Ghosting for Beginners’ amusing title poem plays on the idea of social-media “ghosting,” the act of going absent online after the end of a relationship, but there are many ghosts and hauntings in Anna Saunders’ fifth collection.
The poet’s delicate touch evokes the “gauzy blur” of other-worldly encounters. A jealous lover returns “shroud-bound” from his suicide, and hovers over his beloved and her new paramour: “All his sins are exfoliated now, his new skin/light as bible paper, lucent as rain.”
These poems show not only how ghosts touch us, but also how that ectoplasmic life might feel; they lead us across the shifting boundaries between the seen and the unseen.
Ghosts are not all human, “limbed and familiar;” there are other essences too. “And who will speak of the ghost of the rain?” Or of “the spirit of the air—the grassy fragrance/ plaintive amid the pollution…?”
Hinted presences are almost tangible in this ravishing yet precise language.
There is variety of subject, tone, and approach, from humour to poignancy. Throughout, there’s loss, and sorrow; a lost father’s voice somehow becomes that of a bird, in “the urgent song of a creature/asserting its claim on a darkening earth.”
In this poem and others, that claim of the living contrasts with the ghostliness in rich physicality: “the body’s incense, smouldering.” For “Aren’t we all wild garlic/rooted into the dark woods/offering ourselves to the gods,/cowering from rough paws,/blazing our pure stars?”
Whilst the rough paws buffet us, these poems delight and sustain.
Christine Whittemore is the author of Inscription, a novel. (Sowilo Press, 2015) and Sudden Arabesque, poems. (Oversteps Books, 2017)
You can order your copy of Ghosting For Beginners by Anna Saunders (Indigo Dreams, 2018) here: www.indigodreams.co.uk