Harriet Torr's first pamphlet, My Father's Pot and Other Poems, is dedicated to her parents and poems about family life (and death) are central to this collection. Torr is a thoughtful and imaginative writer, who almost obsessively sifts her parents' different personalities and her relationship with them, bringing out amongst other things the curious ways people communicate or don't get through to each other. Torr's strong interest in communication is a thread through this collection: communication with words (" 'All we've got in this world, lad, / is the word', granddad used to say, The Disappearance) and without words ("We had an early understanding, the moon and I", The Hack Man; "the crisp altar of their understanding", He and She). When we don't or can't communicate directly we may live in our minds or 'imaginations'. Torr has several key poems on this theme. She is fascinated by children, adults talking, thinking about, what is only present to the mind's eye ("one roll / of the eyeball and there you were", Death of a High-Riser; "we drew voyages of the world / that circled the mushrooms' dew", The Wall). What might otherwise be conventional poems about the past gain a special spark from this layering of interesting reflections.

Dilys Wood, General Editor