mud, its huge hares, its stubborn sun. After nine books, major prizes and national broadcasts, the rush of Brackenbury's poems are a work in wonderful progress, full of surprises and renewals.
Then
Then draws on Alison Brackenbury's lifetime's experience of rural England, its people and its ways, and the threats to its survival. From the lapwings of her childhood Lincolnshire to the recurrent floods in Gloucestershire, where she has lived for many years, the poems reach urgently to both past and future, finding connections and disconnections. The signs of a changing climate are emblematic of larger erasures. The poems keenly focus the beauty and the harshness of the natural world. They remind us of our own fragility, and our responsibility: 'We are made of water. But we forgot.'
Bricks and Ballads
This book, the first collection of poetry (most in ballad style) in over five years from one of the United Kingdom's major poets, was finished when she was 50, with too much to remember: the shadows of the greater world, the bulldozers down the street tearing through a Victorian school ... the bricks go off to salvage and are lost in other streets but these ballads remain.
Singing in the Dark
"Brackenbury employs the seemingly simple English ballad (invented, more or less, by Wordsworth, and later favoured by the likes of Auden and Edward Thomas) to grapple with knotty modernity - a clash of form and content that carries the risk of wistfulness but, at its most effective, throws up compelling antitheses: "The robin brushes me at dusk / Our good bones fail. We leave no mark. / His voice, she writes, was clear and quiet. / I hear him singing in the dark." from 'Edward Thomas' Daughter'". --Cover.
Selected Poems
This collection includes the full range of Alison Brackenbury's work, from her longer narrative poems to lyric sequences. Her subject matter touches on horses, horsemanship, travel, history, domesticity, and love.
Eighteen Twenty-nine
In 1829 Alison Brackenbury's travels take her to three continents. The variously peopled landscapes of Asia, Africa and Europe are evoked with her lightness of touch, her granting rhythms and the grace of a subtle, distinctive prosody. The title poem was broadcast as part of the Mozart bicentenary celebrations on BBC Radio 3. Music always features in Brackenbury's poems; in this book she risks the dark of a minor key. The poems travel in time as well as space. And sometimes they also stay at home in a world of disorderly domesticity with cats and ponies.
After Beethoven
From Lenin Park, Hanoi, to the Humber, from wars near or remote in space in time, these poems come with their news of aftermath, and of the worlds which survive and recrudesce after the sky has fallen. These poems are touched by death, but more stubbornly by life. They are ordered in progression from shared to private history and out again; from foreign and exotic to familiar, domestic landscapes and out again to the world, the voice informed by the specifics of place. They conclude with A Short Story, a long poem that extends the narrative line that runs though Brackenbury's work from her first book.
