The title poem of this enjoyable collection comes first and establishes a tone of appreciative and bemused engagement with the rest of the natural world. The poet’s garden is full of living beings, busy getting on with life and full of agency. The plants set a furious pace and she attempts, with humour, to keep up with them. ‘My garden knows me but that doesn’t stop it / being tricky’, she says. Flowers and trees are ‘pouting’, ‘moving’, ‘leaning’, ‘springing up’, ‘ignoring commands’, ‘crowding’, ‘marching’, ‘wanting’, ‘imposing’ themselves; the gardener never gets a look in.

In other poems, the poet doesn’t stand still, watching, and uses her poems as a form of notes of a walk. These can seem, at first reading, to be nothing more than a list of names of objects encountered, but looking more closely they are acute observations of the relationships in the world, observed and presented as they are, without elaboration or explanation. In ‘Circuit’, we get ‘Heron, frog, fox, rabbit, hedgehog, owl, vole’. Three predator-prey pairs, plus the hedgehog in the middle, whose main predator, the badger, was presumably not seen or is absent from that particular landscape. Is that hedgehog still as vulnerable as the frog, rabbit and vole? Perhaps that owl might look back, or the fox move on, after finishing its rabbit. Whatever is intended, the sequence of animal names is clearly not accidental and it succeeds in getting me wondering. Later in the poem, she seems to confirm this sense of the ecological connectivity: ‘The story of bird and tree — give and take, take and give.’ Her walk continues with the instruction, ‘travel at your own pace like the daylight moon lingering shell-soft’, which reads like sound advice not only for a stroll, but for life.

Katherine Gallagher has lived a lot of life and she shares many episodes from it in this slim, friendly volume. There are memories of her Australian home, of arriving in Britain in the 1960s, of time spent in France, Italy, India and other places. In India, she learns ‘being alone, being herself’, reporting on her adventures in the third person, as if holding her younger self at a distance. In ‘Owning the Wave’, there’s a well-worked musical metaphor for love with ‘scherzos of moments’ and ‘a rondo of sharing’. There is much love and some grief here, and dreams of other paths not taken, sometimes with regret, but mostly she presents a sense of peacefulness with what life has given her. In ‘What I want’ she tells us ‘I will take my time and walk the happy nonchalance / of fulsome days, lit with birdsong’. Her writing is as clear as the water of Lake Monte Generoso, photographic and well-composed.

Playing with form is clearly a passion and the book includes polished examples of many traditional forms: a villanelle, a pantoum, sonnets, tanka, and nods to classics, such as a tiger poem making a deep bow to Blake. But she is also comfortable with freer verse forms, such as the unrhymed 8-line stanzas in tribute to Rogerson Jeffers, ‘The Tides are in our Veins’, in which she sketches the sea, with beautiful phrases splashing out of the lines, ‘this song of cobalt’, ‘a dance of water’, ‘a spell of ultramarine’ and ‘the long horizon’s / zipped meeting with sky’. To get a sense of her restrained but rich language, here is ‘Clear Lolly Moon’ in full.

a clear lolly moon
keeping counsel
over our road

she sashays slowly
focusing the sky
tide-maker

heavenly-waltzer
serene
in the moment

with no pirouettes
no tango
no cake-walk

she’s an old face
at home
in her own skin

I am left with a sense of deeply liking this poet. She comes through her poems as unpretentious, wise, kind and curious, and her poetry is as quaffable and refreshing as spring water.

Mandy Haggith