Full Description
The recurrent themes of Little Silver are inheritance, loss, and the relationship between real and imagined lives. Moments of crisis - a near-drowning, a fall down a mine-shaft, the death of a friend - prompt reflection on the stories 'we tell ourselves about our / selves', and on the sheer strangeness of existing in our bodies and in time.
The book's title sequence responds to the recent demolition of Jane Griffiths' childhood home, whose absence appears as 'a little silvering between the trees'. Setting its absence against the memory of 'Little Silver', a small enclave of houses in Exeter that she passed on the way home from school (and whose name fascinated her), she considers the gap between the two as the space of the imagination: the origins of her writing.
Other poems centre on the theme of childlessness and the relationship between that and other kinds of making; a sequence centred on conversations between an artist and her imaginary children concludes when the daughter asks 'So if we existed the tree could stand alone?' The emphasis in these poems is on inventiveness and endeavour, on lifelines and human traces.
Contents
9 Waking
10 Inscape
11 The Drowning at Porthcurno
13 Off-spring
14 The Amortals
24 Distance Lane
25 Foundling
26 Lifelines
35 Isolation
36 Grace
37 Out of the Picture
38 Negative Space
39 Snow and Privet
40 Moving the House
41 Little Silver
44 Charm
45 Tall Story
46 Homily
47 The Silence
48 From London far
49 Anchorage
50 Passage
51 Fugue
54 Life Sentence
55 Definition of Huer
56 Stet
57 Sometimes I forget you are dead because
58 Gone Fishing
60 Reading Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis on the Day of the Dead
61 Smokey Considers Hilton's Cat
62 Cot Song
64 Ghost Rhyme
65 Abstraction
68 New Year's Day
69 New Atlantis
70 Tailpiece
