Poetic partners can help you go drifting out to sea
DRIFTWORDS, the second poetry collection from Chris Bainbridge and Eve Nortly, is different from most collaborations in that each poem is written jointly by both poets.
This is so effective that the blending of styles and ideas becomes invisible and, reading the poems, one would think they were the work of a single poet.
When I receive a new book of poetry, I start by randomly opening a page, reading the poems on it and, if they grab my attention, then I continue reading more methodically.
In this case the first poem I read was I Wish
That .... On a cursory reading it is a poem about the sea, almost childlike in its description of wishes for a better world with lines that made me smile.
Reading again I felt a heartfelt desire for a world where each individual life matters and where ‘no one was ever lost at sea.’
I re-read the piece as a metaphor for life with the writers asking for things then and in the final lines asking God, if such a deity is listening, to please arrange for that world to exist.
The traditional themes of the sea, its shores, the ports, the water, pirates, Vikings, sirens, monsters and shipwrecks, are all here in this book and they talk to us about life, love, beliefs and relationships; ours as well as the authors.’
Those Vikings grew in my mind from ancient fearsome and feared raiders to ancestors, to migrants and become as relevant to the modern day as they were 1500 years ago:
‘Our raiding party stole upstream into the island
As, with a blonde figurehead at our prow,
It was full fifteen hundred years ago As much as it was now.’ This is a book you will want to keep so that you can dip in and re-read and you will find more each time you come back. The final poem, Wishing, is a fitting conclusion, using language we can all understand yet, as all good poetry does, giving pause for thought and raising questions in our minds:
‘And I’m writing up a storm
till your words can keep me warm, on a postcard – Wishing you were here.’ »»Driftwords is illustrated by photographs taken by Chris Bainbridge and is published by PreeTa Press, a small publishing house based in the North West of England. The book can be purchased online at www.preetapress .com.