Description
Rachael Boast’s series of seven poems speak of fugitive places and spaces where ‘shifting edges’ of landscape and mindscape merge with each other, and do not merge. Here time slips, and time’s lips speak to us of histories, remembrance, spirits of old houses, and of woods that figure as rooms without walls, all belonging in some elusive other time, a no less elusive now, and the slippage in-between.
This haunting and haunted poetry of mirror and charm, buried apothecaries, horse doctors, spells with strange ingredients (including a goose cry in a jar), creaking door hinges that sound ‘like horses / rubbing their voices in the frost’ – reaches ‘to the other side of memory’, to gothic places ‘suddenly / not the same’, yet just as we imagined them ‘down to /the detail of the occluded’.
Boast’s poems cast a spell over us, as we try to orientate within them, and fail to find their limits, enticing us keenly to backtrack to them and to dwell once more between the ‘angular bones’ of her lines. Timeslips is an intriguing addition to this prize-winning poet’s work, a poet justly noted for what has been referred to as ‘her intense lyricism’.
