afterimage. poems from the family album and elsewhere (en Inglés) - Jane Williams

In afterimage, Jane Williams guides us through ’the multiple choice’ of lives haunted by relationships which are familial, professional, and strange, yet always seen with an unflinching and lyrical eye. Spanning continents and generations, these poems are precise with memory, and at times acute with longing for something / -where / -one else. Underlying Williams’ work is a mature acceptance of those ’things too close to the surface’. We feel ourselves in the presence of wisdom which always steadies and emboldens the reader’s gaze.

Liz Lefroy

afterimage moves from the captured past to a vital, examined present. Its poems spring from acute observations of the physical world as well as imagination - from ’four tonnes of bell-metal swinging full circle’ to the short-sighted field mouse’s ’whisker map of the world’. There are glimpses of monsters, delicate renderings of grief, and flashes of wry humour. This is a collection that not only surmises but conjures the links ’we divine, in and out / of frame, back and forth across the briny deep of our telling’.

Tricia Dearborn