#The seamstress grim dawn full#
#The seamstress grim dawn free#

Perhaps the most striking example can be found in ‘Chainsaws in the Mist’: Yet Henry’s silences, which succeed sounds in the poems, are often more meaningful, yielding metaphors that stay with the reader for a long time. The nostalgia soon becomes the collection’s underlying theme, not due to its prevalence, but the subtlety of Henry’s language, making the mood feel natural, not forced:

#The seamstress grim dawn full#

Nostalgia in this collection is obvious from the very first page where Henry writes about clouds full of his mother’s songs moving east (‘Cliff Terrace Clouds’). There is a performance version of The Glass Aisle, in collaboration with Brian Briggs, which has been touring at the time of publication. This is the tenth book of poetry from Paul Henry, a singer-songwriter. Addressing time, loss and childhood memories ─ told through the stories of ordinary people ─ the collection’s musicality and its preoccupation with voices make for its signature sonic tapestry. The Glass Aisle enfolds the reader with intricacies and figures of sound, exploring noise, rhythm and also silence within its pages. The book’s closing cadence combines love poems with some raw elegies.Ī performance version of The Glass Aisle, featuring songs co-written with fellow musician and songwriter Brian Briggs, (‘Stornoway’), is currently touring festivals. Familiar “visitors” from earlier books: Brown Helen, Catrin Sands et al, haunt poems where the sea and music hold a nineteen-sixties childhood in its place. In the first section, a thematic poem, ‘The Hesitant Song’, “orchestrates silence” while playing “the sea’s soft pedal” to convey the loss of a mother’s songs.

#The seamstress grim dawn free#

Tormented by the voices of former “inmates”, he unwittingly connects the centuries, setting free the Victorian ghosts of poacher John Moonlight, lone parent Mary Thomas, and a host of others who haunt the poem’s present-day walker. In the book’s title poem, a telephone engineer repairs a line that crosses the canal to the site of an old workhouse.

Acclaimed poet Paul Henry’s tenth book includes a moving elegy to displaced workhouse residents, set on a stretch of canal in the Brecon Beacons National Park. The Glass Aisle moves between rage and stillness, past and present, music and silence. ‘This is a poet still at the height of his powers, ten books in. Twenty eight poems so beguiling you know not whether they depict ancient folklore or an everyday occurrence in the next but one village’ ‘Here is a rich and comforting voice next to you in the dark. Thomas’s gift, in that poet’s later work, for terse, coolly forthright insightfulness. Paul Henry has much of his compatriot R.S.