Agnieszka
Studzinska reviews
The Other Side of Glass
by Gail
Ashton
If you
have ever imagined what life might look like through glass then Gail Ashton’s
collection The Other Side of Glass is a journey towards that. The poems in
this collection are sometimes tilted, we think we see one thing but maybe are
looking at something else, sometimes there is shimmering clarity and other
times, a complexity of meaning permeates through the work. In the poem, ‘She
knows’, we enter a strange and otherworldly place of knowing or perhaps not
knowing ourselves or the world we inhabit. This spacious poem, chisels language
to sculpt a metamorphosing self:
….she is
destined for the small life: the grammar of nighfal, lillies,
crawl of
skin, fall and flutter of heart. Things she knows verbatim,
heard,
unseen. Words that won’t lie down.
What floors us everytime
The
strangeness of language is captured in the poem, ‘Still some way to go’:
You were
the kind of girl to eat magnolia and know the
subtleties
of beige. Me I dreamed of chaos, the outrage of a polar
sky. The
poem could be described as an ode to love, I am done with love, it’s
disappointments…..,
says Ashton and she leads the reader to
follow a’ Wet snout to a
pitcher
of ice, snow-hole, a growl of lightning bluer than the arctic snow. And still
some way to go.
Ashton’s
writing in this collection reflects different shades of meaning in this world,
we move gently from one subject matter to another. In ‘Still Life’, Ashton captures
the moment of stillness. She creates a distance between herself and the reader
as well as the closeness she brings through her surprising images, which flow
from one line to another, to paint an evocative still life moment.
It’s the
small things, snags of lemon grass
in a
voice, once the waterfall of a spine
and I am
caught
light on
the back of a hand,
in an
evening that comes with a shock
of
citrus, bass notes blue jazz patchouli
and
flocks of humans
falling
through a window
to the outside
of my skin.
Her work
is both assured, and rooted in what may be personal memory in ‘Emigrating to
South Africa’ and in ‘In the garden’ as well as unassuming; ‘In praise of days’, a
simple poem on friendship; encompassing what others often steer away from in
the collection, a straightforwardness, we know where we are. This familiarity
cannot be said of the poem ‘Signs,’
its silence preys on nature and the semantics of waiting:
moments on which a day
might turn
Like
deer, liquid as the slip of water separating us
watched for
never come
The lexicon
of Ashton’s poetry is vast and skilful.
She is a poet that you will re read with intrigue and like her poem, ‘Something,’
find yourself observing the starkness of humanity:
This is
the way of all of us:
slow
fade, skeletal at the last
Agnieszka
Studzinska has an MA in Creative Writing from the UEA. She teaches and edits a
local community magazine. Her debut collection, Snow Calling (Salt) was
shortlisted for the London Poetry Award in 2010. She is currently working on
her second collection.
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