Böcker av Yvonne Baker

Yvonne Baker has the ability to conjure a world that is at once recognisable and fresh. In this two-part collection we travel with those whose migration brings new worlds and loss in equal amounts. Who do we become in a different place separated from a land that still calls us? Who do we become if we remain behind? Baker interrogates these questions in sequences alive with vivid details, illuminated with affection and empathy. Here lives flutter down in fragments, a shelter is built of story, and unwritten rules for the poor are exposed. Here Irish aunts and other saints leap from the page, ready with an umbrella, making a holy show of themselves, or finding peace in the deep waters of the heart. Themes of belonging, memory and what haunts us run through all of Yvonne Baker's work, and her gift is to bring new perspectives to the questions we ask about what forms us, how we navigate a shifting world and how we remember those we love yet never fully know. At the heart of this collection that tends a sacred fire:'Time judders slowly slides forward accelerates'.

In this prize-winning, lyrical debut full collection, we encounter poetry that is both delicate and powerful. Yvonne Baker writes in the liminal space between the interior and exterior world, illuminating both with grace and precision.What it means to belong, how memory constitutes us, how identity shifts and weaves, how we live in an uncertain world with authenticity and without giving up hope-these themes thread together lucid moments and small but vital epiphanies. And even at their most interior, these moments are embodied, we sense the person of another creature, we feel the weight of 'plastic babies', cup in our hands the porcelain of a pot that holds more than air, hear 'the clink of stone and shell' on a shingle beach, sit by a washing machine and weep and feel the 'roots / yellow as old bones, / shift in darkness, undeterred.'Haunted and haunting, Love Haunts in Shades of Blue, conjures the fragility of past and future, but like the 'Bristlecone Pine' offers the faith that '... the heartwood, linking root to trunk, / will be enough to sustain you.'

From its tentative first word ('perhaps') to the final phrase, realising 'here is no journey / only attending to stones- / like a story told yet again / by an old friend', the reader is immersed in a woodland that is alive with quiet yet profound epiphanies-the way we live and die; the way we might weave narratives that change our stories. In this liminal place, which is both a real woodland and an internal space, we learn that 'What matters is the silence that encircles you...' And we find in that silence a liturgy of the natural world we too often forget we are part of.