Notes on Disparity

This is the author’s fourth collection and the poems in it are, she says, the most personal she has ever written. They also make up what she says will be her final collection. As with her previous books, the poems engage with the language she uses as her medium – and it is her third or fourth language, depending on how one calculates it – in the manner of an observer on the outside looking in, rather than one inhabiting that language. It all goes to prove that native speakers do not have it all their own way when writing poetry in English. As the first two lines in the book say: “Lip-locked, / place-ridden.”