Thin Spells by Kristina Diprose
Black Cat Poetry Press
Thin Spells is a startling collection, in which the present is powerfully haunted by the ecological past. The poems are shot through with teeth, fur and feathers: from 'Cat Calling Card', charged with the energy of the hunt, to the snarling heart of 'Monokoke,' to the unsettling transformation of 'On Mother's Day' where the speaker slips 'into otter skin.' The poems consistently blur the unstable line between the animal and human and celebrate environments which are often overlooked: quarries, canal paths and aqueducts; school yards and penny arcades. The collection combines details from the urban and the rural to create landscapes which are striking in their specificity. In 'Murmuration' we hear the car alarms and clattering heels of the starlings on the Island of Coll, 'shining like oil slicks', whereas other poems insistently celebrate the tiny: the electric blue flash of a kingfisher, the lone gannet. Throughout Thin Spells, Diprose skilfully weaves together nature writing, myth and imaginative lyricism to conjure new stories for our times. These are poems of place, of galloping escape, of splintered teeth and loneliness; poems of loss, wrath, transformation and survival. But above all, Thin Spells conjures a fragile poetics of hope, perhaps seen most clearly in the title poem, where we find fragile possibilities in the 'enchantment of lacework/at the hard edges of the water.'
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