Ghosts and Other Company

The dead keep their watch on the living in ‘The buried army at Xian’, the centrepiece of Jenny Joseph’s haunting, haunted new collection. In these unsettling, eerily evocative poems, she keeps company with many shades and shapes: ghosts from the past rising through the present, ghosts of the hearth keeping the house together, ghosts embraced as well as ghosts wished away. Ghosts and other company is Jenny Joseph’s first new book of poetry for over a decade. Her readers will recognise the familiar territory of her ‘thinking heart’, but her angle here is at a different slant, her mysteries are more resonant, her questioning more urgent, and her voice is both stonier and yet more personal than in her earlier work. These poems take language to its limits, speaking from the other side, echoing the unsaid.