A Girl in a Blue Dress by Rachel Burns
Vane Women Press
Just as Lowry paints scenes of working class life around him, Rachel Burns captures the very texture of life in Durham’s hinterland of ex-mining villages: scent of wild garlic in the woods, the rasp of the pheasant, chat of pigeon fanciers. She even echoes Lowry’s chalk-white skies. But her imagination is defiant. She’s a misfit, reading the TLS in the Library, and observer of her former self, a girl in a blue dress, who wanders off. Is she Okay?
Her poems risk bleakness but deliver a dark baroque humour and play with household tensions as child, wife, mother. She’s survived the hard way. It’s a triumph that the colour, drama and tenderness of her voice have survived with her. Her poetry is a brilliant interlacing of innocence and experience with a thread of disquiet always present.
“In her debut pamphlet, Burns shows her extraordinary range and clarity. Her poems lure me into an intimate, almost confessional space; and I step into their heartfelt territory willingly, before I am returned to myself after the characteristic bite of her closing lines.” — Elisabeth Sennitt Clough
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