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Linda Black’s sparkling poems charm and beguile - and then, quite often, twist a small knife. Under a rubric of ‘little involuntary musings’, she makes a miscellany of different forms: prose poems, grid poems, extended aphorisms with a sting in the tail, fantastical flash-fiction. They toy with nostalgia, trailing threads of real memories into imaginary word-gardens bristling with tricks. Words ‘collude / allude’, slip over each other, with many near-misses. They lean into one another, threaten connection, narrowly miss and ricochet in another direction. Allusions are so nearly (neatly-delightfully) pinned down, are always on the verge of escaping. Daintiness jostles disgust as the poems joke, jibe, curse, cast spells - about food, fripperies, old china, seemingly new-to-you trifles that really aren’t trifling at all. Then tugs and teases - at possible pasts, possible consequences, half-glimpsed narratives - all assembled into glittering bricolage.
-Anna Reckin
Comments on Slant:
Black’s hesitant, unclosed narratives and heart-stopping pauses are more reminiscent of the late Lee Harwood’s poetry: crystalline, fictive, artful. Her vocabulary is more recherche than Harwood’s, her poems often more tautly constructed, more pictorial. In her lusher moments she can disappear into lists of fanciful compound words and sonic pairings, although it is in and through these devices that her poetry achieves its rich, sing-song music; but there are ‘little gregarious footings’ (to quote the poet in ‘She takes herself out of herself’) whereby her poems gain purchase on a human story and haul themselves up and out into shared experience and the quotidian. […] …it is in her own searching, slanted stories that Black’s poetic gift shines, in her inventive use of nursery rhyme and old vernaculars, in her recognition that ‘bread needs the tin of strife’.
-John Muckle PN Review
The delicate threads of Black’s lines lean in such a way that stasis merges into movement … The presentation of each poem, with italicised words leaning against the rest of the text, is part of the whole exquisite design and ‘A life of custom & accident’ is held in a delicate balance. -Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence
