In the Kitchen

I’m reading and reading this line
about the horse ‘living outside of time’.
Surely not. Surely the horse is deep in,
up to his neck in time.

Horse now is horse then.
Horse always with his big teeth,
his wide saddle-warm back,
the swivel and twitch of his ears;

horse felled to one side,
the thick flick of his tail;
the calm and the startle
in his deep brown eyes.

All this without him knowing
which is like time not knowing
what it is, or knowing only
what it is as it happens

in the silence of the kitchen;
the clock in the silence of the kitchen,
the horse clipclopping past the window
open in the silence of the kitchen.

In the title poem of her second collection, ‘Salvation Jane’ (a purple thistle-like weed), Stoddart suggests that in naming something we empower it to fulfil our idea of its meaning and purpose. The poem typifies, as Vernon Scannell wrote, ‘the way her poems display a pleasing fusion of intelligence and sensuous perception with the knack of finding the right rhythmic pattern to convey it’. At the heart of many of these poems lies an apprehension of things being lost or destroyed – whether a child or an illusion, faith or the very earth we live on. The world changes, too, when someone enters it. Greta Stoddart’s poems of motherhood are intense double-edged celebrations; as grief has its consolations, so joy is rarely entire. There is an increasing scope and depth to her language as Stoddart seeks to explore paradoxes in a collection of original and distinctive poems.