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<\/a><\/p>\nIn this third full-length collection, we are made to feel the elemental forces of weather, the ‘exhalation of tides’, the rhythms of language searching to reach beyond its limits in the need to apprehend<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201ca landscape of shadowed voices,<\/p>\n
beating wings and tumbling streams<\/p>\n
where we’re not so estranged<\/p>\n
from the language of stars.\u201d Dreaming of Islands<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Whether the poems evoke the isolation of the human and the harsh but redemptive power of landscape, the attempt to come to terms with the ravages to self, the struggle to survive and to continue to love, there is an acute sense of journeying to the edge of the ‘habitable world’ in order to return, better able to live.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In ‘Love in Whitstable,’ dedicated to a grandson, Louie, Hubbard writes,<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cBelieve me, if I could, I’d<\/p>\n make a deal<\/p>\n with that God<\/p>\n I hardly believe in,<\/p>\n just to show you what<\/p>\n it takes to be here.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Alongside an unswerving urgency, this work is peppered with felicitous detail and wry tenderness:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cthe homely brown cow<\/p>\n with the film-star fringe\u201d (A Meaningful speech)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ‘your small body shivering<\/p>\n inside your Ladybird airtex vest,<\/p>\n towel draped prize-fighter style<\/p>\n around your shoulders,’\u00a0\u00a0 (Nits)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n In a beautifully atmospheric backward glance, Hubbard gives us:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cas in the gloaming<\/p>\n of that smoke-filled gloom, I longed<\/p>\n to become what I could never be,<\/p>\n a light between despair and<\/p>\n luminosity:\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Smokers<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Hubbard’s painterly eye has a natural affinity for the page which she would imbue with the sensual layerings of a visual medium:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ”I try to write a line of colours,<\/p>\n <\/p>\n but words are a string of biro scrawls<\/p>\n without air or light or hue.\u201d White Canvas<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n But neither does she shy away from the predatory nature of art, the colonising role of the artist, such as in Blood Paintings<\/em>, after Andy Goldsworthy:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201che stuffed the sac of its stomach<\/p>\n <\/p>\n with blood and snow,<\/p>\n hanging it by its hind legs<\/p>\n from a hook in the Dutch interior<\/p>\n of the cold pantry.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A much respected art critic, Hubbard uses her knowledge and understanding<\/p>\n of this medium to powerful effect.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In the section, Over The Rainbow<\/em>, the poet explores, with a deft touch, a precise working of the image, representations of women in art and history; the destructive, sometimes violent force of love and sex, rigidly defined and culturally restrictive:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201calone amid the long<\/p>\n shadows of the bunker,<\/p>\n gave me<\/p>\n my wedding gift, the thin glass vial<\/p>\n placed like a fresh-water<\/p>\n pearl in<\/p>\n my palm.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Eva<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n What remains with me above all else, is the poet’s evocation of place, both spiritual and visceral, and most potent perhaps in the sequence Dreaming of Islands,<\/em>\u00a0 a gathering into itself of the inchoate, ‘anthracite dark’, the expanses of light \u2013\u2013 the dark just about mitigated by the light \u2013\u2013 which the poet must shape into human utterance.\u00a0 There’ s a defining sense of the healing properties of close observation, of how landscape can focus and restore us against the noise and clamour. A profound instinct that here in these forbidding landscapes, these islands, less shaped by the human, a language of compassion and redemption can patiently, courageously be brought into being.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In a postmodern world, there is an unapologetic desire to create a rich, mellifluous language within the spareness and anti-Romanticism of a post-modern world, one which can recalibrate the atavistic, almost Pantheistic presence of nature in a secular, degraded world. Again and again, these poems articulate what it is to work through pain and hardship, towards hard-won acceptance and the possibility of forgiveness:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cas the morning slips through<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 my fingers like sand,<\/em><\/p>\n like love, and the tireless waves push on\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 into their own futures, as I reach<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 for a pen, struggling to transcribe<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 word by word, sentence by sentence,<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 this fragile<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2026 yes\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n