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Bricks and Ballads

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Ballads are memorable. This book was finished when the poet was fifty, with too much to remember: the shadows of the greater world, the bulldozers down the street tearing through a Victorian school, the generosity of its founders, its green graceful bell tower and its nesting jackdaws turned to a cry in the air. The bricks go off to salvage and are lost in other streets but the poems remain. Ballads are bare and brief; tried by time. They salvage but they sing, stubbornly. Their stories are sure: a woman in the kitchen, Handel at his illicit feast, the Russian dog heading for space. Shakespeare stops for breath on the stairs. Mithras is the milkman. There are cats and wild cranesbill. The poems nudge us on.
ALISON BRACKENBURY studied at Oxford and has lived in Cheltenham since 1976. Her Carcanet collections include Dreams of Power (1981), Breaking Ground (1984), Christmas Roses (1988), Selected Poems (1991) and 1829 (1995). Her poems have been included on Radios 3 and 4 and 1829 was produced by Julian May for Radio 3. Her work recently won a Cholmondeley Award.
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