Sarah Hymas posted a lovely response to Paula Jennings’ pamphlet Out of the Body of the Green Girl on Tuesday 17th, February – for some reason I’m not able to insert a hyperlink into this message today, but the link to her blog is on the blogroll list to the right of this post. Nice blog too. She describes herself as ‘poet, editor and anti-hoovering campaigner’…
Then later today The Frogmore Papers 73 arrives. Here Louisa Michel says Frances Corkey Thompson’s The Long Acre “draws careful attention to the effortless and yet vital teachings of nature. With poetic grace she is able to examine the simple lives of birds and beetles, and use these explorations to identify how and what it is we humans keep on missing.” I like the reference to care and grace, both words that feel completely right for Frances.
She calls Slug Language (Anne Caldwell) “an intimate collection”, “words of desire, domesticity and death, and with a ceaseless vitality”. Yeay! That’s good.
And of From the Body of the GG, (see above and picture) she says:
“Delightfully uplifting, Jennings celebrates the numerous pleasures, small though they may be, which life grants. Scorning another for being: ‘…always one step ahead, your tight track ribboning behind you‘ she expresses her intent to take heart in every waking moment, ‘Here it is,’ she writes, just as ‘life says‘.
Reviews in Frogmore Papers are often very brief but they have a lovely sparkle to them. And of course it is a characterful publication, one of the stalwarts. It has been going for ages and preserved its own modestly irrepressible character all this time in true small-magazine tradition. May its shadow never grow shorter!