My review of Sarah Westcott’s new book, Bloom, has been published on Wild Court.
‘The poems in this luminous book, Bloom (Pavilion Press, 2021) are tight, fragmented things, varying in shape and typesetting, in a style both abstract and committed: the world placed firmly underfoot even as the work revels in strangeness and uncertainty. The first poem, ‘Apples’, strains at the edges of form, and the spare lines of the opening (‘Have you looked, / Have you looked deeply’) give way to prose vignettes on this question about the power of observation. ‘I look into the eyes of a dog and it is a violent act,’ Westcott writes later. ‘The dog eye is a landscape I cannot reach and the dog is running here. Language: a barrier, a raft of sticks, a child with a nest in his hands.’ This becomes a key theme of the collection: the power of the imagination in what we see, and how we create as much as we understand.’
Read more here.
Absence Club 