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Poem Of The Week: Dark Peak, February By Alison Binney

Dark Peak, February

stone walls lean green-furred
faces into horizontal hail

snowdrops nod huddled heads
at mute daffodil spears

starlings witter and wheel
tumbling to earth like leaves

water gnaws the track’s edge
where the chaffinch hops

under lightning-black twigs
catkins dance like drying socks

Whilst tangential to the prevailing tenor of her fine new collection, Alison Binney’s delicate pinioning of a moment in a winter’s landscape retains the stylistic poise that is an identifiable condition of her poetry.

Unpunctuated and suffused with persuasive alliteration and onomatopoeia, a kind of roving eye is actuated as the narrator surveys a dripping terrain whose aching release from winter is still a prospect. The burgeoning dynamism of the tableau – the silent delicacy of nature’s rebirth, the wild, undirected energy of the starlings and the delightful image of the ‘drying socks’ of catkins – is exquisitely drawn as a beguiling vista opens in the impossibly confined space of five short couplets.

‘Dark Peak, February’ is taken from The Opposite of Swedish Death Cleaning, published by Seren Books and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher.

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