Blue Voyage, and Other Poems

The Blue Voyage, and other poems is a new collection by Anne French. The first in eleven years, it is confident in execution, elegiac in tone. A more comic initial section leads into a section of thoughtful but vivid sailing poems and then a number of elegies, laments and funeral songs from French’s ‘black notebook’. The final section voyages to Korea and includes some loose translations of poems by modernist Korean writer Han Yong-un. In their considerations of remembrance and writerly acts, these ‘translations’ aptly pick up themes introduced in the book’s first three parts and round off the book nicely: ‘Waiting / for the ringing of the bells announcing daybreak, / I put down my brush.