A Heart- Squeeze of Beginnings and Endings

This collection of poems celebrates the turning seasons of an English countryside, and the seasons of our lives and how these intertwine.'Jenna Plewes’s new pamphlet, full of exquisite poems, is packed with exciting and accurate imagery. The reader doesn’t so much observe her work as inhabit it. ’In the Kingdom of the Egg’ she writes in the first person, so we experience birth as unshelled unsafe skydiving into my life. Many of these poems, which follow the four seasons through the year, begin with very precise descriptions of the natural world, but develop towards a deeper understanding of the human condition which may involve some menace. In the heartbreaking description of ’The Winter Calvary’ a severe winter adds to the pathos of the scene. Even the worshipper experiences sleet as lashes on his neck and the carving of the crucifixion is compared with carrion stretched on a boundary wire. In all its beauty and complexity this is a collection not to be missed.'Jenny Hamlett'A remarkable collection of meditative poems where Jenna Plewes charts, with a humane heart and a sensitive, observant eye, the continual flux and fragility of the natural world and human life. Her language is sensuous yet precise (slow summer days 'drip like resin') and her imagery surprises with its freshness and invention (the sea is 'bright/as a delft dish' while a melody soars 'wide-winged as a condor'). A bitter-sweet sensibility pervades many poems -sometimes poignant, sometimes celebratory but never sentimental. Here we find decay, shadow, absence yet also a great assurance that the great wheel of life will turn, so the old man in the garden, 'bent as a crooked finger', looks around and 'raises his head, lifts a hand'.Several poems transform the mundane to offer us a brief glimpse of the numinous in the everyday: cleaned windows bring 'a glitterball of sunshine' into the house; and harvested potatoes are 'meaty, misshapen, scarred'. In the wonderfully titled ’In The Kingdom of the Egg’, an unhatched chick with 'scribbled scrawny wings' is 'gripped in a marble fist' but its hatching comes as a transcendent, energetic release, 'skydiving' into life. Just one of the many small, unexpected yet marvellous epiphanies that transport the reader in this rich and beautifully crafted collection of poems.'Rebecca Hubbard