This is Prue Chamberlayne’s first substantial collection since 2019’s self-published Locks Rust; in between was the superb chapbook Beware the Truth That’s Manacled (erbacce-press, 2022), reviewed by Harriet Thistlethwaite here. While slavery and race relations lie at the troubled heart of that sonnet sequence, the four sections of the more formally and thematically varied Lizzard Looks comprise poems which sing singly, in unison, or harmony, nature’s art and art’s nature. And the history arising from the tension between them.

The four sections – Seasoned Script, Elemental, What the Angel Might Have Said in Response and Air’s so much More than Empty Space – ring like a loose riff off the four elements with the aether, the quintessence, being Chamberlayne’s persistent music.

Often, wonder trumps science, awe overcomes mere measurement. “For Facts or Artistry?” notes that while ‘(m)etrics astound,’ one must ‘pause to wonder’; “Mutual Inquiry” suggests that ‘surprise (is) our engine of inquiry’.

...themes and subjects are articulated with a sure sense of dance, of echo, of timbre. Listen to the gloriously sibilant ‘Sun-sidle of the script’s sedate’ in “Seasoned Script”, which tunes the ear for the following startling image of a ‘pavane of birds’ – the name of that courtly dance said to derive from the Italian word for ‘peacock’.