Something, I Forget

while news love meant to keep forever is wiped, so lightly, by this scanning weeper. 'Another Lighthouse' Angela Leighton's sixth collection of poems turns on the strange arts of remembering and forgetting. From Rome to Yorkshire, Naples to the Fens, she sets contemporary moments of hope and loss against a classical or Christian backdrop, while tracking a path that goes, more impersonally, from winter's cold to the growth of a garden. There are poems about war, love, childhood, age, and the wiping of memories they (differently) encourage. Whether elegiac or humorous, each tightly written poem is its own imaginable place, where words have the keen touch of things, yet things – a creaky old lift in a palazzo, a glass harp played in a backstreet, the CDs hanging on a tree, a clay doll in a museum – resonate like memorials to 'something' beyond themselves. Whether in strict or free form, in rhyming stanzas or verbal openwork, this is a collection that tests the sound-shapes of language while always listening for the tunes and rhythms that make it sing.

Angela Leighton was born in Wakefield, educated in Edinburgh and Oxford, and has taught at the universities of Hull and Cambridge. The daughter of a Yorkshire (composer) father and a Neapolitan mother, she has always recognised her heritage of mixed languages and conflicting standpoints. Her book, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (2018), sets autobiographical prose beside critical writing to suggest the connections between them, while her volume, Spills (2016), interweaves memoir, short story and translation with original poetry.