I Review Lucy Ingrams' Light-fall

All That Is Most Hopeful

Light-

           fall

by Lucy Ingrams

Flarestack

After heartbreak, the thought of another love, a tender love, can become a dry territory to be skirted, or walled off. Not in Lucy Ingrams’ Light-fall. Here, ‘loved me    loved me not’ exist in the same breaths and curvatures, to love, have loved, ‘is to carry  …  is to be carried away.’

Reading these poems again and again has enabled for me a different vision of what it is to be alert and sentient in the world after a thinning love: they are open with courage, even when (especially when?) ‘weary of flowers’.

Bound in the familiarly confident Flarestack style, each page holds levers, phrases and twists of sound, which shift and interact to unlock sensations of light and thorn, and above all a strange hope.

It is rare to find a pamphlet in which every poem sings, and I enjoyed so much about this from the very start. Its lines flex, supple as the sea rendered in the exquisite opening poem, Swimmer, right up to the final exhalation of Blue hour. The rich imagery of intimacy and distance ranges across landscapes and seasons, with an originality that requires close attention.

‘Can / you-in-me really heal?’ asks Ingrams in Lammas. Yes. And what is more, she has made the intimacies of a love’s passing available to her readers as a balm, beautiful as skylark song, strawberry light, and greenwood.

Light-fall is available from flarestackpoets@gmail.com