Folding Time by Jules Whiting
'This highly charged collection of poems pitches direct into the elemental without recoil, reminds us that “we are made of the same elements as the stars themselves.” The core of the book is the sequence that reimagines the cadaveric donor as a baby cradled in a lambswool fleece, elicits the scary name of Trundle Ward, confronts the truth of terminal illness and, heartbreakingly, addresses her significant other: “I want– / to run with you the tunnel’s length, echoing/ our voices forward over Amwell Springs.”
As it was with Heaney, Whiting’s truths are to be found in the rendering of physical detail with pin-point fidelity: “the pure light drained.” Her habitat is the lyric,both exploded and formal; she turns it into the perfect vessel for her compressed narratives. A strange prescience permeates these poems, which cannot be named. It is a stunning debut.'
Tim Liardet, Professor of Poetry, Bath Spa University
As it was with Heaney, Whiting’s truths are to be found in the rendering of physical detail with pin-point fidelity: “the pure light drained.” Her habitat is the lyric,both exploded and formal; she turns it into the perfect vessel for her compressed narratives. A strange prescience permeates these poems, which cannot be named. It is a stunning debut.'
Tim Liardet, Professor of Poetry, Bath Spa University
Despite its themes of loss, pain, brushes with death and chronic illness, what shines through Folding Time is sunlight, hope, gratitude for the rapture of living and theastonishing beauty of the natural world, brought alive with the pin-sharp clarity of a latter-day John Clare. Page after page the reader is rewarded by such lines as ‘sunriseas an art form’ or the visceral intimacy of the ‘two squashed beds of green / where deer have lain side by side/ and left behind their broken warmth’. Wonderfully life-affirming, Jules Whiting has written a book to be treasured and widely shared.
Dr. Jenny Lewis, The Poet’s House, Oxford
Dr. Jenny Lewis, The Poet’s House, Oxford
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