Salacia

This collection opens with the darkly powerful poem, ‘Gwen Ellis’, ‘the first woman to be hanged for witchcraft in Wales’, the note tells us. Written in first person, the voice inhabits the moments before and as the ‘gallow-wood cracked/and knocked beneath me’. There is a potent imagination at work here, where the crowd are described with their ‘mouths wide/as caverns’ as Gwen steps defiantly into the noose. Other female personae are used to explore themes of sacrificial love (‘Blodeuwedd’) and anorexia (‘Shrinking’, which draws on the historical ‘fasting girl’ Sarah Jacob’s demise). The title poem ‘Salacia’ plunges us into oceanic depths, the poet drawing on Roman mythology here, Salacia being goddess of the sea and salt water. Though her usual personification is of the calmer, sunnier aspects of the sea, you don’t get that here. The poet has chosen a more fraught scene from the myth, or perhaps goes beyond it, to where there is ‘Spiralling darkness./Then the boundless/black-blue of bruises’, where ‘Your golden band/appals me,/folded about this finger,//swollen and salted/as a womb-pickled/baby’. This is a book of pain, and the imagery often commands attention. At times, it can feel rather too over-wrought, and sometimes the metaphors clash. However, you can feel the way the poet reaches for meaning: ‘Grow the bleach from your hair, cut the ends clean away,/embrace the darkness that has been mauling/at your roots for years’ (‘Waxing’), and she is an adept at skilful line-endings. There are some strong poems and plenty of powerful moments. ‘Exposure’ brings home the humiliating aftermath of rape: ‘They asked for a cut of my vest-strap, took/the underwear pooled around my ankles/with gloved hands … I shuffled/from the clinic in the drab clothing of a victim,/the last shards of me gathered in a clear bag’. Salt and salinity are oft-used tropes throughout the collection, which tallies with the impression created by the cover image of a woman submerged, possibly drowning. The ‘underwater’ imagery is often compelling, and the back-cover blurb speaks of this poet writing about ‘mental disorder and the intricacies of depression’. The poetry is embodied and fiercely lyrical: ‘I creep to the shallows, my hollow heart briny/and swollen with the harsh tug of glinting objects’ (‘Hoarding’), and poems like ‘relapse’ describe anorexia’s hold: ‘i could have sworn i’d shaken/you off years before, dislodged/you with a hard gulp// … nevertheless – here you are/again, the same dead form,//the same shirking shoulders,/damp with river-water’. ‘Collision’ is one of the stand-out poems, for me, the language precise in its strong spare images. Here, the reader can picture vividly ‘the way the motorbike sailed/through the Brecon Beacons, headlights dancing, wheels//ablaze’, and this leads the speaker to reflect on the impact of traffic on various animals, such as ‘the seagull, crack-necked/and crumple-winged; the fox, all shades of red …