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Glass<\/em> is Elisabeth Sennitt Clough\u2019s first collection and she immediately draws us into a bleak, desolate world, with open skies, dark earth, shame and secrets.<\/p>\n She is a new voice rising from the Fens, from a desolate murky landscape, she shines with the sharp glint of steel and glass. Sennitt Clough\u2019s skill is to keep holding you down into her poems as you read them. Her skill displays the nature of the fen. The soil of the poetry goes deeper then you dare, takes you insistently downward and it\u2019s effect is mesmerising, uncomfortable and powerful.<\/p>\n Her first poem Sightings<\/em> is full with rich colours, internal rhyme and we understand this is the \u201crarest of gifts\u201d, a totem of the poet, a peacock, a strange bird inside a family, trying to understand it\u2019s own distorted reflection and escape. Be we can\u2019t flee the horror of the \u201cslow slow grab\u201d. She tells us \u201cour home was full of hooks\u201d.<\/p>\n It is satisfying that Sennitt Clough keeps us located and rooted to a place. A recurrent theme in her collection is machinery. In The Yard at Waterside <\/em>we find \u201cvinegar sharpness\u201d and a \u201cpox of rust\u201d and we walk with her into the machinery of the past. As we travel through sharp images, we sense we are colluding, sometimes knowingly. She has us questioning what is myth and truth. Her use of couplets is interesting \u2013 she uses them to control the flood of emotions and typically loosens them towards the end of her poems where they merge with a bigger chaos \u2013 or is it freedom?<\/p>\n Another theme recurrent in Glass<\/em> is curiosity and how this is controlled. Green-Eyed <\/em>is a great example of both the control and wildness in her poetry. She gives us lenses with a \u201cmutation in her eyes\u201d. One of the most moving poems of this collection (and there are many) is My Father\u2019s Coat<\/em>, where the daughter dresses in the magic of her father into a woven legend of strangeness.<\/p>\n The Collection is in three parts, each with a layer of distortion and revelation. She shows us the murk of the fens, the truth behind the fairy tales. In the excellent Codes of Behaviour in a Canbridgeshire Village <\/em>the sagging and oozing takes on it\u2019s own personality, you want to stop looking, stop reading \u2013 but you can\u2019t. Her S sounds in the poem are like a hissing, this poem hurts.<\/p>\n She gives us motifs of water spilling into earth, machinery that tries to control by brutalising, the need to look deeper are all engineered to remarkable effect in this collection. She manages with skill to use long lines in poems such as Potato Season<\/em> to echo the big Norfolk skies.<\/p>\n In Fidget <\/em>words like \u201cwrist flicks\u201d have a great effect showing us anger and loss of control and the confessional Glass Collar<\/em> where the poet writes that revelation can be it\u2019s own prison.<\/p>\n This collection stays with you, seeps into you with all the bleakness of the Fens. It also cries out to the reader, holds us in it\u2019s looking glass. It does what poetry is meant to do \u2013 makes you clutch it to your chest and cry while not knowing why because the poet is unsentimental, brutal, sharp and full of wild colours.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n