Review

It is a fascinating idea to write poems with OS map references attached: somewhere between poem-biography and conceptual art, it constitutes a new kind of marriage between the lyrical poem and the notion of provenance. Where precisely in Stoke Poges churchyard was Gray sitting? Which view of Tintern Abbey did Wordsworth have in mind when visiting the Wye Valley? Jo Kjaer’s collection is intimately related to points in the Norfolk landscape. The poems are subtle points of clarity, riffs arising from specific settings, brief love letters to place, powerfully held together by the overall project which is the inscription of experience on place.

George Szirtes

About the Author

Jo Kjaer first visited Norfolk in 1948 when she was five, after living in other parts of eastern England she settled here in the 1990’s. During a varied career as designer, restaurateur, nutritionist, tutor, educational advisor and aid worker, articles on the history of food and special diets were published in magazines including Harpers & Queen, The Tatler and The Nutrition Practitioner.

In 2007, she gained a first in the Advanced Poetry Diploma at the University of East Anglia and won the first Café Writers Norfolk Poetry Commission: As the Crow Flies is her first collection. She teaches Creative Writing for the National Extension College and is working towards a second collection inspired by the landscape and history of Norfolk.

Aviatress
OS TF 898 304

I dream of the speed of wings,
the ruffling of dark forces
around the heart: a beggar woman,
drawing shadow arcs on tree bark,
stealing feathers, polished in a mirror,
for her bed.

If I had this feather for a hand,
if this gamble lost me a stake
in ordinariness, only the hawk
would see the woman hidden
in my eye.


Camera
OS TF 219 425

Someone else saw us
through the eye
of a square black box
as we smiled, and stiffened,

waiting for the click
that took our past,
catching it forever,
so that when we are very old

we will remember
to come back here,
and contemplate our lives,
on the blue canvas of the sea.


Moor
OS TF 901 303

Leaf free,
the colour of this place in winter
has every shade of light;
don't touch it with more than a wash over the water.

South Creake Church
OS TF 866 363

We sat beneath angels
and listened to a quartet:
Beethoven uncoiled in the air -
four bows tuning the mind,
one voice playing over and over,
until we were deaf.


Bluebell
after David Malouf
OS TF 979 333

I’m making a new theorem:
this bluebell is blue
therefore there is no other colour,
you said.

As if nature’s breath was blue,
passing over the wood,
transforming it
with a twitch of leaves.

Perhaps she carried the seeds
in her mouth and spat them out
recklessly, to push winter back,
you said.

This is a blue not of the night
or day, I said, it reminds me
of a small glass for eye drops
from Bristol, on the bathroom shelf.

I’ve got the hang of it now, you said,
I’m Persephone, lying down with spring.