Louise is a rapidly emerging poet who I & a multitude of others have been following on Twitter & her blog for quite some time. It is such a privilege & a pleasure, therefore, to offer you my review of Louise's stunning collection of poems:
‘What
name defines me?’ asks Louise Hastings in her poem called, simply, Poet. Well, after having savoured the
delights of her first collection she is clearly a very talented poet who has
the ability to hold the reader in the simple truths and beauty of her words. So
many times I found myself stepping out at the end of a poem with a sense of its
wholeness fixed firmly within me. That is her writing style. Her poems tend to
capture you and hold you in the lilt and sway of her basic, uncomplicated
rhythms.
Phases of the Moon is a glorious concoction of poems that paint the
richest pictures of an Awakening, ‘away
from the grey and mechanic into the poetic and extraordinary’. In her opening
poem, Shadow Dancing, Louise likens
her soul to ‘a blown fuse’ as, through the process of writing, she begins to
accept the frightening shadows that have haunted her for so long as spaces of
potential discovery, ‘where there is life, death and love’. Striving
desperately to throw off years of shackled emotions, her plea is heart
wrenching and obvious in her poem Monday
as she craves the ‘twisted love and yearning’ of life as opposed to one that
merely ‘drips water along the windowpane’.
Her troubled childhood
features strongly in many of her poems. In the poem Phases of the Moon she finds herself ‘walking the asphalt lights
with jagged shards of memories’, a child cruelly deprived of ‘amber flight’.
Similarly, in Inner Child we find her
‘cloaked in moth wings and dust’ as she ‘trips down present-day halls,
corridors that smell of emptiness’.
Yet, far from being
confessionals, these beautifully crafted poems shine softly like petals in
sunlight: each one an epiphany that carries with it emerging hope as Louise,
herself, becomes ‘a little poem that could’. Love, too, touches her like ‘a
silken tendril along my skin’ as, freed now from the trammels of her past, she
finds herself ‘embraced by the scent of warmer rain’.
Whilst certain themes do
emerge from this collection, each poem is always glazed with a degree of
purposeful ambiguity. Louise has perfected the technique of wrapping her poems
in intrigue as her words take us towards familiar destinations via unfamiliar
pathways. Step into any of her poems and there is always something new under
the sun for us to discover.
Louise’s very first
poetry collection, having touched just about every emotion it is possible to
feel, leaves me thrumming with an inner contentment as her words linger like
the aftertaste of strong chocolate. And the way in which she dips her poems
into the universe and all its mysteries, for me, automatically draws out
comparisons with the poetry of Mary Oliver.
It is so hard to choose a
favourite poem from so many gems but I will leave you with the final lines of Seeing Zebras, a poem of time, mindfulness
and liminal space, where:
‘In
my underlying consciousness
lies
linear time,
full
of yesterday and tomorrow,
flowing
through heart and lungs,
through
endless breath
where love is earth’s glow off its
edge.’
