To Know Bedrock

Sharon Black is a poet who takes the everyday and transforms it into something quite extraordinary, using imagery that impresses with both its imaginative scope and skillful use of language. Not surprisingly, her poems have been widely published and won many prizes. They are collected together here for the first time. Sharon Black’s poems are meditations on memory and family, on the way the present triggers images of the past. But they are also gentle explorations of the skin and bone of bodies, and the oddities of landscape, deft and highly tactile: a series of deceptively quiet lullabies to the inner and outer world. Hidden among the gentle, teasing and tender images - of love, of birth, of dying - there are also suddenly disturbing moments, as in a poem about a terrorist bomber, which make the reader want to go back and search the poems for the little inklings of pain as well as the sensory delights. This is a really absorbing and pleasurable first collection, with a constant enjoyment of the individual power of words. Bill Greenwell, poet