Carl Phillips asks in ‘Foliage’, ‘When did syntax and life become indistinguishable from one another?’ Art and Life; poetry as the transformation (not transcription) of experience in words. In reading Scattered Snows, to the North, I shall take my cue from Phillips’ essay. For these are thoughtful, expansive, if sometimes also frustrating to read, new poems made up of lengthy, sinewy sentences and syntax a muscular intellect tethered to a body that loves, desires, and also decays. Tethered to—to use Yeats’ beautiful phrase—that ‘rag and bone shop of the heart’.

I’ll have to pull back my instincts, my desire to allow myself only to feel this work, not to feel I have to know it and show how I know. Because isn’t that what a book review is all about? A professionalised description of contents and effects, identifying themes, motives… Yet, as Louise Glück writes, ‘Within the discipline of criticism, nothing is more difficult than praise. To speak of what you love… to speak of such work is difficult because the natural correlatives of awe and reverence are not verbal.’ …

Anne Casey’s third poetry collection is a sensitive and nuanced portrayal of deeply personal grief that yet, somehow, leans always a little towards the light. Touching the poet’s own experiences of mothering young boys in the face of wide-spread environmental crisis, on the turmoil and isolation of Covid-19, and on losing her parents, the light we cannot see is one of those rare collections that uses language as a prism through which you, I, we, see the living world anew.