Earthlight

Second Light Network Newsletter, Winter 06/07

Reviewed by Lyn Moir

Judith Taylor lives in Scotland. Some of her poems reflect this, others do not. There is some wistfulness, some sense of loss running like a thread through these pages. Sometimes the loss is that of a person, at others that of the countryside, because Taylor has left a small town to work in a city, and because industry and modern life creep inexorably on, encroaching on more rural areas. The poem (Developments) which starts

I leave my town
as builders buy the last of the space
to build expensive ugly houses,
stealing everyone’s view of the river

ends with

I move to the city and dream,
dreams in which everything is for parking cars on,
everything; and for sale.

‘Romance’ is a poem about bikers, men freed from offices to live Viking dreams on the open road with a ‘berserk roar’. Elsewhere ‘Scatter’ and ‘Stratum’ are clearly urban poems: the latter finishes

The city takes the evidence, grinding it down
to an oily grit that sticks to us all,
a thin glitter that might be some of our artifice.

Or maybe mica schist.

This too is a warm collection, but with more of an edge, a tongue-in-cheekiness which, coupled with the bucolic descriptions of country life, makes this an engaging book, well worth the read.