Just about my favourite of the (far too) few new poems I've read this year so far is this from Poetry Review, http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/lib/tmp/cmsfiles/File/review/1022/1022%20Copus%20Miss%20Jenkins.pdf
Miss Jenkins has appeared in a Copus poem before and the 'out and back' form of this poem is one she has used previously, too, and so one feels not only that this is genuine and authentic, it is also admirably done, with its formal structure becoming apparent gradually, well, just after halfway actually. And it appears here, it being such a good marketing idea to have a poem in Poetry Review when you have a new book coming out.
Julia Copus's poems have a resilient delicacy, a gentleness that is always supported by cogent lines of thought, sure syntax and a thoroughly well-made quality that, poem by poem, gives a reader confidence to know that it isn't going to go wrong, it is going somewhere worthwhile and one will be carried to a satisfying conclusion.
The poems at the end on the subject of IVF treatment wouldn't usually suggest themselves to me as subject matter within my range of interest but are completely convincing in making the point that a good poem will be good irrespective of their theme. For instance, on the somewhat unlikely image of a pregnancy testing kit,
and beside it the silvery ghost of a second line
willed into being - frail as the arm of a sea-frond
trailed in the ocean - but failing to darken or turn
into more than a watermark.
Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden is a poem to return to time and again, its short and long sentences beautifully modulated between the intimate and the immense. Heronkind is a tighter statement of free verse. The Particella of Franz Xaver Sussmayr is four poems on the role of Mozart's student and helper in those difficult days of 1791 that will, I'm assuming, reveal more on subsequent readings. There will be several of those, and of the whole book, one in which each poem looks as if it will be worth further consideration. It is a wonderful set of poems that, if she wasn't already, establishes Julia Copus among the front rank of her generation of poets.
I'm sure this book will appear on many prize shortlists and win its fair share of those awards.
See you in Cheltenham, then.
