There is a lot to like about this new pamphlet. I'm not a big admirer of the term 'pamphlet' but apparently that is what the industry calls publications like this and so I must stay with the protocol.
It is 'some poems', isn't it, never mind how many.
It is evidence that Kathryn Gray hasn't gone away. I'm sure I wasn't the only one looking forward to her second full-length book of poems but I had by now just about forgotten, it having been 2004 ( ! ) when her debut, The Never-Never, appeared. Oh, my giddy aunt.
But she is to be admired for having waited for some poems that she wanted to arrive rather than press on regardless with the 'difficult second album'. Many wouldn't.
It happily comes signed and numbered and thus adds to the Signed Poetry Books collection without the rigmarole of queueing after a reading and having to exchange a few words of polite conversation or being hailed by the poet as 'European Man of Mystery'. It's been some time since the collection was added to.
It consists of nine poems over ten pages and so makes me feel better about my own frugal booklets.
The best poem in it, for me, is Bournemouth, with its reference to Rosemary Tonks which also makes me feel good about being one of the in-crowd that would know such a thing, as well as,
And my tears
will be nothing new, and the stars -
our startlers - the stars impossibly accrue.
On first reading, I read 'sparklers', which may or may not be intended to echo inside but I'm stuck with that forever now.
It rhymes when it feels like it but doesn't feel as if it has to and achieves enough of a casual sublime to make the short list for my Best Poem of the Year.
And it also references Brandon Flowers, more explicitly, and I was equally pleased with myself that I had to look up which band he was in.
Within its handful of poems, there are various signposts suggesting which way Kathryn Gray's poetry might be moving, like perhaps towards something more allusive than before but, if we are going to allow ouirselves to anticipate a fuller volume one day, it need not be restricted to any specific definition of what her, or any other, poetry should be like.
