Three Seasons for Burning

By Lynda Plater
ISBN 978-0-9935103-0-4
Price £5

Currently out of stock. If you wish to buy, contact the poet at: lyndaplater@aol.com

 

Summer, autumn and winter are the seasons of many of Lynda Plater’s poems in which elegies, forebears and intense moments of recollection mingle. Her distinctive rhythms and language have a songlike quality, part homage, part celebration.

“there is a luminous quality to the writing: colour and light are everywhere, and at the same time there’s a lovely sound quality…

…the poems seem to me to flow naturally into each other, although they cover different images and events in both day and night. They are painterly poems, in which an owl flying at night, catching silver moonlight on his wings, is kin to the fishermen sailing through moonlight on the waves… “ Helena Nelson, Sphinx

“a commendable, accessible and enjoyable chapbook in which Lynda Plater explores succinctly the recurring themes of love and loss and the connection of the cycles of nature with the cycles of the human condition.” Graham Hardie, londongrip

“In what seems her deliberately plain but often highly charged lucid style, Plater seamlessly links past and present, also drawing on timeless symbolism.”  Dilys Wood, Artemis

 


Saving Fruit

And here the fingers are in the ruffle
of newspaper around the blush and
smooth skin of apples being laid out

for a later fruiting, gathering juice
as they sleep. Let us lie down then
on the bed of words in long night

as great-grandmother did and spoke
soft to her man as he roused sheets
to lie beside her in the feather bed

using the soft pronoun thou
as address. Not archaic but tender
as the blueness at the window

where the moon hangs. She lays
cold feet on his thick calves and
he murmurs ‘Thou art cold, lass’

with his whole roundness turning
to her thin frame all gentler
than the you we use. Thus,

lying like fruit, untightened, their
vocabulary for apples is thinned
leaving windfall words unsaid.


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