The Yellow Table

'The Yellow Table casts an alert eye on the lost and the lonely - the crazy boy pianist, the bright boy who became a drug dealer - in poems jewelled with images that surprise. A statue is someone waking from an anaesthetic; grief is a goldfish 'quivering'. She conjures the times with period detail - that yellow Formica table, a red windcheater, the smell of shoe polish; the dispersals of divorce and breakage, then repair - life opening like a white peony in her own cupped hands, viper's bugloss, like 'splinters of sea, far inland.' It is a humane collection about human vulnerability.'Gillian Clarke