NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

An independent small press poetry review

NHI independent review
LISE SINCLAIR: HERE
North Idea
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This page last updated: 10th December 2007. 		LISE SINCLAIR: HERE

The slim volume takes its title from the Pablo Neruda quote:

	This is a port 
	Here I love you
and this is fine because the poetess and musician Lise Sinclair is happily at home with a few other hardy souls on that 6 square miles of bleak landscape known as Fair Isle situated at the point in the crosshairs 59.32N 1.32W in the North Sea between the Orkney and Shetland Islands.

I was reminded of the Hebridean poet Sorley MacLean's classic line that

	Time the deer is in the wood
when I read the first poem BLACK. It begins:
	The night 
	Sky has no 
	Commitment to black
	It collects light for light
	Years over millions
	Of breathless kilometres
	And flings radioactive 
	Aurora to dance
	Over my head
One can in such locations access that sense of timeless wonderment that is in the inner being; one can find that part of self that is at one with starry nights, feral creatures and the wild rhythms of the sea.

It was something of a shock therefore to come across a trio of cappuccino poems in subsequent pages, and even though they were also well-written, I couldn't help feeling that they were in the wrong book. After all, this was HERE and HERE was a place and a point in time according to the poet's dictionary source. It was with some relief that I passed on to PLAECE and with the dialect I once more tasted the worth of it like a golden dram of single malt. PLAECE begins:

	Hit geens doon
	deeper aes da litht fae da sun
	hedds life wi-oot air ur care
Presumably the editorial idea is that you don't know where HERE is until you've been somewhere else; in this case Florence.

I forgive Lise Sinclair for intruding with her Italian postcards because of lines like the following, also from PLAECE:

	Hi cuts
	whin da sky is weighed doon gruy
	steel clean trau da soul.
and this from CONCEIVED:
	A solstice of light. The sea stills
	Soft above fish and feels
	Bluefull and knowing
	How it is
	Being this close
Moving and wonderful. Like a shell to the ear.

And that unfortunate business with the aperitifs and mozzarella? Precocious talent seeks editor, perhaps?

reviewer: Gwilym Williams.