Then

By Alison Brackenbury

Then draws on Alison Brackenbury's lifetime's experience of rural England, its people and its ways, and the threats to its survival. From the lapwings of her childhood Lincolnshire to the recurrent floods in Gloucestershire, where she has lived for many years, the poems reach urgently to both past and future, finding connections and disconnections. The signs of a changing climate are emblematic of larger erasures. The poems keenly focus the beauty and the harshness of the natural world. They remind us of our own fragility, and our responsibility: 'We are made of water. But we forgot.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Release date: Apr 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847777713

Alison Brackenbury

Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953, from a long line of skilled farm workers. For the last forty years she has lived in Gloucestershire, where her varied jobs included twenty-three years working with her husband as a metal finisher. Her poems (written in small gaps between work, child, horses, addictions to music and grassroots politi) have won an Eric Gregory and a Cholmondeley Award. Recently retired from her day job, she has become increasingly interested in performing her poetry, usually by heart.

Reviews for Then

[sometimeunderwater · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Some wonderful poems in the first third of this collection, but there's a severe drop-off of quality towards the later end. It's not a long book either (only 90 pages or so) so that's disappointing. The better poems are those where Brackenbury (great name) uses her excellent ear for rhyme and rhythm, and writes with a quiet emotion: like in the excellent 'Bath Cubes', which turns a potentially-tasteless symbol of cheap fragrance into one of bittersweet sadness for lost friends. Elsewhere, sadly (particularly in a run of late poems about her horse) Brackenbury's poems lose all delicacy, and read like the musings of a blinkered Home Counties grandmother. A lesson about quality over quantity perhaps.