Stand Magazine, Volume 9(1)

Alison Brackenbury's seventh collection Singing in the Dark, was published by Carcanet in 2008. Her work to date has been characterised by a delicate lyricism strongly informed by a sense of a rich British ballad tradition and a sensibility which celebrates the rural, the local, and the quotidian. Brackenbury often deals in the touching ordinariness of everyday lives, the precariousness and beauty of moments observed from the routines of labour. In many poems on animals - particularly her beloved cats and horses - she also draws on a strong pastoral tradition in which one would see not only Wordsworth, but also Cowper as a key figure. Like her eighteenth-century predecessor, she focuses on our relationships with animals not only to define our own human identity, but also to search out the limits of our ethical capacity. In this way animals often provide us with the domestic routines through which we can assess our own burdens and rhythms of time. They offer us a mark and a measure of our lives. Not unsurprisingly, elegy is also a familiar and powerful component of Brackenbury's poetic output.


In ['Diary of a stretcher-bearer', 'Suddenly', 'After the funeral', 'Note from B', 'Rescue centre', 'Wilfred Owen at the Advanced Horse Transport Deport, 1917'], this combination of history, elegy, and the workings of a much more localised experience of time takes us through the labours of stretcher-bearing, riding, nursing, illness, and ageing. the events of the First world War are perceived and mediated through an awareness of other more localised and surprising experiential perspectives. 'How horses jar us, scar us' the speaker of ['Wilfred Owen at the Advanced Horse Transport Deport, 1917'] exclaims; and the sentiment could be extended beyond this poem to a more general comment on the imaginative process of Brackenbury's verse. Her often deceptively simple lyricism at its best can provide us with a jolt or jarring. She feeds off a strong sense of balladic form pared down to a ghostly and delicate music, reminding us, as she puts it in ['Note from B'], how '[b]ehind loud songs, the small clocks chime'.


Alison is particularly interested in how poetry escapes into the wider world. She has had work in the 'Poems in the Waiting Room' series of free pamphlets and [...] is also very glad to hear from readers via her pages on MySpace or Facebook.